Was sind goldene Waffen wert?

Abstract

This paper studies two very different medieval heroic poems, the Middle High German Otnit und Wolf Dietrich and the Old Spanish Cantar de Mio Cid and the way in which they present and give symbolic value to the hero’s weapons. The German text (in this aspect much closer to other heroic poems of the Middle Ages) wraps the hero in gold with a coat of mail of fabulous origin, fabulous value and fabulous com-position to emphasize its symbolic representation of power and to present him as the shining ruler over Rome and Byzantium. The Spanish poem, instead, handles gold mainly as pecuniary value, and the hero’s apparently never ending richness is not an expression of his power but the advantage of a social and economical system, which only existed in the territories beyond the border of the Christian reign. The contrast between both texts shows how consciously medieval authors worked on the presen-tation of weapons and other objects as semantic markers.