Dignified, Powerful, and Respected Old People in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: The Worthy Hero and the Wise Old Person Versus the Old Fool

To understand the topic of old age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we can draw much information from relevant literary texts among other sources because the poets operated with general notions commonly subscribed to by their audiences. Old people appear in many different roles already in the pre-modern world, but here the focus will rest mostly on worthy, dignified, mighty, and even ferocious old warriors in heroic poetry. Those stand out because of their strength, their knowledge, their resolve, their wisdom, and their extensive and varied abilities, but this does not automatically mean that they were flawless. To round off this entry, the attention will finally turn to remarkable examples of old but highly respected people in the verse narratives by the German poet Heinrich Kaufringer, in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a harbinger of the Italian Renaissance, in Christine de Pizan’s didactic writings, and in the Old Norse Njál’s Saga.