Hild under helm and the witch in the rose garden: The rise and fall of the heroic woman in medieval Germanic literature

Using a comparative approach encompassing Old Norse, Old English, and Middle High German literature and spanning approximately the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, this dissertation delineates the figure of the “heroic woman” in early medieval Germanic heroic culture and charts her gradual disappearance from the Germanic literatures in the High Middle Ages. Focusing particularly on the Nibelung cycle, a popular legend that appears across the Germanic cultures and across the centuries, from the earliest extant Old Norse Eddic poetry (c. 900) to the German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200) and other later Middle High German texts, this investigation explores the transformation of a powerful female character type into an object of denigration and demonization. The reading of the heroic woman includes the Old English texts Judith, Elene, Juliana, and Beowulf, as well as some Old Norse saga literature. The early heroic female—allied with martial action, authority, literacy, and the dissemination of knowledge—indicates considerable gender role fluidity in the early Germanic culture and must make us reconsider, among other things, the history of received gender categories and the “masculinity” of the martial discourse. The transmogrification of the heroic woman is best explained by a materialist investigation of historical and cultural developments including the rise of the Christian Church and major shifts in property dispersal and inheritance practice. A considerable reduction in female property rights in Europe from approximately the tenth century onward is reflected in an increased interest in questions of property and power in the literature; in such works as the Nibelungenlied, the heroic martial woman becomes aligned with the female property holder who abuses her wealth and power, and both become unnatural and unacceptable figures. We find in these texts marking the trajectory of the heroic woman both an important moment in the history of the material oppression of women in Western civilization, and a surprising glimpse at a gender-fluid discourse in its last moments before a shift to more stringent categories of “masculine” and “feminine” behavior.