Relational reiteration brings the allusive story worlds of Widsith into focus. Widsith has traditionally been defined as a catalogue of seemingly-random people and places visited by the speaker. But almost half of these “random” names and places, and all names repeated more than twice, are grouped and linked together through Old English and Old Norse narrative. In claiming lived experiential knowledge of these legendary worlds, Widsith establishes himself as a “local” guide to the intricacies of authority, kingship, and power. Leading the reader through a reiteration of these narrative landmarks, the poem both anticipates and rewards a reader’s previously acquired knowledge of the story—just as the reiteration of property bounds rewards the re-walking of familiar routes. The speaker’s positive references to kings are juxtaposed without comment alongside catalogues of the characters they have betrayed or killed, and the speaker says that he has been given “cystum,” choices, and knowledge of good and evil. These lists function as an implicit critique of what stories can be told, as the speaker quietly shows us the misdeeds of his benefactors even while celebrating their glory.

What connections might be found between those who write history and the different kinds of histories they write? An emphasis on gender often focuses on the dynamics of women’s collaborative authorship, whether produced anonymously or in the form of patron and client relationships. But it also highlights the fact that sole authorship is often associated with male writers; with masculinity. Beginning with the Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, an anonymous Life that may have been composed by a woman, the chapter next addresses Æthelweard’s Latin Chronicle, written by a secular, elite male author for and in collaboration with a female patron and family relation, Abbess Matilda of Essen. It concludes with another kind of history, that of the anonymous Old English poem, Widsith, and the insight that the sheer variety of early medieval historiography is also suggestive of the different uses of gender by its authors.