Abstract
This article explores the narrative functions and literary effects of references to beards in medieval German heroic epic, beards being perhaps the most perfect of metonyms for heroic masculinity. In doing so it seeks to shed light on the ways in which poets of heroic epic address the issue of the appearance or rather the physiognomy of their (many) male characters. The ‘Nibelungenlied’ represents something of a literary archetype which remains largely unparalleled in the subsequent tradition of German epic poetry; later texts deal with heroes and their beards quite differently.
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