Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  This motif of bear–human hybrid ancestry is clearly related to the stories we have been looking at, although there are some differences in detail. Neither this text nor the Siward narrative tells the whole legend as it appears in the Scandinavian sources: both lack elements such as the abduction of the woman, the killing of the bear, and the son’s revenge on its killers (which Thomas Elmham’s later story does include). They only deal with the offspring of the bear and the physical characteristics which reveal its animal parentage. Both, however, indicate that the story is traditional: the Gesta Herwardi attributes it to ‘the stories of the Danes’, and the Gesta antecessorum to ‘the tales of the ancients’ (relaciones antiquorum).89 The presentation of the story in the Gesta Herwardi is particularly self-aware, as it not only makes use of the bear story, but explicitly identifies it within the text as a story, and one associated with Scandinavia – specifically Norway, where Beorn, the bear’s son, is said to have been king. The Scandinavian identity of the story is clearly marked, and in framing the story like this the Gesta Herwardi seems to be deliberately directing our attention to the way in which it is weaving a legendary narrative into the life of its historical hero. The part of the Gesta Herwardi which deals with Hereward’s youthful adventures is closely related to other early romance narratives, and we could interpret the comment here as a self-referential aside, a wink at the fictionality of this part of the text: Hereward, in his first adventure away from the Fenland, goes north and encounters legends brought to life. We are told in the prologue to the Gesta Herwardi that the author of the Old English text on which the Latin version claims to be based, Hereward’s chaplain Leofric, was something of an expert in fables and legends: it says that he would gather the deeds of giants and warriors ex fabulis antiquorum, ‘out of the stories of the ancients’, for the edification of his audience, and commit them to writing in English.90 The text seems to be reminding us of this assertion about its own origins – its own complicated ancestry-story – by associating Hereward’s first adventure with such fabulae, and offering a literary context within which to interpret this narrative of Hereward’s early career.

  More than this, however, the Gesta makes it clear that the monster Hereward encounters is not just a creature like something from Danish legend; it is a genetic relation of a bear who is a figure from an existing narrative – a narrative that was the ancestral origin-myth associated with a noble, by this time a royal, dynasty. Although written early in the twelfth century, Hereward’s adventure with the bear is set on the eve of the Norman Conquest, at a time when the family with whom this myth of bear ancestry was apparently linked were at the height of their power. This may not be a coincidence. The historical Hereward collaborated closely with the Danish army led by Ulf ’s son Osbeorn: the interpolation in the Peterborough Chronicle describing the plunder of Peterborough in 1070 by Hereward and his gang of outlaws tells how, after stripping the church, Hereward gave its treasures to Osbeorn’s army, who were camped at Ely and later sailed away with them back to Denmark.91 This collaboration between Hereward and the Danish army is not mentioned at all in the Gesta Herwardi – a striking omission, which perhaps indicates not only that plundering churches did not fit with the Gesta’s view of Hereward as a fair-minded hero, but also that collaboration with the Danes might have sullied this text’s presentation of him as an English hero. The Gesta Herwardi, a text full of stories about post-Conquest conflict between the English and the Normans, is keenly alert to questions of national and cultural identity, and in light of its unwillingness to mention Hereward’s Danish allies, the text’s one explicit reference to a Scandinavian legend – a legend associated in twelfth-century sources with the family of Hereward’s allies – might be interpreted as derisive, or at best dismissive. This cousin of a Scandinavian royal family is a savage half-human bear, kept in a cage for the amusement of a nobleman and then unceremoniously killed by Hereward. By making Hereward confront this creature from Danish legend at the very beginning of the text, the Gesta Herwardi seems to be putting Hereward into the Scandinavian world only to demonstrate his distance from it. Its attitude to the bear story is quite different from that of the Crowland narrative about Siward; while the Gesta Herwardi keeps a sceptical distance from the Danes and their fabulae about half-human bears, the monks of Crowland seem to have been glad to claim similar ancestry for their own hero, Earl Waltheof.

  The final point to mention here concerns a short episode in the Roman de Waldef, an Anglo-Norman verse romance composed in East Anglia, probably in the first decade of the thirteenth century.92 This romance is set in an imagined version of pre-Conquest East Anglia, which is presented as a world of small regional kingdoms and warring kings, and the titular hero, Waldef, is said to be the ruler of a kingdom in Norfolk. The Roman de Waldef is the earliest and (although unfinished) the longest of the Anglo-Norman ancestral romances, and the episode in question takes place just over halfway through this very lengthy story, as attention turns from Waldef to the next generation, his twin sons Gudlac and Guiac. The children are kidnapped as infants, and grow up apart and far from their East Anglian homeland. Gudlac is brought up in Morocco, but is exiled from that country after killing the nephew of the king in a fight, and he ends up shipwrecked on the coast of Denmark. This initiates a brief Scandinavian interlude in the romance: Gudlac seeks out the court of the Danish king, Svein, and while riding with the king and other nobles rescues the king’s son from a giant white bear. This act of heroism brings Gudlac into favour with the king; he remains in Denmark and aids the Danes in fighting off a Norwegian invasion, and in return Svein provides him with ships and men for his return to England, where he is eventually reunited with his parents and brother.93

  Gudlac’s adventure with the white bear seems to have been borrowed more or less wholesale from the Gesta Herwardi, in a manner which is characteristic of the narrative composition of the Roman de Waldef – this romance takes stories, motifs and character names from a variety of historiographical and romance sources, reusing them and recombining them at will. The name ‘Hereward’ is used for an unconnected character in the romance, and there are some other parallels between the two texts.94 The links between the two bear episodes are clear, both in the narrative details and in the function of the episode within the text: the encounter with the bear takes place when the young hero has been exiled for violent behaviour, he saves innocent victims from an out-of-control bear, proving his valour for the first time, and he is rewarded highly for this deed by the local ruler.

  The most important difference between this text and the others we have been looking at is that the bear in the Roman de Waldef is not sentient, and does not come equipped with a story of human–bear progeny like that referenced in the Gesta Herwardi and the narrative about Siward. However, all three texts bear some relation to each other, even if the exact direction of influence is difficult to reconstruct. In all three, the bear motif appears in roughly comparable narrative contexts: it occurs early in the career of a young hero, who has left home and is setting out into the world to try his prowess, and in all three texts it is associated explicitly with Scandinavia and Scandinavian men.95 In plundering his stock of character names from other sources, the Anglo-Norman poet seems to have borrowed the name Waldef from Crowland’s Waltheof, although there are no similarities between the plot of the romance and any surviving stories about the earl. (Similarly, Gudlac gets his name from the Anglo-Saxon hermit St Guthlac, Crowland’s other saint, with whom he has even less in common than Waldef does with Waltheof.) The Roman de Waldef has been dated to c.1200–10, and it is probably not a coincidence that interest in Waltheof as a saint appears to have been at its height in the early part of the thirteenth century: the 1219 translation of his relics doubtless encouraged this interest, which seems to have also led to the production of the Crowland manuscript where the Siward story is recorded. All three texts have a Crowland connection, since Crowland also had a particular interest in Hereward, who had been a tenant o
f the abbey. The Gesta Herwardi says that Hereward’s first wife took the veil at Crowland, and the later chronicle of Pseudo-Ingulf, written at Crowland, gives its own version of the Hereward story which shows knowledge of the Gesta Herwardi.96 Since the hero of Waldef and one of his sons share their names with the two principal saints of Crowland Abbey, it seems possible that the author might have had a connection to that house and knowledge of the texts being produced there.

  These three texts, then, suggestdifferentways in whichlegends about the Danes might retain meaning and use for English audiences into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The narrative element of bear ancestry is reused in three geographically close but very different contexts, yet in each case is still marked out as Scandinavian. In the first place, a particular version of a widespread story seems to have been introduced to England as an origin-myth for an aristocratic dynasty, in the mid-eleventh century when ties between English and Danish noble families were closer than ever before, and when elite Scandinavian literary culture was known and practised in England. In the Crowland narrative about Siward, it retains some of its original power, providing a foundational myth for the abbey’s past and current aristocratic patrons. The Gesta Herwardi, written in a different and tense political context in the decades immediately after the Norman Conquest, repurposes this Danish story for its own ends, and in doing so makes it available as narrative material for later romance such as the Roman de Waldef. There the episode is in part simply a useful way to launch a story about Gudlac’s Scandinavian adventures, but the Roman de Waldef is also interested in a much longer and more wide-ranging narrative of pre-Conquest history than either of the other two texts. This romance’s use of narratives about the English past, as Rosalind Field has argued, ‘goes beyond a casual plundering of commonplace motifs’ to create something that amounts almost to ‘a national corpus of literary material’, imagining pre-Conquest England not as a single unified Anglo-Saxon world but as a space occupied by multiple competing interests, kingdoms and nationalities.97 Within this corpus, narratives about the history of interaction between England and Denmark have their own place, as we will see in Chapter 4.

  CHAPTER 4

  Danish sovereignty

  and the right

  to rule

  The relationship between the legends of Siward and Hereward and the Anglo-Norman romance Waldef suggests how, in the fertile literary culture of post-Conquest England, narrative material could freely pass between Anglo-Scandinavian legend, historical writing, hagiography and romance. What we see in these texts is narratives and legends about England’s Viking history becoming part of the material of romance, reshaped and adapted to fit new audiences. In Middle English romance, narratives of Anglo-Danish interaction feature most often as tales of Viking aggression – with the important exception of Havelok, which will be discussed in the next chapter.1 However, even in texts where the Danes appear primarily as adversaries, it is sometimes possible to see a more nuanced interest in the history of their relationship with England. In this chapter we will look at how the Danes feature in the story of one of the most popular heroes of medieval romance, Guy of Warwick. Guy’s long and varied career takes him from dragon-slayer and chivalrous knight to a repentant pilgrim and hermit, but his final and most famous victory comes when he defeats a Viking invasion through single combat against the Danes’ champion. The Guy story uses the threat of Danish invasion as a national conflict in which the defender of the English can win a patriotic triumph, but it also seems to show knowledge of a belief, found in other sources, that in the Anglo-Saxon period the Danes had some kind of historical right to claim sovereignty in England. Rather than framing the idea of Danish invasion and settlement in solely personal terms – as we have seen in many of the stories about Lothbrok and his sons, and in the tale of Siward – this tradition takes an interest in the political and legal history of Danish rule in England.

  Gaimar and the Danish claim

  One of the earliest writers to explore this idea is the twelfth-century writer Geffrei Gaimar in his Estoire des Engleis. Gaimar’s Estoire was written c.1136–7 and narrates the history of the English, in Anglo-Norman verse, from the coming of the Saxons to the death of William Rufus in 1100.2 An earlier section of the chronicle, dealing with the origins of the British, is referenced by Gaimar but no longer survives. Gaimar wrote under the patronage of Constance, the wife of Ralph fitz Gilbert, a member of a family characterised by Ian Short as ‘well-connected members of the minor aristocracy of Lincolnshire’; unlike many of the texts we have been considering so far, therefore, Gaimar’s Estoire is intended primarily for a secular, aristocratic audience.3 Gaimar presents a narrative of English and British history freely drawn not only from his two main sources, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but also from romance and oral tradition which he probably encountered in Lincolnshire.

  In a series of passages not derived from either of his two main sources, Gaimar mentions a number of semi-legendary Danish kings who ruled in England.4 The first is Havelok, whose legend will be dealt with at greater length in the next chapter, and he also refers to a king named Wasing, a Danish ruler of Norfolk not found in any other source, as well as to the better-attested periods of Danish rule under Svein and Cnut.5 He claims that the Danes believed they had a right to rule England dating back to before the arrival of the Saxons, when England was ruled by a king named Dan, from whom later Danish kings were descended. This belief in an ancient Danish right to England is discussed in the Estoire on two separate occasions. The first comes as an explanation for the beginning of Viking raids in England, prompted by the reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the arrival of a small number of ships on the coast of Wessex in 789:6

  E en cel tens vindrent Daneis

  pur guereier sur les Engleis:

  un senesçal al rei oscistrent,

  la terre saisirent e pristrent,

  mult firent mal par les contrees,

  si nen u[re]nt ke treis navees.

  Puis realerent en lur païs

  si asemblerent lur amis;

  en Bretaigne voldrent venir,

  as Engleis la voldrent tolir

  car entr’els eurent esgardé

  e dit ke ço est lur herité,

  e mulz homes de lur linage,

  urent le regne en heritage

  ainceis kë Engleis i entrast

  ne home de Sessoigne i habitast:

  li reis Danes tint le regnez,

  ki de Denemarch[e] fu nez:

  si fist Ailbrith e Haveloc,

  e plus en nomerent ovoc,

  purquai il distrent pur verité,

  Bretaigne ert lur dreit herité.

  (2065–86)

  (It was during this time that the Danes arrived to wage war on the English. They killed a certain royal steward, seized and secured the land and, despite their only having three ships, caused a great deal of damage throughout the region. They then returned home and enlisted their allies with the intention of coming to Britain to seize the island from the English, for they had reached the decision between them, and claimed that this country was part of their heritage, and that many of their ancestors had established an inheritance claim before any English had even arrived or before anyone from Saxony came to live there. King Danr, who was born in Denmark, had ruled over the kingdom, as had Adelbricht7 and Haveloc, and they named others in addition who had done so. It was on this basis that they claimed it to be true that Britain was their rightful inheritance.)8

  Gaimar provides this as an explanation for all Danish attacks on England from the ninth century onwards, rationalising Viking activity as a coordinated attempt at national expansion. The Danes are imagined not as opportunistic plunderers but as would-be conquerors who target England specifically because their ancestors had once ruled there. Gaimar returns to this subject in his account of the meeting between Cnut and Edmund Ironside at Deerhurst in Gloucestershire in 1016. In common with a number
of medieval historians, Gaimar says that on this occasion the two kings made preparations for a single combat to determine which of them should rule England, and in the middle of the duel he has them debating their respective rights to the English throne. As they face each other before beginning the combat, Cnut interrupts and speaks mult sagement, ‘very wisely’ (4307), about his grounds for claiming to rule England. He tells Edmund that they are both the sons of kings who have ruled the country, but that his ancestors held England many years before the coming of the Saxons:

  e bien sachez loi[n]gtenement

  l’urent Daneis nostre parent:

  prés de mil anz l’out Dane aince[i]s

  ke unc i entrast Certiz li reis.

  Certiz, ço fu vostre ancïen,

  e li reis Danes fu le mien.

  Daneis le tint en chef de Deu,

  Modret donat Certiz son feu:

  il ne tint unkes chevalment,

  de lui vindrent vostre parent.

  Pur ço vus di, si nel savez,