Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  The founding of Grimsby

  The chronicler Rauf de Boun, in his Le Petit Bruit of 1309, gives a brief summary of the story of Havelok, and comments that fuller information can be found in a text which he refers to as ‘l’estorie de Grimesby’, the history of Grimsby.11 By this he probably means the Middle English poem, and his description of it focuses on an important aspect of the story: the link between the Havelok legend and its setting, its place in Lincolnshire history. The poet of Havelok clearly knew the area where the poem is set, and carefully, almost lovingly, evokes its specific details. He proudly refers to Lincoln as ‘þe gode borw’ (‘the good city’) on several occasions, and identifies sites within the city, such as the green where the traitor Godrich is executed at the end of the poem (2829–30). The busy streets through which Havelok pushes his way as a kitchen-boy, carrying baskets of fish up to the castle from the market by the bridge, echo with what sound like the authentic cries of medieval Lincoln (868–909).12 Such details locate the poem in a physical space not bound by temporal limitations; the world in which Grim and Havelok live and work can be readily imagined by an audience familiar with these places, although it may be distant in time.

  Grimsby, Havelok’s place of refuge, is less closely described than Lincoln, in part because the poem conceives of it as a new place – not yet a populous port, but a little settlement for Grim and his family. The founding of Grimsby is described when Grim comes to settle in England, after saving the child Havelok from death at the risk of his own life. Grim and his family flee Denmark and are driven by a strong wind to the English coast; the poem lingers on this powerful north wind, perhaps with a hint that it is an act of providence, a moment of supernatural intervention driving Havelok and Grim towards their destiny. With characteristic close attention to detail, the poet describes the dwelling Grim constructs for his family:

  In Humber Grim bigan to lende,

  In Lindeseye rith at þe north ende.

  Þer sat is ship upon þe sond;

  But Grim it drou up to þe lond,

  And þere he made a litel cote

  To him and to hise flote.

  Bigan he, þere for to erþe,

  A litel hus to maken of erþe,

  So þat he wel þore were

  Of here herboru herborwed þere.

  (734–43)

  (In Humber Grim came to land, in Lindsey, right at the north end. There his ship lay upon the shore, but Grim drove it up to the land, and there he made a little dwelling for himself and his companions. In order to live there, he began to build a little house from earth, so that they were well protected there by their shelter.)

  The repetition of ‘litel’ emphasises the makeshift, rough-and-ready nature of the dwelling Grim manages to construct – perched on the very edge of England, his family’s only shelter against the sea winds. But this temporary lodging, we are told, is the beginning of a town that will last forever:

  And for þat Grim þat place aute

  Þe stede of Grim þe name laute,

  So þat Grimesbi it calle

  Þat þer-offe speken alle;

  And so shulen men callen it ay

  Bituene þis and Domesday.

  (744–9)

  (And because Grim owned that place the town took its name from Grim, so that all those who speak of it call it ‘Grimsby’, and so shall it always be called, from now until Domesday.)

  This moment of naming is a proleptic glimpse forwards from the time of the narrative to the present day of the poet and his audience, and on into the future. A combination of the giving of a name and a look towards the future is appropriate for a moment of settlement or invasion, and it is at these moments of first encounter when the nature of the relationship between land and settler is defined. We might think of Siward being addressed by name by the old man who foretells his destiny, or the moment in Hemings þáttr where Harald Hardrada and Tostig, landing at Cleveland, discuss the name of Ivar’s mound and the significance of landing there.

  In Havelok, this settlement narrative is also an origin-myth for the town of Grimsby, and the permanence of Grim’s new settlement, mentioned at this early point in the poem, foreshadows the eventual happy union between the English and Danish kingdoms which is brought about by the marriage of Havelok and Goldburh. This account of the founding of Grimsby is followed by a description of how Grim works hard to support his family in the early days after their arrival: the poem devotes nearly 40 lines to telling how Grim builds up his fishing trade, including a list of the fish he catches (sturgeon, herring and many more) and an account of him going around the countryside selling it, exchanging the money he earns for hemp and rope from which to make his nets (750–785). It is hard work which brings Grim – and thereby his namesake town – prosperity and success, and again there seems to be a sense that fortune or providence is on Grim’s side: the fruitful sea yields its bounty to him, and he knows how to make the best of it.

  This fascination with the details of ordinary working life sets Havelok apart from other romances which share the same basic plotline of a dispossessed prince; Havelok is the only hero of medieval romance whose talents include knowing how to skin an eel (919). It is also an indication of how by the thirteenth-century ideas about north-east England’s Danish heritage had become bound up with experience of other kinds of contact with Scandinavia, particularly trade. Grimsby, like many other ports on the east coast of England, had strong trading links with Scandinavia throughout the medieval period; the fishing ports of the north-east coast did a thriving trade with Denmark and Norway, and as far away as Iceland.13 Ships and merchants travelled regularly between England and Scandinavia, and one historian of Grimsby has commented that medieval Lincolnshire seems to have been ‘a kind of remoter suburb of Norway’.14 The streets of Hull, on the other side of the Humber, were said in the late medieval period to be paved with Icelandic cobblestones, which had been brought there as ballast in ships.15 All this forms part of the world imagined by Havelok, which is as interested in merchants and fishermen as it is in kings: it is Grim’s prosperous fishing business which provides the foundation of the town of Grimsby, and Havelok disguises himself as a merchant when he first returns from England to Denmark. The legend of Havelok and Grim is not only an origin-myth for the town, but also an expression of its contemporary commercial identity.

  This must be added to the fact that the region around Lincoln, one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw, had indeed been an area of extensive Scandinavian settlement in the Viking Age. The name Grimsby really is, as Havelok states, place-name evidence of this settlement: it is very likely that Grimsby did take its name from a Scandinavian settler or landowner named Grim (Old Norse Grímr).16 Just as the poet of Havelok was conscious of this fact of linguistic history, so too were medieval Norse writers; the thirteenth-century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson accurately comments, speaking of the impact of Scandinavian rule in this part of England, that ‘Mörg heiti landsins eru þar gefin á norrœna tungu, Grímsbœr ok Hauksfljót ok mörg önnur’ (‘Many names of places in the country are in the Norse language, such as Grimsby, Hauksfljót and many others’).17

  Although geographically part of England, Grimsby functions in Havelok as a kind of no-man’s land between England and Denmark – not quite a suburb of Havelok’s Danish homeland, but perhaps a colony. Unlike Lincoln, Grimsby is a new place, founded by a Danish man on English soil and inhabited by his Danish family. It is the place where the dual Anglo-Danish identities of Havelok and Grim’s family intersect: within this carefully structured and patterned narrative, there are several key moments at which the characters travel between England and Denmark, and these moments always involve journeying through Grimsby. The first, of course, is the original settlement. After this Havelok, fast growing up, travels from Grimsby to Lincoln, and in doing so he is making a journey further into English territory, where a parliament draws people from throughout England and where he can begin to prove his right to be king of two realm
s. It is at Lincoln that he marries his English wife, but they soon return to Grimsby, and it is there that Havelok begins to assume his identity as a Danish king: in Grimsby Grim’s children welcome him as king, Goldburh learns of his royal status, and they embark to regain his kingdom. Unfortunately, the section of the poem which would have dealt with Havelok’s return to Denmark is lost, but on his return to England, the decisive battle between the Danes led by Havelok and the English forces of Godrich takes place near Grimsby. In this battle, Havelok’s Danish origins become, for the first time, a source of conflict in the poem.

  Havelok and the Vikings

  At this moment, as Havelok is returning from Denmark to England to regain his wife’s inheritance on her behalf, the English usurper Godrich gives a speech urging his men to fight against the Danish army. He encourages them by evoking a familiar stereotype: the Danes as destroyers, hostile to England and to Christianity. He tells them that Havelok has brought ‘uten-laddes’ (2581), ‘foreign soldiers’, who have seized a priory in Grimsby, and elaborates on the supposed enormities of these Danish aggressors, claiming they are burning churches, capturing priests and strangling monks and nuns (2584–5). This picture of Havelok’s men as rapacious Vikings is pure propaganda, and clearly framed as such in the poem: as the audience has been told less than 50 lines earlier that Havelok has in fact founded a priory at Grimsby, to commemorate Grim, the contrast between this distorted picture of the Danes and the truth of Havelok’s piety is particularly ironic.18 None of the characters who travel between Denmark and England in Havelok are actually Viking raiders: they are merchants, fishermen, settlers and kings.

  Godrich’s speech, however, suggests that the poem is alert to the historical resonances of a battle between English and Danes, and is able to exploit literary tropes associated with the Danes to produce a moment of heavy narrative irony. Godrich’s speech is a reminder of the poem’s setting in the Anglo-Saxon past, where we would rather expect the defender of the kingdom against the Danes to be the hero, not the villain, of the story: Godrich’s rhetoric aligns him with a figure like Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon, yet here he is a traitor whose defeat the audience is encouraged to enjoy heartily. Our sympathies are supposed to be entirely with Havelok and the invading Danes (invading, of course, on Goldburh’s behalf): ‘daþeit who recke!’, the narrator exclaims when Godrich is finally captured and maimed, ‘curse him who cares!’ (2757). There is no sympathy for the English earl.

  This manipulation of expectations suggests an awareness of how a Danish king like Havelok might be perceived by an English audience, and seems to indicate that the poet knew something of the familiar portrayal of the Vikings in English historical writing. This is also suggested by some of the names given to the Danish characters in this poem, which are not used in the other main versions of the story. As Scott Kleinman has argued in his study of the names in the Havelok legend, the naming strategies in this poem should be understood as drawing not directly on history but on historiography, specifically on what he characterises as a ‘chronicle tradition of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries in which writers were engaged in a process of East Anglian history-building, a learned and literate enterprise that attempted to establish an identity for the region’.19 Like the stereotype of the rampaging Danes conjured up in Godrich’s speech, the use of distinctly Scandinavian names suggests an awareness of historiographical traditions about the Anglo-Danish past. The most striking example is the name Ubbe, given to the nobleman who first recognises Havelok’s identity after his return to Denmark. The name Ubbe was rare in England,20 and it seems very likely that the poet of Havelok borrowed it from a chronicle or hagiographical source – the role of Ubbe, son of Lothbrok, in the story of St Edmund made him one of the most famous Danes from the Anglo-Saxon period, especially to an audience in the east of England. The use of the name for a leading Danish character in Havelok is unlikely to be a coincidence, but it seems an extraordinary choice for a character who plays an important and positive role in the poem: this Ubbe is tough and formidable, but ultimately one of Havelok’s most loyal and useful supporters. At the end of the poem Ubbe is appointed regent of Denmark while Havelok rules with Goldburh in England, and so is placed in clear contrast to the two treacherous regents who are the villains of the story. In English tradition Ubbe appears as a cruel invader – and even a magician – but this poem seems to reject any negative associations with the name.

  As we have seen, Ubbe frequently appears alongside a character named Bern, who is either identified as one of his brothers, as in Scandinavian tradition, or as the person responsible for bringing the Danes to England – either by fetching them himself (as in the story of Buern Butsecarl) or by killing their father Lothbrok. In Havelok, the second Danish character to appear after Havelok returns to Denmark is named Bernard Brun: Bernard defends Havelok and Goldburh from attack and by his support helps to convince the doubting Ubbe of Havelok’s true identity. The name Bernard is, of course, much less rare than Ubbe, but the appearance of the two names together as the most important Danish characters apart from Havelok and Grim is suggestive, given their frequent co-occurrence in the English sources. The Ubbe and Bernard of Havelok have little in common with the characters of similar names in the legends about Lothbrok and his sons, but the choice of these names (which do not appear in other versions of the story) suggests that they did not have negative connotations for the poet. They may have been chosen for the characters in Havelok to create an air of historicity, evoking associations with other legends which, like the story of Havelok, showed the Danes playing a formative part in the history of the East Midlands.

  The Anglo-Danish dynasty established at the end of Havelok is similarly underlined by the use of a name which seems to link the Havelok story with later Danish rulers of England: the name of Grim’s daughter Gunnild, which appears in association with the Danish royal family in several narratives dealing with the conquest of England by Svein and Cnut. Gunnhild was the name of Svein Forkbeard’s sister, who some English sources say was killed with her husband and child in the massacre of St Brice’s Day. Svein’s invasion in 1013 was, several medieval writers claim, prompted by revenge for the murder of Gunnhild, a beautiful woman who faced death with courage and prophesied that the shedding of her blood would cost England dear.21 Cnut’s daughter was also named Gunnhild, and she too was the subject of a popular legend by the twelfth century. William of Malmesbury tells how this Gunnhild, ‘a girl of the greatest beauty for whom many suitors had sighed in her father’s time’, was married to Henry, emperor of Germany, and he claims that the splendour of her wedding ‘even in our own day is still the subject of popular song’. She was wrongly accused of adultery and defended in single combat by a page-boy, keeper of her pet starling, and finally divorced her husband to spend the rest of her life as a nun.22 The origins of this story (beyond the fact of Gunnhild’s marriage, which took place in 1036) are unclear, but it appears in various forms in texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.23

  By the time Havelok was written, therefore, there were two widely recorded legends circulating about a Danish noblewoman named Gunnhild, either of which might have encouraged the choice of this name for the character. At the end of the poem, Havelok arranges for Gunnild to marry the Earl of Chester, another Anglo-Danish marriage like that between Havelok and Goldburh. At this point the poem refers to her as ‘Gunnild of Grimesby’ (2866), as if to emphasise her link to the town her father founded. Unlike their brothers, who fight alongside Havelok in battle, Grim’s daughters play no role in the poem until the very end; they are not even mentioned by name until Havelok is arranging their marriages.24 At this point they are substituting for Havelok’s own murdered sisters, and they are introduced solely so that their marriages can strengthen the bond between English and Danes. These names may suggest that the poem is deliberately drawing on narratives dealing with Danish rule in England to create a sense of its pre-Conquest setting, perhaps in order to suggest th
ere is historical precedent for the legend of Havelok without tying the story to any particular dynasty or specific moment in English history.

  The landscape of conquest

  The double-plot structure of the poem means that in Havelok Denmark and England are presented as twin nations, united at the end of the poem by marriage. Several critics have argued that the poem identifies the crucial difference between the two countries as the superior nature of English law, and that England has a civilising effect on Havelok and his country;25 legal procedure aside, however, Denmark is not presented as noticeably different from England. It is certainly not a pagan country (as it is in, say, the hagiographical tradition of St Edmund), and its society essentially mirrors that of England, populated by knights and merchants, castles and towns. At some moments in the poem Denmark is even romanticised, as in a tender scene between Havelok and Goldburh in which Havelok’s love for his kingdom becomes entwined with his relationship with his new wife. After Godrich has forced them to marry, Havelok and Goldburh return to Grimsby – they are poor, and have nowhere else to go. They are welcomed by Grim’s children, but Goldburh continues to grieve, believing she has been wedded unequally. That night as they lie in bed, Havelok’s identity is revealed to her by miraculous tokens of his royal nature: a light blazing from his mouth as he sleeps, the birthmark of a cross on his shoulder, and an angel voice telling her he will be king. She is delighted by this persuasive cluster of signs, and begins to see there is more to her new husband than she had first thought. Havelok then wakes and tells her he has been dreaming a marvellous dream in which he is seated on a high mound in Denmark: