Ermenrich- Germanic FigureMortal"King of the Goths"

The Historical King

The historical Ermanaric was king of the Greuthungi, an East Germanic people, who according to Ammianus Marcellinus ruled over a vast territory north of the Black Sea until the Hunnic invasions of the 370s. Jordanes, in his Getica, greatly expands this into a near-legendary account, describing Ermanaric as ruler of an empire encompassing numerous peoples, a king whose dominion stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jordanes records that Ermanaric, despairing after the Hunnic assault and grievously wounded by two brothers avenging their sister Sunilda, whom he had ordered torn apart by horses, took his own life. This brief sixth-century account contains the seeds of two great legendary cycles that would develop across the medieval Germanic world: the Dietrich exile tradition and the Norse Svanhild vengeance.

Villain of the Dietrich Cycle

In the Middle High German heroic epics, Ermenrich is the quintessential tyrant. In Dietrichs Flucht, composed in the thirteenth century, he is the treacherous uncle who, counseled by the wicked advisor Sibich, seizes the Italian kingdom rightfully belonging to his nephew Dietrich von Bern. Through political manipulation and military force, Ermenrich strips Dietrich of his lands and followers, driving him into a thirty-year exile at the court of King Etzel. The Rabenschlacht continues this narrative, recounting a devastating battle in which Dietrich's forces attempt to reclaim his inheritance, a conflict that costs the lives of Etzel's young sons entrusted to Dietrich's care. The Þiðreks saga, a Norse prose compilation drawing on German oral tradition, preserves a parallel account in which the treacherous counselor appears as Sifka, and the progressive betrayal of Dietrich's loyal vassals unfolds in grim detail. Throughout these texts, Ermenrich embodies unjust kingship, the antithesis of the noble lord whose power derives from the loyalty of his warriors.

The Vengeance for Svanhild

In the Norse Eddic poems Guðrúnarhvöt and Hamðismál, the same legendary king appears as Jörmunrekr, whose cruelty takes a different but equally fatal form. He orders his young wife Svanhild trampled to death beneath the hooves of horses, accused of infidelity with his own son Randvér, whom he has already hanged on the counsel of the treacherous Bikki. Guðrún, Svanhild's mother and a woman who has already endured the deaths of Sigurðr and her brothers, incites her remaining sons Hamðir and Sörli to ride south and avenge their sister. The brothers enter Jörmunrekr's hall and hack off his hands and feet, but are slain when the wounded king, on the advice of a one-eyed stranger, commands his men to stone them to death. This episode, rooted in Jordanes' account of the brothers who wounded Ermanaric to avenge Sunilda, represents one of the oldest recoverable layers of Germanic heroic legend, a story whose outlines survived eight centuries of oral transmission from the Gothic migrations to the medieval manuscripts.