Much critical attention has been paid to the character of Hagen in the Nibelungenlied and much ink spilt in various attempts to reconcile the murderer of the early part of the poem with the heroic warrior of the latter âventiures. 2 Franz Bäuml identified Hagen as "the archetypal 'dark figure'", a concept he defined as: ambiguous, a combination of significant virtue with significant evil for a purpose which may itself be ambiguous, but the achievement of which demands a capacity of understanding, evaluation, knowing which exceeds that of other figures. Both, the combination of significant virtue and evil, and the superior knowledge and understanding of the figure, imply a certain demonic ingredient. (Bäuml 1986, 89) Certain analogues of the German Hagen, such as Efnysien in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, also demonstrate just such a mixture of evil and virtue; Efnysien, halfbrother of Brân, king of Britain, senselessly mutilates the horses of the Irish king, Matholwch, upon learning that he is to marry his sister, Branwen, and later murders Gwern, his sister's son, yet he is redeemed in the final battle through his self-sacrifice, which destroys the Irish Cauldron of Rebirth. When seeking a northern parallel to the "dark" Hagen, however, it is not to Hǫgni, his nominal counterpart in the Icelandic incarnation of the Nibelung legend, that Jesse Byock turns but to Egill Skalla-Grímsson, who demonstrates all the necessary characteristics of a "dark figure" (Byock 1986, 152).Byock's choice is entirely understandable since the Icelandic Hǫgni has not the requisite darkness to be considered a "dark figure". Most obviously, Hǫgni does not appear in the eddic accounts of Sigurðr's death as the slayer of Sigurðr. This is especially significant since it is the slaying of Siegfried which acts as the defining moment for Hagen in the Nibelungenlied, cementing his 'dark' reputation in later scholarship. 3 The effect of making Hǫgni innocent of Sigurðr's murder in the Poetic Edda is to make him less problematic, arguably even less complex, as a character. Edward Haymes has noted that:1 Names follow normalized Old Norse orthography, except in quotations, though names in eddic translations have been emended for clarity.

This wide-ranging study offers a new understanding of Old Norse kinship in which the individual self was expanded to encompass its kin.

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Heng has suggested that " [t]he great texts of medieval literature, into which are encoded the responses of culture to a range of imagined conduct, confirm an overwhelming cultural revulsion to cannibalism." 2 From Beowulf to Dante's Commedia, its perpetrators are predominantly the "subhuman" and the "grotesque," whose terrifying appetites are used to anatomize and address issues which would otherwise be unutterable. 3 Cannibalism in the Middle Ages, she argues, was "one of those instrumentally useful technologies of definition by which the malignant otherness of cultural enemies and outcasts can be established and periodically renewed." 4 Such an approach mines instances of cannibalism in literature for their religious and political valence, revealing how cannibalism was used to construct and demarcate communities of cultural identity. In this respect, Heng closely echoes Peggy Reeves Sanday's observation that "[c]annibalism is never just about eating but is primarily a medium for nongustatory messages -messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order." 5 In spite of its shock value, cannibalism is actually used to reassure and reaffirm established cultural and social norms.Recent approaches to cannibalism in Old Norse literature have not strayed far from Heng's methodological paradigm. Ármann Jakobsson and Andrea Maraschi both identify cannibalism, or more accurately anthropophagy, 6 as a marker of trollish or giantish identity which Others those who practice it. 7 However, as Maraschi goes on to discuss, Old Norse literature does not always confirm the "cultural revulsion" to cannibalism of which Heng speaks. Under the right conditions, in fact, Old Norse narratives present cannibalism as "not repugnant in the slightest, but even advisable." 8 Maraschi attributes the difference in attitudes to the identity of the eater: cannibalism in giants and trolls only confirms their brutal nature 2 (natural cannibalism), but in humans, where it is carried out not to satisfy hunger but to gain power and knowledge from the body of the slain, it reinforces their cultured and civilized status (cultural cannibalism). 9 Maraschi's work is an important step in recognizing the multivalent potential of cannibalism in Old Norse literature: the act of one person eating another can have many and varied meanings, dependent not just on the eater, as Maraschi proposes, but also on who is eaten, how and why.With this in mind, this article focuses particularly on acts of kin-consumption in Old Norse myth and legend, where the consumer is related in some way to the victim being consumed. In such instances, rather than distinguishing and separating between two cultural or taxonomic groupings, cannibalism disturbingly redoubles the propinquity of two persons who are already related. It is the social and the interpersonal impacts of kin-cannibalism which register most strongly, rather than the religious or the political aspects. Indeed, despite the modern tendency to interpre...

The article introduces Old Norse material into the ongoing critical discussion about resistance to closure in medieval literature, a discussion traditionally dominated by Old French and Middle English texts. The failure of narrative accounts of the Old Norse Hildr legend to resolve is embodied by the tableaux of the eternal battle at the legend's climax, an impasse which nevertheless functions as a closural device and unites the retellings of the legend around the theme of battle. The open nature of the impasse, however, encouraged medieval authors to work on constructing narrative closure within their own accounts of the legend, not only by writing new endings but also new beginnings for the battle, elaborating on the motivations behind it. Such a strategy confirms that in Old Norse texts, as in wider medieval literature, concepts of closure involved more than merely the ending of a narrative but embraced its broader structure and invites further comparison with other medieval European texts. Finally, in taking as its starting point not a text but a legend, the article aims to explore how issues of openness versus closure can be usefully applied to a narrative unconfined by a single text but represented rather in a nexus of texts with little in common besides a brief overlap in subject matter. The article argues for the necessity of the legendary perspective, in spite of its methodological challenges, in order to distinguish between closure on a textual and closure on a narrative level.