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narrative of giants, which is more closely connected to the Grendelkin than to the Danes. Hrothgar ‘reads’ that hilt all the same and, urged by an alien history, warns Beowulf through the figure of Heremod against becoming monstrous to future generations. Thus, the hilt might be seen as a self-reflexive literary device; it asks whether Beowulf itself is the story of an alien, monstrous past. The hilt embodies a concern over how stories of the present are conveyed to future audiences and, specifically, how histories may be transformed by the kinds of artefacts that carry
often called upon to do in history – reconcile the warring parties. Marriage brings about a peaceful countryside and happy lovers, although in actual practice marriages were supposed to be arranged by parents and guardians, who saw marriage ‘as a way of augmenting and consolidating their lands and rising in political power and influence … [and ensuring] heirs to whom the inheritance would pass and who would safeguard it for future generations’.18 According to May McKisack, ‘failure of heirs constituted by far the most serious threat to baronial stability … [and
future generations. Every Jew who enters the cemetery sees the two tombstones containing the well-known story of the treacherous behavior of the apostate Jew against a prominent Jewish leader. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Rabbi Yuzfa Shemesh writes that ‘a certain apostate informer denounced him to the King of Rome.’13 It is this perception that accompanies the Jewish apostate from Rothenburg’s time onwards, and it finds expression in the growth of folk stories literature. Towards the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, we