Hidden Hoards, Past Pains: Treasures, Ancestors, and Ghosts in Beowulf and in the Nibelungenlied

Abstract

AbstractThe respective heroes of Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf and Siegfried, display contrasting attitudes towards the treasures ubiquitous in the two poems. A comparative analysis of these behaviours has not been attempted yet. Using a Maussian model of gift exchange, this article argues that their distinctive behaviours are closely linked with the dissimilar outcomes of each narrative. Furthermore, there is a successful resolution of the story in Beowulf, whose hero is transformed into an ancestor through the exchange of gifts, whereas Siegfried becomes a ghost, something unfinished that haunts the second part of the narrative in the Nibelungenlied. Contributing to current debates in material culture studies, the article shows that, just like there is fluidity between hoards, gifts, and loot, so are the boundaries between human and nonhuman and between the living and the dead fluid in both poems.