Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  Full bold be these danys,

  And gret cowardys the Englyssh

  (C 10420–1)

  (Very bold are these Danes, and great cowards the English.)

  Æthelstan fears losing control of his kingdom, is concerned about being forced to flee the country, and laments that if he had been less stingy to his knights they would have stood by him. It is difficult to recognise the valiant, decisive and generous Æthelstan of William of Malmesbury and other chroniclers in this helpless king;48 the fictional Æthelstan’s acknowledged errors of policy and the sorry state of the English nobility in the face of Danish attack are all more reminiscent of the ways post-Conquest historians (following the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) portrayed the last years of Æthelred’s reign. By contrast, the Danes are presented as proud and arrogant: we are given a vivid little picture of the Danes watching the single combat, nudging each other and boasting that England will pay them tribute and for ever be subject to them. This picture of an England helpless in the face of wide-ranging attacks by a Danish army echoes accounts such the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s description (quoted in Chapter 2) of the arrogant army who defied the threat of Cuckhamsley Barrow in 1006, and there are a number of elements in that entry which provide particularly close parallels with the narrative in Guy: the combination of references to both Guy’s hometown of Wallingford and the site of his combat at Winchester is particularly striking, and the general fear caused by the invasion and the ineffective results of summoning a defensive English army appear in both narratives. Æthelstan’s crisis parliament and the hopeless situation of the nation recall the efforts which attracted the scorn of the chronicler writing about the events of 1006 – and that Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry also contains vainglorious boasting, although there it is on the English side.49

  Into this context of English weakness and Danish arrogance the romances insert the Norman hero Guy, saviour of the hour. With Æthelstan helpless, the role of national defender is delegated to Guy; in presenting the victory of the English as the single-handed triumph of the Norman knight Guy, the romances reimagine Anglo-Saxon history in a way which must have particularly suited a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman audience, but which is carried over into the English versions of the story too.50 It is in this context that the romances introduce the idea of a historical Danish right to rule England. This is first mentioned when Guy is absent abroad, and Æthelstan holds a parliament to discuss the threatened invasion of England by Anlaf of Denmark. It becomes clear that Anlaf ’s attack is not imagined as a random act of aggression: Æthelstan tells his counsellors that the Danish king is claiming he has a right to rule in England, and asks for reassurance that this claim is not valid. In response, Guy’s elderly tutor Heraud, the wisest of Æthelstan’s counsellors, describes the history of the Danish king’s claim. He acknowledges that while the Danish kings once had a just right to rule the country, they long ago lost it by defeat in battle. He explains:

  Myn eldren seide, ich vnder-stonde,

  Þe Dennisch men hadde riȝt in þis londe,

  Wiþ-outen eni faile…

  & siþþe þai han it lore, y-wis,

  And here folk in bataile.

  (A 17.7–12)

  (My elders said, I understand, that the Danish men had a right in this land, without doubt … and afterwards they lost it, indeed, and their men in battle.)

  Another version of the romance elaborates a little on this decisive battle:51

  And sethen longe tyme a-goone

  Many of hem were here sloone:

  A grete bateyle there they tynte

  Right with strengthe of swerdus dynte;

  Therfor haue thei loste there right:

  Thei were dyscomfyt in that fight.

  (C 8803–9)

  (And afterwards, a long time past, many of them were slain here. They fought a great battle there with powerful swords’ blows. By that they lost their right; they were defeated in that battle.)

  The question of the Danish challenge is presented as a matter of great antiquity: many winters have passed, Æthelstan says, since they first challenged England. Æthelstan asks his barons what their elders have told them about the Danish claim, and Heraud echoes this reference to oral tradition passed down by his ancestors – it is information which only he can give the king in his role here as the aged and wise counsellor. The very antiquity of the claim makes it vague and unspecific: it is not clear what decisive battle the poet may have been thinking of, and it is possible that no specific event is intended to be recognisable here. The romance clearly imagines this battle to have taken place some time before Æthelstan’s own reign, and the effect is to place this latest attack within a longer pattern of invasion, defeat and return.

  But Guy’s victory, of course, will send the Danes away for good. When Guy returns home from pilgrimage he finds that Anlaf, with an army of 15,000 men, has ravaged the land up to the walls of Winchester, capturing and burning towns and castles. Anlaf challenges Æthelstan to find a knight who can defeat his champion, the giant Colbrand, but after another parliament to discuss the crisis the king is unable to find any warrior who will undertake the combat. A dream leads him to Guy, who has come unrecognised to the gates of the city as a pilgrim, and after some persuasion Guy agrees to fight Colbrand. Watched by crowds of Danes and English, he fights and kills the giant, and Anlaf, in accordance with the agreement he has previously made with Æthelstan, concedes defeat. The Danes leave England, promising never to return, and Guy, renouncing the world for the last time, becomes a hermit and dies shortly afterwards.

  Some of this seems to reflect the use of information from historical narratives about Danish invasion, with particularly strong parallels to the invasions of Svein and Cnut, and this makes the appearance of the claim of Danish sovereignty in this narrative especially interesting, when compared to the context in which it appears in Gaimar’s Estoire. There it is Cnut who describes his ancestral right to England, in the middle of a single combat which will settle the question for once and all. Might some version of the story told by Gaimar be the tradition which lies behind Heraud’s speech in Guy of Warwick?52 In the romance, the ultimate motive for Anlaf ’s attacks on England is political: the Danes once had a legitimate claim to rule England which Anlaf is attempting to resurrect. As a result of this, the invaders are not presented as indiscriminate raiders but as would-be conquerors with a reason to think themselves entitled to claim the country. As soon as the battle is over the Danes at once know themselves to be beaten and fulfil their promise to leave the country; in doing this they obey the terms of the oath Anlaf has sworn with Æthelstan, and the finality of their defeat not only emphasises the glory of Guy’s victory but also underlines the point that this conflict is a struggle between two nations claiming legitimate rule over England, not between a landed king and a group of opportunistic raiders.

  Anlaf ’s invasion is presented as ultimately unjust, but only because his ancestral right was (Heraud says) overthrown long ago. There is no mention in Gaimar, as there is in Guy, of a right lost in battle; Cnut clearly considers his claim to be valid even up to his own day, and Edmund implicitly accepts this by agreeing to the division of the kingdom. However, a pre-Saxon setting for Heraud’s story fits well with Æthelstan’s statement that the battle took place many years ago, and accords with the way the idea is put to use in the Guy legend: there the Danes are to be defeated by Æthelstan’s champion, a glorious national hero, and retreat from England forever. Heraud’s version of the story means that if it were not sufficient that Guy has God on his side, he has history to support him too; the Danes have not had a right to rule in England for many years, and Heraud’s story is almost a refutation of the tradition which is voiced by Gaimar’s Cnut.

  The appearance of the idea of single combat provides a further link between the story of Guy and Colbrand and Gaimar’s narrative about Cnut and Edmund in 1016. Margaret Ashdown surveyed a number of examples of single combat in medieval literature, including the Guy
–Colbrand and Cnut–Edmund duels, and proposed that many of them could be explained by the existence of a tradition about a single combat fought by Olaf Cuaran, which became linked to the battle of Brunanburh.53 While this would explain the otherwise obscure connection between the Guy legend and the reign of Æthelstan, the appearance of the Danish sovereignty motif in both the Guy and Cnut stories of single combat suggests the two may be more directly linked. It may be that the composer of the Anglo-Norman romance had access to a source which contained a version of the story of a combat between Cnut and Edmund – not found in the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, but appearing in numerous sources from the mid-eleventh century onwards – which may have formed a more immediate model for the Guy–Colbrand duel than a combat at Brunanburh, particularly if it involved, as Gaimar’s version does, a discussion of the idea that the Danes claimed an ancient right to sovereignty in England. The histories of Winchester and Oxford which Gaimar claims to have had access to might well have included such a story; the possible contents of these lost works are especially suggestive in the light of the connections between the Guy legend and Winchester and Osney, near Oxford.54

  Whatever the precise connection may have been, however, both Gaimar and the Guy story show how stories about Danish rule in England could become part of a longer narrative of England’s history, envisaging it as a land which had been conquered many times over. Within this context even Viking invaders could be construed as potentially legitimate conquerors, not merely plunderers, with a claim which can be debated even if it is eventually refuted. This view of the English past may in the first instance have been especially appealing to Anglo-Norman aristocratic audiences, but in the Guy legend it quickly spread beyond this initial context: the reference to the idea of Danish sovereignty appears in both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions of the story, and must have helped to popularise the idea as the legend of Guy became widely known. In this way interpretations of English history which give the Danes a significant role to play could circulate in new and unexpected contexts – and the best example of this is the story of Havelok, the subject of our final chapter.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘Over the salt sea to

  England’: Havelok

  and the Danes

  The last story we have to consider is perhaps the most enduringly popular of all the medieval legends about the Vikings in England. It is the tale of Lincolnshire’s own Viking hero, the Danish prince Havelok, king of England and Denmark. The story of Havelok is first recorded in the twelfth century and survives in various forms, including Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, an Anglo-Norman lai, and a Middle English verse romance from the end of the thirteenth century.1 There are also a large number of references to Havelok in histories and chronicles in French, English and Latin, suggesting that the legend was widely known, but it is particularly associated with Grimsby, where the orphaned Havelok was said to have been brought up by a fisherman, Grim, who had saved his life.2 These texts all present different versions of the story, but most share the essential details: the young Danish heir raised in exile, his marriage to an English princess, and the connection with Grimsby.

  We can begin by summarising the story as told by the English romance, the most extended of all the versions of the legend. As this poem presents it, it is the story of the parallel, entwined fates of Havelok, son of the king of Denmark, and Goldburh, daughter of the king of England. Goldburh’s father, Athelwold, and Havelok’s father, Birkabeyn, both die while their children are still young. They leave their heirs in the care of trusted regents, but both guardians turn out to be traitors, who mistreat the children and usurp their kingdoms. Goldburh is imprisoned by her treacherous guardian Godrich in Dover Castle, deprived of her royal status, and Havelok’s fate is even worse: he has to watch his young sisters being murdered by their protector, who then orders a fisherman named Grim to take Havelok and drown him. But Grim, recognising the boy as the rightful heir to Denmark, saves his life and flees with him to England. Grim and his family settle down near the Humber in Lincolnshire, founding what would become the town of Grimsby, and there Havelok grows up. He is a cheerful, good-humoured boy, but he grows so fast that Grim can hardly afford to feed him, so he leaves Grimsby and starts working for his living as a kitchen-boy in Lincoln. There his extraordinary strength and success in a stone-throwing contest bring him to the attention of Godrich, the English usurper. Godrich forces Havelok to marry Goldburh, intending to humiliate her by marrying her to a kitchen-boy, and the pair, initially reluctant to marry, soon fall in love. When Goldburh learns that her husband is in fact of royal birth, she urges him to return to Denmark and regain his kingdom. They travel to Denmark, where Havelok’s true identity is revealed by a miraculous beam of light which shines from his mouth as he sleeps – a supernatural token of his royal nature which recurs at key moments in the poem. After winning back his kingdom and avenging the murder of his sisters, Havelok leads an army back to England to conquer it on Goldburh’s behalf. The poem ends with Havelok and Goldburh happily married, ruling England and Denmark together in one harmonious union.

  Like Guy of Warwick and several other medieval romances, Havelok is set in a fictionalised version of Anglo-Saxon England, but its recreation of this period is an unusual one: instead of focusing on how English kings and heroes respond to the threat of Danish invasion, Havelok presents us with a Danish protagonist who is a lovable and sympathetic hero, an invader who fights for justice, and a popular king of England. The contrast is so striking that early critics of the poem often sought for a Scandinavian origin for the legend, apparently in an effort to account for the unusually positive depiction of Danes and Denmark in this poem. Various historical models have been proposed as the original of Havelok, including Olaf Cuaran, the tenth-century Norse king of Dublin and York (Havelok has the nickname ‘Cuaran’ in some versions of the story),3 the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason4 and Cnut.5 There are, however, no direct parallels between the Havelok legend and the life of any historical figure, and even if there were, this would not really explain why Havelok is presented in such a heroic light; none of these names, except that of Cnut, would have meant much to an English audience by the thirteenth century.

  Another method of accounting for the Danish element in Havelok was proposed by Edmund Reiss, who sought to identify mythological origins for the legend. He saw the character of Havelok’s foster-father Grim as a distant echo of Odin: Grim is recorded as a name for Odin in some Old Norse sources, and Odin sometimes acts as a protector and guide of young warriors (a role which, as we have seen, may perhaps be traced in the prophetic old man of the Siward legend).6 However, there is little to suggest that any of the medieval writers who tell versions of the Havelok legend were aware of this, and in most of these texts Grim is presented as a kindly, hard-working, but essentially very ordinary fisherman. We will, however, consider some later folklore conceptions of Grim at the end of the chapter.

  Whatever the origins of the legend, then, a better way in which to understand the Danish element in the Havelok story is to situate it among the medieval accounts of Viking invasion and settlement which, as we have seen, offer varying interpretations of the Danes’ role in English history. Although Havelok cannot be conclusively linked to any historical figure, the story was widely understood to be based on fact: in the earliest version of the story, as presented by Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Havelok is taken to be part of a long history of Danish rule in England, his reign just one episode among centuries of shared Anglo-Danish history dating back to the time of King Arthur. For Gaimar, Havelok is one among a number of Danish kings to have ruled in England, and his story lends support to the argument for hereditary Danish sovereignty over England discussed in the previous chapter. There are numerous differences between the two main Anglo-Norman versions of the story and the English poem: Gaimar sets the story in the reign of Constantine, nephew of King Arthur, and his version takes place in neighbouring small kingdoms in the East Midlands, rather than
presenting England and Denmark as two distinct but eventually unified countries. Other sources fit Havelok into English history in different ways – making Havelok the son of Alfred the Great’s opponent Guthrum, for instance, or the father of Cnut.7 The English poem makes no such attempt to locate Havelok in a dynastic history of England or Denmark – at the end of the poem, it is said that all Havelok’s 15 sons and daughters became kings and queens, and not one of them is named. However, the name of Goldburh’s father Athelwold clearly signals that the poem is set in the Anglo-Saxon past, as does the location of his chief city, Winchester.8

  The variant strands of the Havelok legend are all, to a greater or lesser degree, engagements with the Anglo-Danish past; at whatever point they situate Havelok in English or British history, all but the very briefest references to the story identify him as a Danish king. They accept significant periods of Danish rule over England, or regions of England, as an established part of pre-Conquest history. One important feature which sets the Middle English romance apart from the other versions, however, is its interest in Danish settlement in England as well as Danish rule. This poem presents Danish settlement as a formative process in both local and national history; in telling the stories of Havelok, Grim and Goldburh, it also tells of the foundation of a new town and a new dynasty. It has been suggested, most influentially by Thorlac Turville-Petre, that this represents an attempt by the poet to integrate the Anglo-Scandinavian heritage of Lincolnshire with a developing conception of national identity, influenced by an awareness of the role Danish settlement played in the region’s early history.9 Turville-Petre argued that the poem should be interpreted in the context of chronicle accounts of Viking raids, and that it offers a self-conscious alternative to the familiar story of the Danes as violent invaders: ‘The chronicles tell only of pagan bands raping and pillaging; Havelok presents a revisionist view of the Vikings, bringing justice, peace and social integration.’10 Beyond raping and pillaging, however, we have seen how some traditions of medieval history-writing provided a broader range of narratives about Danish invasion and settlement in England, acknowledging the complexity of the history of Anglo-Danish interaction and telling other kinds of stories about how and why the Danes settled in England. Reading Havelok against the background of this wider tradition helps to explain some of the distinctive ways in which this poem tells the story of a Danish prince who becomes king of England.