Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend

One of the few records of German heroic poetry, Widsith was found in the Exeter Book, a manuscript of Old English poetry compiled in the late tenth century. The tale, in which the wandering poet and narrator Widsith recounts his travels across northern Europe, is often seen as a catalogue of tribes, people and heroes who existed between the third and fifth centuries. Yet it is also, in Raymond Wilson Chambers' words, a rare and valuable 'record of lost heroic song'. Originally published in ...