Lothbrok and the huntsman: death
and Danish vengeance
Just as Geoffrey of Wells provides St Edmund with a lineage, a family and a narrative of his youth, so he gives the fullest picture to date of Ubbe, Ivar and Beorn. Later sources build further on this desire to provide origins and motivations for both Edmund and his enemies, and the figure of Lothbrok comes to the fore. In Scandinavian tradition, Ragnar famously meets his death in England, captured by the Northumbrian king Ælla and put to death in a snake-pit. The death of Ragnar in England is a crucial part of the Norse legends, because it explains why his sons decide to come and invade Northumbria: they come to get vengeance on King Ælla. In Ragnars saga, Ragnar, with his dying words, predicts his sons will be angry at his death: ‘The piglets would grunt if they knew the boar’s plight’, he says.35 The Norse legends tell how each of the sons reacts on hearing the news, their responses revealing their different characters: one son, Sigvard, cuts himself with a knife without noticing the pain; another, Hvitserk, is playing a game when he hears the news and squeezes a game-piece so tightly that his hand bleeds; Ivar turns red, then white, but is able to control himself enough to ask for every detail of his father’s death. Saxo Grammaticus says that Ivar’s reaction reveals he is the most dangerous of Ragnar’s sons – the one with the most self-control and courage.36
21a. Lothbrok and his dog set sail from Denmark to England
Medieval English sources also have a story about Lothbrok’s death and his sons’ revenge, but the English version of the narrative has some significant differences from the Norse tradition. The most important is that in England the story is linked to St Edmund, rather than to Ælla, and so it came to be combined with Geoffrey of Wells’ explanation of the Danes’ motives and promulgated as part of Edmund’s popular cult. The link between Lothbrok’s murder and the Danish invasion is first made by the chronicler Roger of Wendover, a monk of St Albans, writing in the early thirteenth century.37 Roger tells of a Danish man named Lothbrok, who goes out in a little boat, hunting for birds with a hawk. His boat is carried out to sea by a sudden storm, which drives him to the coast of East Anglia. He lands at Reedham in Norfolk and is taken to the court of King Edmund; Edmund receives him kindly, and ‘as the Danish tongue is very like the English’, Roger says, Lothbrok and Edmund are able to talk to each other. Lothbrok is greatly impressed by the elegant lifestyle he observes at Edmund’s court, and asks to stay so that he can learn to imitate courtly manners. He takes lessons in hunting and hawking from Edmund’s huntsman Bern, but Bern soon becomes jealous of Lothbrok’s favour with the king and one day while they are out hunting Bern murders Lothbrok and hides his body in a thicket. Lothbrok’s faithful greyhound leads Edmund and the rest of the court to discover the body, and Bern is found to be guilty of the crime. He is punished by being set adrift at sea in Lothbrok’s boat and comes ashore on the coast of Denmark, where he meets Lothbrok’s sons, Ivar and Ubbe, and maliciously lies that their father has been murdered by Edmund. They swear to take revenge on the English king, and so decide to invade his kingdom. From this point on, the story follows the familiar lines of Abbo’s Passio.
This story is clearly related in some ways to the Norse versions of Ragnar’s death, but the characterisation of Lothbrok and the shape of the narrative are very different. This Lothbrok is an innocent victim of Bern’s jealousy, and in his admiration for St Edmund and his desire to imitate the courtly life of the East Anglian kingdom he is evidently intended to be a sympathetic character, a protégé of the saintly English king. Perhaps the most striking feature of this story is how it reduplicates aspects of Edmund’s martyrdom in Lothbrok’s murder, particularly in the role given to the protective greyhound who leads to the discovery of the murdered man’s body – this seems to replay the motif of the wolf who guards Edmund’s head in the usual accounts of Edmund’s death. The repetition of one of the most famous elements of Edmund’s story seems to position Lothbrok and Edmund in parallel roles, both innocent victims of undeserved murder, rather than in opposition or contrast to each other as in Geoffrey of Wells. A similar kind of structural repetition also occurs in the two journeys, in which characters travel between Denmark and England, in each case driven by the winds of chance (or fate, or divine providence). First Lothbrok is carried out to sea and driven to the coast of East Anglia, then Bern is set adrift in the same boat as a form of ordeal, ‘that it might be proved whether God would deliver him from the danger’.38 This narrative’s use of such accidental journeys recalls William of Jumièges’ reference to Björn Ironside being shipwrecked in England on his way home to Denmark, but in Roger’s story the name Beorn belongs not to one of Lothbrok’s sons but to the man whose intervention brings the Danes to England – a detail we shall encounter again.
21b. Lothbrok is received at Edmund’s court
Lothbrok’s character and role are therefore conceived quite differently in this story from those of the ‘loathsome brook’ of Geoffrey of Wells, but the function of the Danes in both narratives is comparable. In each case, Denmark is imagined as a kind of mirror to East Anglia – whether directly or inversely – rather than as a distant or alien country. Edmund’s characteristics as a saint, and some of the key images of his cult, are refigured in the presentation of his Danish enemies, allowing for the saintly king to be defined and exalted by contrast or by analogy. As well as explaining why the Danes came to England, these stories make use of the Danes to serve their purpose of praising Edmund, and they envisage Denmark as a near neighbour, a rival or a relative to East Anglia. Although the narratives still end in Edmund’s death, Roger of Wendover’s story, in particular, imagines a positive interaction between Lothbrok and the English king. Presenting Lothbrok’s sons as avenging their father’s murder (and blaming Edmund for it only because they have been misled by Bern), explains their behaviour, even if it does not quite justify it, while the innocent Lothbrok himself is an entirely sympathetic character.
21c. The murder of Lothbrok by Bern the huntsman
In the ravenous search for material about St Edmund, these two distinct stories were in time combined into one narrative. A fourteenth-century compilation of hagiographical material, produced at Bury St Edmunds around 1377, contains a life of St Edmund which joins these two versions of the Lothbrok story into one.39 Here, as in Geoffrey’s narrative, the fame of the glorious King Edmund spreads to Denmark and causes Lothbrok to incite his sons to jealous anger against Edmund. After this, Lothbrok, out hunting at sea, is blown off course to England, taken to Edmund’s court, and murdered by Bern the huntsman as in Roger of Wendover’s tale. This composite version of the story was then used by John Lydgate, monk of Bury St Edmunds, in his Life of St Edmund, which was commissioned to celebrate the occasion of Henry VI’s stay at the abbey in 1433–4.40 A lavishly decorated manuscript of Lydgate’s poem, with more than a hundred miniatures illustrating the story, was presented to the young king shortly afterwards. This manuscript, which has been called ‘one of the most accomplished works of English illustration of the fifteenth century’,41 shows Lothbrok and his sons in richly ornamented costumes, and here they are clearly figured as foreign pagans. Now the story of Lothbrok is fully incorporated into the narrative of Edmund’s death, but any sympathy for Lothbrok found in Roger of Wendover’s story is done away with; Lydgate presents him as a cruel and envious pagan king, and his sons as bloodthirsty pirates.42 In a poem which is intended to affirm the link between Bury St Edmunds and royal power, the elements of Lothbrok’s story which are emphasised are his wicked kingship and the dangers of envy at court – not only exemplified by Lothbrok himself, but also by the murderer Bern. The pagan Danes serve to exalt the saintly Edmund by contrast, and Lothbrok is not the only Danish king cast in that role; Lydgate also includes Herman’s stories of Svein Forkbeard’s death as a result of Edmund’s supernatural intervention and of Osgod’s hostility to Edmund, so the narrative includes a number of Danes acting as Edmund’s enemies.
21
d. Bern tells Lothbrok’s sons that Edmund has killed their father
Lydgate’s poem became popular and widely read, and it survives in a large number of fifteenth-century manuscripts.43 It circulated the story of Lothbrok’s murder to a much wider audience than any previous version of the legend, and made it part of the standard late-medieval narrative of Edmund’s death. The English branch of the Lothbrok story is often treated as a minor offshoot of the Norse saga tradition, but it is worth remembering that by the fifteenth century it had become an established part of one of the most high-status saintly cults in England; the idea of the teenage Henry VI reading about Lothbrok and his sons provides an important indication of how very different the context of the English strand of Lothbrok-lore is from its Scandinavian analogues, whatever their shared origins may have been.
Finally, there remains to be considered one further version of the revenge legend centring on St Edmund and the Danes. This was recorded by the monastic historian Thomas Elmham, writing in the second decade of the fifteenth century. He wrote at the monastery of St Augustine’s in Canterbury, but his name suggests he came originally from North Elmham in Norfolk, so there may be a link to the East Anglian traditions.44 Lord Francis Hervey, nineteenth-century editor of hagiographical texts on Edmund, called this version of the story ‘the stupid and revolting figment which Thomas of Elmham has perpetuated’, and was so horrified by it that he consigned it to an appendix and refused to translate it;45 it is, however, a particularly interesting – if lurid – variant of the usual story explaining the connection between Edmund and the Danes.
21e. The Danes invade England
This story tells how Edmund married the daughter of the king of Denmark (no other source gives Edmund a wife; he was considered a virgin saint).46 His new wife already has two sons, Ivar and Ubbe, whom she has conceived ‘against nature’, with a bear. After their marriage Edmund catches his wife in bed with the bear, and he kills it, rejects his wife, and returns to England. When Ivar and Ubbe grow up, their mother tells them Edmund is their father’s murderer, and they cross the sea to England in search of vengeance.
The motif of descent from a bear reflects a legend found in Norse sagas, where the bear is usually either half-human or a man magically transfigured into a bear. The element of the bear’s adult sons taking revenge for the killing of their father frequently appears in those versions of the story, too, and in Chapter 3 we will consider some more examples of this bear-descent motif – in England it is always attached to Scandinavian characters, suggesting that to English audiences the story had a particularly Norse flavour. It is not a motif linked to Ivar and Ubbe in the Scandinavian legends (since their father there is Ragnar), although one reference to Ivar says that he could shape-shift into a bear, and the name of their brother Beorn – who does not appear in this story – means ‘bear’.47 It seems that this is a unique English combination of a story about Edmund with an idea elsewhere associated with the Danes in England, which is independent both of the Scandinavian legends and the East Anglian stories about Edmund. It has parallels to that tradition, but it involves a very different view of King Edmund from the official version of his cult promoted at Bury St Edmunds – he is not a virgin saint, and is actually the killer of Ivar and Ubbe’s father.
All these stories suggest that the character of Lothbrok was conceived of in England entirely in relation to the story of St Edmund’s death. Although his sons feature in other contexts, Lothbrok never appears in a story unrelated to Edmund. This in itself sets the English Lothbrok legends apart from their Scandinavian analogues, and it means they reflect a specifically East Anglian perspective on the relationship between England and Denmark: Denmark is a close neighbour, just across the sea, and although the intervention of the Danes in East Anglian affairs is generally hostile there is also space for sympathy towards Lothbrok when he submits to the influence of St Edmund. Although Lothbrok shares the name of the great hero of Scandinavian legend, he is essentially a different character; whether imagined as the envious king of Geoffrey of Wells, or the humble victim of Roger of Wendover’s story, he is no hero in his own right, but simply an adjunct to East Anglia’s greater hero, St Edmund.
St Ragner
This brings us to one of the stranger offshoots of this legend in England, which seems to be the only appearance of the name Ragnar in English sources. A man named ‘Ragner’ appears to have been venerated – in one town at least – as a martyr and a saint. A short Latin text, the Inventio cum translatione S. Ragnerii, describes how the relics of a saint Ragner, ‘soldier and martyr’, were supposedly discovered at St Peter’s church in Northampton.48 In the text we learn very little about this Ragner or who he was thought to have been, although the circumstances of the finding of his relics are described in detail – and they are of interest in themselves.
The text survives in a manuscript of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica which was made at Kirkham Priory in Yorkshire,49 and another copy appears in a fourteenth-century manuscript, probably originating from the Northampton area, containing saints’ lives and other hagiographical material.50 The Inventio claims that the relics of St Ragner came to light in the middle of the eleventh century, during the reign of Edward the Confessor. At that time, it says, the priest of St Peter’s was a man named Bruning, and among Bruning’s servants was a man of Norwegian birth, so simple and patient that many people laughed at him as a fool.51 This Norwegian man, who is not named, conceives a great desire to go on a pilgrimage to Rome to seek the tomb of St Peter – he wants to seek out the man he is accustomed to call, in his own language, ‘drotin’, which the text translates as dominus, ‘lord’. He sets out, but during his journey he has a sequence of three dreams telling him he must turn back: his real ‘drotin’ is to be found not in Rome, but in his own church in Northampton. The man obeys his visions and returns home, much to the mockery of his companions, and after more than a year his humble devotion is rewarded by a vision showing him a spot in the church where the relics of an unknown martyr lie buried. When the tomb is excavated crowds gather to see the discovery and miracles take place: a woman named Alfgiva is healed from illness after praying at the tomb, bells ring by some divine power, and dazzling light shines from the church in the middle of the night. It is only after these miracles that Bruning finally opens the tomb, and there he finds the body and an inscription identifying the saint as ‘Ragener, holy martyr of Christ’, a nephew of St Edmund who died in the same persecution as the king. More miracles occur, and the fame of Ragner spreads. Pilgrims come from far and wide, and King Edward sends generous gifts to the newly built shrine. The text then closes with an attempt to put these events in some historical context: Edmund and Ragner both died in 870, it says, and seven years later his persecutor Ivar was killed along with another unnamed pagan king. The date of Edward the Confessor’s death, 1066, is also noted as an indication of when these relics were thought to have been discovered.
Apart from this one short account, there are very few other references to this mysterious saint Ragner. Ragner is mentioned in a list of saints’ resting-places which was compiled c.1155 by Hugh Candidus, monk and chronicler of Peterborough. This list includes a saint named ‘St Ragaher, king’ whose relics are in ‘Hamtune’ (i.e. Northampton).52 No other details are given. Although there is no evidence that this saint was venerated anywhere other than Northampton, his cult seems to have endured there for some time: from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there are references in the church records to a ‘fraternytye of Seynt Reginary in the church of Seynt Peter’ and a chapel of ‘St Eregiar’, apparently the same saint.53 In the fifteenth century the feast of St Ragner was being celebrated at St Peter’s on 21 November, the day after St Edmund’s.54
Who was St Ragner? The Inventio gives no details about the saint’s life or death, except to say that he was Edmund’s nephew and died with him. Where, why, or how he was killed is not stated. The focus of the text is entirely on the discovery of his relics, and not on the acti
vities of the saint himself; the link to Edmund and the supernatural elements of the narrative are sufficient to demonstrate his sanctity. There is not much to go on, then, except his name – which is, of course, a suggestive one. It seems possible that there may be a connection between this Ragner and Ragnar Lothbrok, especially as there are no other obvious candidates for this supposed relative of St Edmund. Since the figure named in Scandinavian sources as Ragnar Lothbrok is usually called only Lothbrok in England, it would be unusual to find him appearing under the name Ragnar; as noted above, however, the first time the two names occur together is in a twelfth-century text from Iceland, apparently attributing the information to English sources on St Edmund’s death, so it may be that this link had already been made in England and is simply not recorded in any of the surviving sources. As Edmund’s legend grew, he was provided with numerous saintly relations for whom there is no historical basis – over the centuries he acquired a hermit brother named Eadwold and a nephew named Fremund, in addition to St Ragner.55 We have seen how Lothbrok, originally Edmund’s antagonist, became reinterpreted in legend as his friend and even his protégé, cruelly and innocently murdered; it would not be a great stretch to make that into a family relationship, or to interpret Lothbrok’s murder as a kind of martyrdom.
If these were indeed the origins of St Ragner, however, the text which recounts the discovery of his relics does not seem aware of it. Although Ivar is mentioned at the very end, the Inventio does not suggest any link between these pagan kings and the ‘holy martyr of Christ’. However, there is one intriguing connection with Scandinavia in the Inventio: the Norwegian servant. The simple, devout man to whom Ragner’s relics are revealed is not just of Norwegian birth, but is explicitly said to be a Norse-speaker – he refers to St Peter in his native language as drotin, ‘lord’, and by the miraculous discovery of the martyr’s relics he learns that Ragner, not St Peter, is the real drotin he has been seeking. This must represent the Old Norse word dróttinn, a common word for ‘lord’, which was also frequently used in medieval Christian contexts to refer to God and to saints. The appearance of this word in the Inventio is an interesting moment of linguistic self-consciousness: the text treats it as a foreign and unfamiliar word, worth noting and translating as a marker of this Norwegian man’s distinctive language.56 The meaning of the word then becomes crucial to the story of the man’s revelation and spiritual enlightenment, as he is shown the identity of his true ‘lord’ and leads others to venerate him.
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