The Limits of Obligation and Friendship: Hrothgar, Beowulf, and the ‘Germanic’ Ideal

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. List of Contributors VII
4. Introduction: The ‘Germanic’ and its Discontents 1
5. The Marriage of Philology and Race: Constructing the ‘Germanic’ 19
6. Rome and Its Created Northerners 31
7. Re-inventing the ‘Germanic’ in the Early Modern Era: Omnes Germani sunt, contra fabulas quorundam 67
8. The Balloon that Wouldn’t Burst: A Genealogy of ‘Germanic’ 89
9. What Can Cultural Anthropology Do for Medievalists? A Methodological Discussion of Ethnicity Applied to Late Antique and Early Medieval History 111
10. From Rhetoric to Dialectic: The Becoming ‘Germanic’ of Visigothic (Legal-)Literature, and (Postulating) the End of a ‘Truth’ 127
11. Sidonius Apollinaris’s Use of the Term Barbarus: An Introduction 145
12. A Habitus Barbarus in Sub-Roman Britain? 167
13. A Farewell to Arms: Germanic Identity in Fifth-Century Britain 189
14. Germanic or Slavic? Reconstructing the Transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages in East Central Europe 211
15. Linguistic Labels and Ethnic Identity 225
16. (Proto-)Germanic Alliterative Verse: Linguistic Limits on a Cultural Phenomenon 241
17. The Limits of Obligation and Friendship: Hrothgar, Beowulf, and the ‘Germanic’ Ideal 251
18. Index 267