This means that Sigvard, as well as being the only one of the sons of Ragnar to be assisted by Odin in disguise, is also the only one to be associated with snakes – a feature which appears prominently in the stories about Ragnar himself, and which may have helped to make the link between the Ragnar legend and that of Sigurðr the Völsung, the slayer of the dragon Fafnir. There is no evidence that the serpent-slaying exploits of Ragnar, recorded by Saxo and Ragnars saga, were known in England, but those of Sigurðr the Völsung certainly were, at least as early as the tenth century.61 Sigurðr was the most famous dragon-slayer of Germanic legend, and an association between the name Sigurðr and serpents may have helped contribute to the narrative which grew up around Siward of Northumbria. Although it is treated fairly succinctly in the Gesta antecessorum, Siward begins his career by fighting with dragons: when he meets the old man on the mound, he has already encountered one serpent in the Orkneys and is in search of another to fight. Like both his legendary namesakes, Sigurðr the Völsung and Sigurðr the son of Ragnar, the dragon-fighting Siward is given assistance and patronage by an Odinic figure, who promises him a favourable wind to guide his ship to London and tells him what to do to achieve success there.
All this suggests that the narrative about Siward may have been forged out of elements drawn from Anglo-Scandinavian tradition, probably in the East Midlands. Although the historical Siward’s strongest connections were with Northumbria, all the evidence for interest in the Siward legend comes from the Midlands: the Crowland Gesta antecessorum, the text from Delapré, Henry of Huntingdon, and the reference to ‘Richard the Chauntour’ of Nottingham. We have seen that while the legend of Lothbrok and his sons belongs to a tradition shared by England and Scandinavia, the distribution of the surviving evidence suggests that in England it was particularly popular in East Anglia and the East Midlands, so it is not difficult to believe a writer at Crowland might have encountered such legends. The story in the Gesta is clearly told from a southern perspective, not a Northumbrian one, and the references to Northumbria in the early part of the narrative suggest an attitude to the region more likely to resonate with a southern audience: Northumbria is used as the setting of Siward’s landing in England, but in a way which suggests it is seen as a distant and exotic location, where supernatural monsters are more easily to be met with than in the Fenland. It is in Northumbria that Siward seeks the dragon to fight after killing one in the Orkneys, and there that he meets the old man on the mound who directs him south to London. This use of Northumbria as a wild, liminal country suggests the attitude of an audience to whom Northumbria was as alien and unknown as the Orkneys. It is also suggestive that the story about the acquisition of Siward’s earldom of Huntingdon takes place in London and Westminster, concentrating on the king’s decision to grant the earldom to Siward. The complete absence of any reference to the ancestral earls of Northumbria, into whose family Siward married (and who were actually the more distinguished of Earl Waltheof ’s ancestors), suggests ignorance on this subject.62 The earldom of Huntingdon was obviously of more significance to the compiler of the Gesta antecessorum than Siward’s role in Northumbria, and his account of Siward’s life has been influenced by the concerns of an audience nearer to the place where the manuscript was produced at Crowland. This seems to reveal that story-telling traditions of Anglo-Scandinavian origin – dragons, raven banners, Odinic guides and all – were not just being preserved but were continuing to thrive and grow in this part of England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The bear’s son: ‘wild blood’ and the Danes
In the case of the prophetic old man and the raven banner, it is difficult to be sure about the form in which the Crowland compiler might have encountered these narratives about the Danes in England – if they were legends circulating in the East Midlands, whether orally or in written texts, it is probably impossible to pin down any particular source. It is a different matter with the other most strikingly Scandinavian element of Siward’s story: the genealogy of the bear’s son, with which this chapter began.63 The legend of a man descended from a bear is a widespread folk-tale, and it appears in various forms in Scandinavian tradition. Common versions of the story tell, for instance, of a man magically turned into a bear who begets a son while in bear form, or of a woman kidnapped by a bear who has a child by it; often the bear is killed and the son seeks revenge for his father.64 We have seen that one variant of this story features in a strand of the English legends about the sons of Lothbrok, Thomas Elmham’s fifteenth-century tale about St Edmund becoming stepfather to the bear’s sons through his marriage to a Danish princess. That version contains some parallels with the usual form of the story, such as the idea that the bear’s sons wreak vengeance on their father’s killers.
In the Crowland text we hear nothing of the woman involved other than that she was of noble birth, but we are given a genealogy of Siward’s father, Beorn ‘Bear’s Son’. The Crowland version of this genealogy is muddled, since Ursus and Beorn are clearly meant to be the same person: both names mean ‘bear’, the usual name for the bear’s son in this kind of story, and it is Beorn who has the ears of a bear as a sign of his ancestry. (In Old English beorn means ‘man, warrior’, but Old Norse björn means ‘bear’, the equivalent of the Latin ursus.) The Crowland Gesta has added two extra steps to Siward’s ancestry, but the version of the text from Delapré has a simpler and probably correct genealogy: Bear-Beorn-Siward, without the addition of Spratling and Ulf. These additions in the Gesta have been copied from a genealogy attached to another aristocratic Scandinavian family, more famous and influential than Siward’s otherwise unknown father – the family of the eleventh-century nobleman Ulf Thorgilsson, who was connected by marriage to both Cnut and Earl Godwine. Ulf was married to Cnut’s sister, while his own sister Gytha was married to Godwine and was the mother of Harold and Tostig Godwineson and their siblings. The genealogy of Ulf and Gytha is recorded in both English and Danish sources, and Saxo Grammaticus gives the story of their bear ancestry in the Gesta Danorum. He tells how the daughter of a Swedish farmer was captured by a bear and bore him a son – ‘wild blood was invested with the features of a human body’.65 This son, named for his father (i.e. Beorn), became the father of Thorgils Sprakalegg, who was the father of Ulf and Gytha. Saxo says that Ulf betrayed in his character his descent from a wild beast – evidently a rationalisation of the motif which gives the descendant of the bear physical features belonging to his ancestry, such as a bear’s ears.
This genealogy was also known in England, although the Gesta antecessorum is the only source to share Saxo’s connection between it and the ‘bear’s son’ motif. John of Worcester records it (without the bear) in giving the ancestry of Ulf ’s son Beorn, while describing how Beorn was murdered by his cousin Svein Godwineson in 1049. John identifies Beorn as the son of ‘the Danish Earl Ulf, son of Spracling, son of Urse, and brother of Svein, king of the Danes’.66 Ulf ’s father is referred to here as filii Ursi, which might be a translation either of the name Beorn or, perhaps, of an epithet, ‘bear’s son’. The naming traditions of the family suggest a link with the legend of bear ancestry: Ulf had a son named Beorn and one named Osbeorn (Old Norse Ásbjörn), which means ‘god-like bear’.
This is obviously the genealogy which lies behind the extra names added to the Gesta antecessorum. The Gesta’s version of it cannot be accurate, as Siward and Ulf were contemporaries and Ulf ’s son Beorn certainly could not have been Siward’s father. It has been suggested that Siward was related to the family of Ulf, although no sources record this, but it may be that Siward simply also had a father named Beorn – especially since Siward too had a son named Osbeorn, the son killed fighting against Macbethin 1054.67 The scribe of the Gesta presumably copiedthis genealogy from a text of John of Worcester, thereby introducing several superfluous generations into Siward’s ancestry, as a result of confusing Siward’s father Beorn with Beorn the son of Ulf.
Why borrow this genealogy for Siward,
in the process of constructing a history for Siward’s acquisition of the earldom of Huntingdon? Ulf and his family had close links to England, and played prominent roles in the political crises of the eleventh century in England and Scandinavia. Ulf ’s career in England was short-lived, although he briefly held an English earldom under Cnut. He was involved in the conquest of England and witnessed several charters between 1020 and 1024, but returned to Denmark soon after 1024 and was murdered on Cnut’s orders in 1027.68 His brother Eilaf held an earldom in Gloucestershire under Cnut, but it was their sister Gytha whose presence in England had the most lasting effect. She probably married Earl Godwine around 1020, and her husband and sons dominated politics in England in the middle decades of the eleventh century. Her nephews, Ulf ’s sons Beorn and Osbeorn, also made their careers in England. Osbeorn held an earldom in England under Harthacnut, but was exiled on the accession of Edward the Confessor.69 Beorn was given an earldom by Edward in 1045, which he held until he was murdered by his cousin Svein Godwineson in 1049; this earldom covered eastern Mercia, including part of Lincolnshire and Huntingdonshire.70
The eldest brother Svein became king of Denmark in 1047, on the strength of his relationship to his maternal uncle, Cnut, and his descendants ruled Denmark until the fifteenth century. For a brief period in 1066, two of the grandsons of Thorgils – Gytha’s son Harold and Ulf ’s son Svein – were ruling England and Denmark. The family’s connections with England continued after the Conquest, and they took part in English rebellions against the Normans; the Danish fleet which came to the aid of English rebels (including Waltheof) in 1069–70 was sent by one of Ulf ’s sons, Svein, and led by another, Osbeorn, and three of Svein’s sons also took part.71 William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester claim that Osbeorn was bribed by William the Conqueror to leave England, angering Svein and leading in time to his exile from Denmark.72 In 1075 two of Svein’s sons returned to England to support the Revolt of the Earls, the rebellion that led to Waltheof ’s execution. As a result of their family connection with Earl Godwine and their involvement in the rebellions of the 1070s, Ulf ’s sons must have been fairly well-known in England, especially in East Anglia and the Fenland.
There is also some evidence to suggest that legendary stories about Ulf and Godwine circulated in Anglo-Scandinavian tradition, in which similar narratives were attached to both earls or transferred from one to the other. For instance, a story told by Walter Map about how Godwine came to marry Cnut’s sister through trickery with the king’s seal has close parallels with a similar tale attached to Ulf by Saxo Grammaticus.73 Walter Map tells how Cnut plots to kill Godwine by sending him to Denmark on the pretence of wanting him to share the rule with Cnut’s sister, but on the voyage Godwine opens the sealed letters containing Cnut’s orders, and finds his death-warrant. He amends the letters so that they entrust him with the government of Denmark and arrange for his marriage with the king’s sister.74 This story, which appears in a very similar form in the Vita Haroldi,75 makes use of a familiar motif in the secret changing of the letter, which is also found in the context of a journey between Denmark and England in Saxo Grammaticus’s story of Amleth, from where it eventually reached Hamlet.76 Godwine was the subject of a number of such legendary narratives by the twelfth century, some of which appear in Norse sources too.77 The thirteenth-century Knýtlinga saga tells a story in which Ulf encounters Godwine, the son of a Wiltshire farmer, while taking refuge in his father’s house after the battle of Sherston in 1016. Impressed by the boy’s attentive hospitality, the Danish earl takes Godwine to join Cnut’s fleet, marries him to his sister, and arranges for him to be appointed earl.78 This might be dismissed as a late fiction were it not for the fact that Walter Map also tells a very similar story about Godwine’s origins, although he says that it was King Æthelred who spotted Godwine’s potential.79 It is likely that Knýtlinga saga preserves the earlier story, and that at some point in English tradition the name of Æthelred came to replace that of the less familiar Danish earl; the story may have originated as an explanation for how Godwine came to marry Ulf ’s sister.
The connection between Godwine and Ulf was not very well remembered in English sources, with the exception of John of Worcester. Even the Vita Ædwardi Regis, although it was commissioned by Eadgyth, daughter of Godwine and Gytha, and written while Gytha was still alive, does not mention Ulf and calls Gytha the sister of Cnut.80 But some information about Godwine and his family seems to have been available at Worcester, and John of Worcester has additional information about a number of Anglo-Danish families in the period of his chronicle in which Ulf ’s genealogy appears.81 John is the only source to note the parentage of Svein (‘son of Godwine and Gytha’) as well as the genealogy of Beorn in his account of Beorn’s murder, clarifying the relationship between the cousins as well as Beorn’s link to Svein, king of Denmark. The genealogy appears in the context of a narrative of treachery and betrayal, in which Svein Godwineson, returning from exile in Denmark and dishonestly promising to remain faithful to the king, murders his cousin, who has offered to intercede with King Edward on his behalf.82 Some of these elements recur in the Gesta’s narrative about Siward and Tostig, in which Siward takes his revenge on Tostig for an insult and gains his earldom by exploiting an unconscious promise from the king. Since the Crowland writer clearly had access to John of Worcester’s Chronicle, he may have been influenced by it in this respect too.
It is hardly surprising that the Crowland writer confused these two Danish families, with their plethora of similar names, but it is interesting that he chose to elaborate on Siward’s genealogy by borrowing from such a prominent Anglo-Danish dynasty. It suggests that in composing an origin narrative for Siward, the compiler of the Gesta antecessorum was deliberately taking names from eleventh-century history, locating his story in the reign of Edward the Confessor and during a period of particularly intense Anglo-Danish interaction. This probably also explains why he used the name Tostig for Siward’s Danish predecessor, whom Siward murders by trickery – this story lets Siward defeat Tostig, presenting Siward as braver, brighter and more loyal than the Godwinesons, as well as borrowing their genealogy.
This offers an important context for the narrative of Siward’s ancestry and adventures. What this narrative provides is not just the tale of a daring Viking settler, but the origin-myth of an aristocratic Anglo-Danish dynasty. The lineage of the bear lives on through Waltheof ’s descendants, and so does their connection with the earldom to which Siward was supernaturally guided. This also explains how the story of Siward fits together with the other texts in the same manuscript, providing a narrative of both family history and the history of the honour of Huntingdon. The emphasis in the Gesta antecessorum on Siward’s acquisition of Huntingdon acts as a form of prologue to the later history of the earldom under the Senlis earls and the Scottish royal line, and Siward’s story provides a foundational myth for the dynasty, hinting at some supernatural agency at work in the link between Waltheof ’s family and Huntingdon. The story of bear ancestry is assimilated to this purpose, too, through the reference to a prophecy in the ‘ancient histories of the English’ which says that a man born of a rational and irrational being would defend England from its enemies. This Scandinavian legend provides Waltheof and his descendants (including the royal line of Scotland and later, through them, the royal family of England too) with an incomparable ancestry – a distinguished line of forebears with more than human power and ferocity.
Hereward and the bear
There are two final relevant comparisons for the bear ancestry element in the story of Siward, which suggest how in medieval England this kind of Scandinavian legend could be used in different ways for different audiences. The first is the Gesta Herwardi, a twelfth-century account of the adventures of the anti-Norman rebel Hereward, which features a related narrative about a Scandinavian family and descent from a bear.83 The Gesta Herwardi is a Latin prose text preserved at the end of a thirteenth-century collection of legal docu
ments from Peterborough Abbey (Peterborough Cathedral Manuscript 1, folios 320–39),84 and based on the fact that it was used in the compilation of the Liber Eliensis, it is possible to date its composition to between 1107 and 1131.85
Like Siward, Hereward was a historical figure who came to be the subject of a colourful narrative of his early adventures. The evidence for Hereward’s life is confined to the Domesday record of his possible land-holdings and to the chronicle records of two events, the plundering of Peterborough Abbey by his ‘gang’ in 1070 and the siege of Ely by the Normans in the following year, which Hereward stoutly resisted.86 The Gesta Herwardi, however, offers an expansive account of Hereward’s adventures as a young man, set during the 1060s in Northumbria, Cornwall, Dublin and Flanders, and then goes on to record numerous stratagems and tricks played by Hereward against the Normans, claiming to be based on a variety of first-hand accounts of his life. The Gesta Herwardi is a mixture of historical fact and romantic adventures, many of which went on to influence later outlaw legends such as the stories of Robin Hood. Hereward, like Robin Hood, is a young nobleman unjustly dispossessed of his inheritance, who wages a mischievous campaign of guerrilla warfare against his enemies while living a comfortable life in an inaccessible hideout. Hereward takes refuge in the Fens rather than the greenwood, but he has Robin Hood’s taste for tricks – putting the shoes on his horse backwards, so as to send his pursuers in the wrong direction – and a similar retinue of assorted outlaws with their own individual stories.87
It is Hereward’s very first adventure that concerns us here. The Gesta Herwardi tells how, as a young man, Hereward is forced to leave his native Lincolnshire because his behaviour is too riotous for his family to handle. He goes to stay with his godfather somewhere in the far north ‘beyond Northumbria’. His godfather keeps wild beasts in cages for the entertainment of his knights, and among these beasts is a very large bear. But this is not an ordinary bear – it is, the Gesta Herwardi says, the offspring of a famous Norwegian bear, which is said to have had the head and feet of a man and human intelligence. This bear understood human speech and was cunning in battle, and according to ‘the stories of the Danes’ ( fabula Danorum), it had fathered Beorn, king of Norway, on a human woman. The point of the story is that the bear breaks loose and young Hereward is the only one strong enough to fight and kill it; he saves the lives of his host’s wife and daughters and earns their gratitude, and songs are composed in his honour.88
Dragon Lords Page 13