Heremod
Anglo Saxon · mortal · heroic age · Recorded classification
A FIGURE WHO EXISTS IN THE POEM ENTIRELY AS A CAUTIONARY EXAMPLE, twice, both times in a speech about what a king must not become. Killing men in your own hall is the unforgivable act in this literature, and the corpus had no record for the man who is its byword.
Relations
- held up as a warning to: BeowulfNon-symmetric. The kind is unusual and it is what the poem does with him.Reference treatment: Hrothgar uses Heremod as the example of a gifted king gone wrong in the speech he makes to Beowulf. (secondary)
Sources
- Heremod is the tyrannical Danish king held up in Hrothgar's speech as the example of a gifted man who turned on his own people.: Reference treatments of Beowulf and of Heremod. (secondary)