The Hundings are a legendary tribe or clan in early Germanic sources, mostly mentioned due to their feud with the Wulfings.
History
In the Poetic Edda, Hunding is a king of the Saxons, slain by Helgi Hundingsbane. The Gesta Danorum mentions a Danish king Helgo who slew Hundingus, king of Saxony, in single combat. The historical core of the story is likely a conflict between the Eastern Geats and the Lombards. Hunding itself is a patronymictranslating to "son of a hound", while the Hundings as a clan would be the descendants of Hunding. Being named a "hound" or "dog" was by no means an insult in pre-Christian Germanic culture, but that the animal was rather a symbol of the warrior, while in Christian Germanic culture, it became associated with heathendom, "heathen hounds" being an appellation especially of the pagan Vikings. The name of Lamicho, king of the Lombards, may mean "little barker". In Paulus' Historia Langobardorum, the Lombards terrorize their neighbors by spreading the word that they had dog-headed warriors, possibly a reference to ulfhednar. In Paulus's account, Lamicho is one of seven sons of a "prostitute", who is fostered by king Agelmund. This "prostitute" has been explained by Rudolf Much as going back to a word for bitch. The Lombards' original ethnic name, Winnili, has also been connected with "savage dogs" by Much. In Eddaic account of a feud between the Hundings and the Wulfings surrounding Helgi Hundingsbane may correspond to the Lombard story, and Malone explains the whole story of Lamicho as the Hunding version of the same feud. Jacob Grimm compared the story of Lamicho to the German legends of the origins of the Welfen, in German legend tracing their ancestry to fostered babes who were given the surname of "whelps". Hundings also appear in Sturlaugs saga starfsama, where they are a tribe of Cynocephali dwelling in Hundingjaland, which is apparently in much the same latitudes as Permia. These Hundings may relate to those Cynocephali mentioned by Adam of Bremen. The Hundingas in Old English literature are mentioned in Beowulf, and in Widsith. The Widsith poem mentions the Hundings twice, once in a list of Germanic clans, as ruled by Mearchalf, and a second time among outlandish tribes and peoples, in the sequence mid hæðnum ond mid hæleþum ond mid hundingum "with heathens, heroes and dog-people", implying a re-interpretation of the name as a remote people of "heathen hounds". This re-interpretation is complete in a later Anglo-Saxon manuscript on the Marvels of the East, where the Cynocephali are glossed as healf hundingas.
