Hero and Gold On the Significance and Function of metals in the Heroic Epic

Metals are almost omnipresent in the epic, in the form of arms and weapons, booty, treasure, and as vessels in the hall they dominate the heroic world. Whereas iron and ore play a decisive role as metals of war, gold indicates special value because of its properties and characteristics and its relation to transcendence. Therefore, metals correspond in different ways with the exorbitance of the hero. Especially significant, however, is the ambivalent attitude towards gold both as extraordinary value and incarnation of evil. That this is not only a medieval Christian phenomenon is demonstrated in literature from antiquity: The central and most striking feature of the Golden Age in Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, is that there is no such thing as gold and the earth therefore is not destroyed by mining, much as human society is not affected by avarice. It is not only the evaluation of gold that oscillates, but also the evaluation of those who possess and wear it. The poems take advantage of the resulting polysemy of gold for a differentiated characterisation of the protagonists. They put into question the relation between the inward nature and the outward appearance of a figure, between the claim of value that gold raises and its fulfilment.