Quello che i poeti non dicono. Le forme del silenzio nella poesia germanica

Modern readers of Germanic poetry cannot fully grasp the meaning of several lines of Old Germanic poems because their poets left many words unspoken. The anonymous poets of the Germanic oral tradition and their audience shared the knowledge of the same heroic era, therefore they could allude to rather than explicitly report all the details of a story. The allusive silence of some Germanic lines relies on the net of intertextual references which characterise Old Germanic poems: common themes, shared poetic language and style. Old Germanic epic poetry is based on an ancient compact nucleus of legends which have been orally transmitted and go beyond the language used by each poet. We will take into consideration some of the oldest Germanic poetic texts – Widsith, Deor, Beowulf, Hildebrandslied – to analyse the forms of the poets’ silence paying attention to alliteration, allusiveness, variation, personal names, and so on. Moreover, we will highlight the impossibility to separate those texts from their common literary context as single works.