Me þouthe Y was in Denemark set,
But on on þe moste hil
Þat euere yete kam I til […]
Als I sat up-on þat lowe
I bigan Denemark for to awe,
Þe borwes and þe castles stronge;
And mine armes weren so longe
Þat I fadmede al at ones
Denemark with mine longe bones.
And þanne Y wolde mine armes drawe
Til me and hom for to haue,
Al þat euere in Denemark liueden
On mine armes faste clyueden,
And þe stronge castles alle
On knes bigunnen for to falle.
(1287–1303)
(It seemed to me that I was in Denmark, but on one of the tallest hills which I ever yet came to […] As I sat upon that mound, I began to possess Denmark, the towns and the strong castles, and my arms were so long that I embraced Denmark all at once with my long limbs. And then I wanted to draw my arms towards me and have them in my keeping, all who ever lived in Denmark, clasped fast in my arms, and all the strong castles began to fall to their knees.)
This imagined embrace between Havelok and his kingdom is not paralleled in the other versions of the story: in the equivalent scene in Gaimar’s Estoire, Goldburh has a dream of a battle between boars, foxes and a savage bear, and of lions coming out of the forest to pay homage to her husband.26 Only in the English poem does this wedding-night dream have an emphasis on the loving union between the king and his land, appropriate for the intimate setting of the marital bed. Havelok’s embrace of his kingdom parallels the consummation of his new, and until this point unwanted, marriage: when Goldburh is convinced of her husband’s royal nature she spontaneously kisses him, and he addresses her as lemman (‘darling’), the first moments of affection between them. Havelok’s dream encompasses not only the towns and castles of Denmark but also its people, tenderly drawn towards him and clasped in his arms, and when he describes how in a second dream he flies across the sea to England to restore the land to Goldburh, he is accompanied by his people:
Ich fley ouer þe salte se
Til Engeland, and al with me
That euere was in Denemark lyues
But bondemen and here wiues;
And þat Ich kom til Engelond –
Al closede it intil min hond,
And, Goldeborw, Y gaf [it] þe.
(1306–12).
(I flew over the salt sea to England, and with me all who ever lived in Denmark, except bondsmen and their wives, and I came to England with it all enclosed within my hand; and, Goldburh, I gave it to you.)
The restoration of Havelok and Goldburh to their proper places is imagined as a dream-world invasion, or migration, from Denmark, and it is stripped of any threat of violence by being figured as a love-gift between husband and wife. The dream inspires a longing for Denmark: Goldburh counsels Havelok to go and regain his country, telling him she will never be happy until she sees Denmark (1340–1).27 This vision indicates a romantic, even loving, interest in the country of Havelok’s birth unparalleled in other versions of the story; where those dreams focus solely on the revelation of Havelok’s royal status, this vision links that identity closely to the land and people of Denmark.28
There are some features of these dreams which seem to align Havelok’s vision with other narrative traditions we have looked at about Danish settlement in England. In his dream Havelok sees himself seated on an area of raised ground, so high that he can look over the whole kingdom, on a mound which is referred to as a ‘hil’ and a ‘lowe’. The latter word, deriving from Old English hlæw,29 suggests Havelok’s hill may be classed with the burial-mounds and barrows which, as we have seen, act as a locus for prophetic knowledge in several narratives about Scandinavian invasion of England. These mounds are specifically connected with conquest, king-making and the ownership of territory – from Cuckhamsley Barrow in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and the mound where Siward meets the man who prophesies his destiny.30 It may be that Havelok is drawing on this kind of tradition in setting Havelok’s dream on an elevated lowe. In these narratives such mounds are the sites of prophetic inspiration: what happens there predicts success or failure in an enterprise of conquest such as Havelok is about to undertake. These encounters connect the protagonists to supernatural knowledge about their own future, and grant them power over the land they see (in Havelok the rhyme between lowe and owe ‘own’ reinforces this connection strikingly). Havelok’s vision of himself seated upon a mound seems to participate in this prophetic tradition, and Goldburh interprets it as such: the dream shows that within a year, she says, he will be king of Denmark. In narratives where the mound is the burial-place of a named ruler, the prophetic power of an encounter with the mound must derive in part from the intimate physical connection it represents between the king and his land; interred in the mound, the king continues to exert control over his territory after death. He has given his body and his name to the landscape, and retains the power to determine who shall rule it. Havelok’s tender embrace of his land and people, enclosing them first in his arms and then within his hand, seems to engage with a similar kind of union between king and kingdom; in this case the prophetic power of the mound does not warn him away from invasion, but urges him on to return to his country.31
The vengeance of the Danes
In the use of this motif and in its treatment of its Danish characters, Havelok seems to be drawing on a wider body of narrative material exploring the causes and nature of Danish settlement in England. An awareness of this tradition appears to have influenced Havelok in one further respect, which is more prominent in the English poem than in other versions of the Havelok story: the role of revenge in Havelok’s decision to reclaim Denmark and invade England. As we have seen, narratives about the Danish invasions are frequently interested in providing motives to explain why the Danes came to England, beyond the simple desire for plunder or violence. One of the most common motives ascribed to the Danes is personal vengeance: this features in various forms in English legends about the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, and also appears in the tradition about the murder of Gunnhild on St Brice’s Day, in which Svein is said to have invaded England to avenge his sister’s death. We have seen such explanations for Danish invasion already being offered in the eleventh century, with Osbern’s story in the Vita S. Elphegi that Eadric Streona brought the Danes to invade England to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of some Kentish noblemen, and in the idea that Thorkell raided in England to avenge either his brother (as in the Encomium Emmae Reginae) or his two sisters, said in the revised version of Herman’s Miracula to have been killed at Thetford amid the St Brice’s Day slaughter.
Havelok, too, has two sisters to avenge, and the wider context of these narratives linking invasion to personal vengeance for the death of a relative may help to explain why Havelok lays more emphasis on the murder of Havelok’s sisters than the other versions of the legend do. The role of the revenge motif in Havelok is easily overlooked, perhaps because this poem is so explicitly concerned with institutional law and justice, but it is fundamental to the movement of the story between England and Denmark and central to both Havelok’s growth to adult maturity and to his relationship with Goldburh. The subject of revenge is introduced before Havelok’s return to Denmark, when he prays to God to avenge him on his foe (1364). Havelok lists the wrongs Godard has done him, and this narrative is repeated a few lines later, again in Havelok’s voice, as he presents the sons of Grim with his plan to return to Denmark. The recounting of Havelok’s injuries takes up 30 lines, and contains a declaration of his intent which links his growth to manhood and martial strength with his return to Denmark (1432–40); the emphasis is not placed on the treachery of Godard’s seizing the kingdom, or the justice of Havelok’s claim to rule Denmark, but the personal injuries against Havelok and his family.32 Godard’s murder of Havelok’s sisters does not appear in the Anglo-Norman lai or i
n Gaimar, and is part of a sustained narrative strategy which works to increase the audience’s sympathy for Havelok.33 The multiple later references back to the pathos of their deaths – usually including the formulaic reminder that they were slain ‘with a knif ’ and, in Havelok’s speech to Grim’s sons, the gruesome detail that they were cut into pieces (1412–15) – add a personal dimension to Havelok’s return to Denmark, making it emphatically a quest of family vengeance as well as the regaining of an unjustly seized kingdom.
In the Danish section of the story, the poem separates out the two purposes of Havelok’s return: first comes the lengthy episode in which he is recognised by Ubbe (1626–2158), then he is accepted as king (2159–364), and only then does he set out to get revenge on Godard, after swearing a formal oath of vengeance on the book and altar in the presence of all his men (2368–9). This vengeance is not carried out by Havelok himself, since Godard is judged and sentenced by an assembly of Danes drawn from all classes of society, but the emphasis is on his crimes against Havelok’s family as much as his treachery: the murder of Havelok’s sisters is recorded along with the usurpation of the kingdom in the record of Godard’s crimes inscribed above him on the gallows (2483–6). Goldburh, too, is activated by a desire for vengeance, and after Godrich’s death she rejoices that she is avenged on her foe (2850). The closing lines of the poem foreground the importance of vengeance, presenting it as one of the strands uniting the twinned stories of Havelok and Goldburh; the poem has told how both were ill-treated and ‘hwou he weren wreken wel’, ‘how they were well avenged’ (2993). This emphasis on vengeance fits into the wider context of narratives about Danish invasion, which seem to reflect a desire to tell a narrative of military invasion and national conquest in solely personal terms, and in a way which encourages sympathy for the invader.34
Before we leave the subject of Havelok, and move beyond the medieval period to look at some later interpretations of the Danes in England, it is worth noting what this legend tells us about the popularity and diversity of narratives about Viking history in medieval England. In their recent edition of the Anglo-Norman lai, Burgess and Brook bring together no fewer than 14 short versions of the Havelok story – in addition to the three main versions in French and English – from before the sixteenth century.35 Some are very brief, but they come from a wide range of chronicle sources, from all over England (as well as one from Scotland). Their details vary considerably, but they all bear witness to some kind of interest in this Danish king who ruled England, considering him a noteworthy part of England’s pre-Conquest history. As with the legend of the sons of Lothbrok, scholars have often approached this material only in order to distinguish fact from fiction, to search out the kernel of historical truth which may lie within the elaborations of later legend, but it is important to remember that the legends themselves are widespread, influential, and important in their own right.
For a long time the apparent simplicity of the English poem Havelok in narrative and verse form – the folktale quality of its story, and its vigorous short lines – similarly led to its artistic qualities being undervalued, and the assumption long prevailed that this narrative about Danish invasion must simply be an artless reuse of material which had survived in oral tradition from the early days of Scandinavian settlement in Lincolnshire. In recent years, however, studies of the poem have increasingly emphasised the importance of understanding how far its apparent naivety in fact masks a carefully constructed fiction,36 and this is equally true of its approach to writing about history. It is an imaginative engagement with the Anglo-Danish past, which can be profitably read in the context of a particular tradition of writing about the Danes in England, which aims to explain how and why the Danes came to settle and rule in parts of Anglo-Saxon England and to understand the contribution that Scandinavian settlement made to local and national history. Havelok shares with this tradition not only a wish to explore the causes of Danish settlement in England, but also an interest in betrayal and treachery, vengeance and justice, oaths, the treatment of young royal children, and the founding of a new dynasty through marriage and conquest.37 In drawing on the names, images and motifs of these narratives in telling the story of Havelok, the poem participates in this exploration of the causes and consequences of Scandinavian settlement in England. It imagines the arrival of the Danes as essentially motivated by personal relationships rather than a desire for plunder or even for rule – in the case of Havelok, what unites England and Denmark more than anything else is marriage and the bonds of family (including foster-family) affection.
Havelok’s positive view of the Danish contribution to English history, in which the Danes bring to England the rule of a just king and families of industrious settlers, is not simply a reflection of the likely sympathies of its Lincolnshire audience but part of a distinctive historiographical tradition, concentrated in but not limited to the East Midlands, incorporating romance and hagiography as well as chronicle-writing.38 Within this tradition there was space for a variety of ways of understanding the relationship between England and Denmark and the history of Anglo-Danish interaction in the pre-Conquest period. Although we cannot be certain exactly which narratives about Scandinavian settlement and conquest were known to the poet of Havelok or his audience, it would seem that the poem, interested in the history of Danish settlement as a foundational myth for Lincolnshire, chooses to situate its Danish hero within a wider context of legendary material about Scandinavians in England. Although Havelok does not seek, as other versions of the legend do, to locate the Havelok story within a specific chronology of Danish rule in the Anglo-Saxon period, it creates an allusive sense of historicity by aligning itself with this tradition, echoing and adapting narratives associated with Danish rulers of England from Ubbe to Cnut. The poem imagines a past in which England and Denmark were closely linked, during a formative period in regional identity, and it shapes this imagined history by drawing on some of the many available stories about former Danish rulers of England.
English towns and Danish founders
It is perhaps not surprising that the poem Havelok should have been informed by other traditions about the Danes in England, since the Havelok story itself was one of the most popular and best-known legends about the Danes. The chronicler Robert Mannyng, writing in Lincolnshire in the 1330s, provides some valuable evidence for awareness of the story at that date. In his translation of Peter Langtoft’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle, Mannyng deviates from his source to note that he cannot find the story of Havelok in other histories: neither Bede, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury nor Langtoft, he says, tells of King Athelwold and Havelok’s rule of England. He contrasts this absence from the most authoritative sources with a number of other forms of evidence for Havelok’s existence:
Bot þat þise lowed men vpon Inglish tellis,
right story can me not ken þe certeynte what spellis.
Men sais in Lyncoln castelle ligges ȝit a stone
þat Hauelok kast wele forbi euerilkone.
& ȝit þe chapelle standes þer he weddid his wife,
Goldeburgh, þe kynges douhter, þat saw is ȝit rife,
& of Gryme, a fisshere, men redes ȝit in ryme,
þat he bigged Grymesby, Gryme þat ilk tyme.39
(Butas forwhatthese unlearned mensay in English, I cannotbe sure of the true story of what is told. It is said that in Lincoln Castle there still lies a stone which Havelok threw much further than anyone else; and still the chapel stands where he wedded his wife, Goldburh, the king’s daughter – that is still widely spoken of. And of Grim, a fisherman, people still read in rhymes, that he founded Grimsby, Grim at that time.)
Mannyng was originally from Bourne in southern Lincolnshire, but he tells us that he wrote his Chronicle at the priory of Sixhills, which lies about halfway between Lincoln and Grimsby, in an area repeatedly traversed by the characters in Havelok. What Mannyng says about Havelok here suggests he knew a slightly different version of the story from any tha
t survives today – for instance, the chapel where Havelok and Goldburh married is not mentioned in any surviving version of the story – although the ‘rhymes’ he mentions may be related to the English poem. His comments provide evidence that the Havelok legend was not only popular in this area but also an important strand in the history of the region, important enough for Mannyng to question why otherwise well-informed chroniclers fail to include it, and reinforced by the pointing out of lasting physical reminders of Havelok’s historicity. Mannyng seems to indicate that it was a popular story in both senses of the word – well-known, but also a tale in oral circulation among the ‘lowed men’.40
The story also features on the thirteenth-century seal of the town of Grimsby, which depicts Grim, Havelok and Goldburh.41 All three figures are labelled with their names, and the fact that Havelok’s queen is here named Goldburh (rather than Argentille, as she is called in the Anglo-Norman versions) suggests a closer connection to the English strand of the story than to Gaimar and the Lai. Goldburh and Havelok are shown with crowns, and Goldburh has a royal sceptre, Havelok a ring and an axe. It is Grim, however, who is the most prominent figure: he is placed in the centre, armed with sword and shield, and considerably larger than the other two. This is an interesting detail, as it again suggests a different interpretation of the story from any of the surviving medieval texts. There is no sign in the Anglo-Norman and English poems of Grim ever fighting a battle, and this image seems to hint at a different conception of Grim from the medieval poems’ peaceful (and at times even slightly cowardly) fisherman. Havelok too is presented in a distinctive way. On the seal, the small figure of Havelok shelters under Grim’s protecting arm; while Grim does save the young Havelok’s life in the medieval texts, Havelok’s unusual height and strength are so often emphasised there that it is remarkable to find him appearing as such a diminutive figure on the seal. It would seem that in medieval Grimsby – perhaps naturally enough – it was the town’s founder and namesake who was the most important and dynamic character in the story.
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