Hrethel (; ) is a

king of the Geats Geatish kings (; ), ruling over the provinces of Götaland (Gautland/Geatland), appear in several sources for early Swedish history. Today, most of them are not considered historical. This list follows the generally accepted identification bet ...

Name

Hrethel's name appears with both the root vowel and and with both the consonant (i.e. the

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

, pronounced in Old English) and (which would ordinarily represent the phoneme ). This is thought to be due to an early manuscript of ''Beowulf'' writing the root vowel using the early graphs (for the vowel resulting from the i-mutation of Common Germanic ) and (for the phoneme , pronounced ). Later scribes misread the former as and failed to recognise that the latter represented the sound rather than . The name also appears as a

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

weak noun Weak nouns are nouns that follow a weak inflection paradigm, in contrast with strong nouns. They are present in several Germanic languages. English Modern English has only two vestiges of the weak noun inflection in common use: ''ox'', whose pl ...

, in the half-line "þæt is Hrǣdlan lāf" ('that is Hrǣdla's bequest'). Rendered in ordinary Late West Saxon spelling and in nominative form, this form of the name would presumably have been *''Hrēðla''.

Role in ''Beowulf''

Hrethel is married to a sister or daughter of Swerting (

Hygelac Hygelac (; ; ; or ''Hugilaicus''; died 516 or 521) was a king of the Geats according to the poem ''Beowulf''. It is Hygelac's presence in the poem which has allowed scholars to tentatively date the setting of the poem as well as to infer tha ...

is the nefa of Swerting) and he has three sons:

Hæþcyn Hæthcyn () is the son of the Geatish king Hreðel in the Old English poem ''Beowulf''. The hero Beowulf is Hæþcyn's nephew. Hæþcyn kills his elder brother Herebeald with an arrow in a hunting accident, which causes their father Hrethel to d ...

, Herebeald and

. He also has a daughter who marries

Ecgþeow Ecgþēow (pronounced ), Edgetho (Proto-Norse *''Agiþewaz''), or Ecgtheow is a character in the Anglo-Saxon epic ''Beowulf''. He is not mentioned outside the ''Bēowulf'' manuscript, and it is not known whether he was based on a real person. He b ...

and has the son

Beowulf ''Beowulf'' (; ) is an Old English poetry, Old English poem, an Epic poetry, epic in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 Alliterative verse, alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and List of translat ...

. Hrethel fosters Beowulf (his grandson) by taking him into his royal household aged seven. Fostering was a common Germanic practice and does not indicate Beowulf's father,

did not want to raise him; indeed, the practice was intended to further improve relations between families and family members, and create close ties of obligation, affection and shared responsibility. As an adult, Beowulf expresses his gratitude to his foster-father explicitly: Hreðel dies of grief when his oldest son Herebeald is killed by his own brother Hæþcyn in a hunting accident, a death that could not be avenged. He is succeeded by Hæþcyn.''Klaeber's Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg'', 4th rev. edn by R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. lix.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hredel Characters in Beowulf English heroic legends Legendary kings of the Geats