Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  There are also some alternative versions of the legend surviving from Grimsby, from a much later date, a testament to enduring interest in the story in the town which Grim had supposedly founded. In the seventeenth century, the Grimsby-born antiquarian Gervase Holles recorded several accounts of the Havelok legend which he claims came from inhabitants of the town.42 These legends too differ in noteworthy ways from the medieval sources, suggesting that the tradition was continuing to develop and change, and they deserve some close attention. Holles is prompted to record them by his objection to William Camden’s sceptical reference to the legend in his Britannia: Camden had said the story was only fit for lovers of old wives’ tales, but Holles cites in Grimsby’s defence various local traditions and landmarks, as well as the town’s seal.43 He notes – accurately – that the etymology of the name ‘Grimsby’ suggests it was named after a Scandinavian settler, ‘ye termination By signifying in ye Danish tongue habitatio, a dwelling’,44 and observes that there was a large stone in Grimsby known as ‘Havelok’s stone’, which recalls Robert Mannyng’s comments about the stone in Lincoln Castle. (A later local legend about this stone, which can still be seen in Grimsby, said that it was brought by the Danes from their own country, and that it was formed of an indestructible material.45)

  One of the traditions Holles records says that Grim was a poor fisherman who put out to sea in the Humber and found the child Havelok drifting in an otherwise empty boat. This is a common motif (Moses is an obvious parallel), but in this context it particularly recalls the legend of the Danish king Scyld Scefing: at the beginning of Beowulf, Scyld is found as a baby by the Danes alone in a boat, and he grows up to be the progenitor of the Danish royal house, the Scyldings.46 After this point, other elements in the story are consistent with the medieval sources: Havelok comes to public notice by his great strength and thereby marries the daughter of the king of England, finally discovering his true identity as the son of the king of Denmark. The happy conclusion of the legend is the foundation of Grimsby: Havelok ‘exceedingly aduanced and enriched his Foster-father Grime, who thus enriched, builded a fayre Towne neare the place where Hauelocke was founde, & named it Grimesby’.47

  Holles goes to observe that tellings of the story differ; in another, Grim is not a fisherman but a merchant, and Havelok spends time working in the king’s kitchen as a scullion. For Holles, the differences of the stories are immaterial: ‘they all agree in ye consequence, as concerning ye Towne’s foundation, to which (sayth ye Story) Hauelocke ye Danish prince, afterward graunted many immunityes’.48 This explains, he says, why in his day Grimsby still had particular trading privileges and immunities in Denmark. The story is therefore closely linked to Grimsby’s commercial identity as a trading and fishing port, and for Holles at least it is the role of the town which is the most important factor in the legend.

  Stories about Grim seem to have endured in local folklore in Grimsby even after this date. In his 1828 edition of Havelok, Frederick Madden records (with disdain) a story communicated to him by George Oliver, the author of a book on the history of Grimsby, which was apparently ‘preserved among the lower classes at Grimsby’ in the early nineteenth century.49 This tradition says that the church at Grimsby originally had four turrets, but ‘Old Grime’ kicked three of them down from the tower to defend his ships from attack at sea. The first turret flew out to sea, and fell among the enemy’s ships; the second, kicked as his strength was diminishing, fell in Wellowgate, and became ‘Havelock’s stone’; the third only fell into the churchyard, and the fourth he could not move at all. Oliver, Madden and Skeat (who calls this tale ‘absurd’50) are all scornful of this local story, but it offers an intriguing picture of a gigantic Grim, closer to the image on the medieval seal than to any of the earlier texts about Grim and Havelok. The ‘Old Grime’ of this story is comparable to the use of the name ‘Grim’ in English folklore to refer to landscape features said to have been formed by giants or the devil, such as Grime’s Graves in Norfolk.51 The attribute of superhuman strength which in the medieval romance is attached to Havelok – demonstrated through his ability at stone-casting – is here ascribed to Grim, in a way which aligns him with a widespread folklore motif.

  The legend of Grim and Havelok is the best-recorded example of an English town claiming to have a Scandinavian founder, but it may not have been the only one. Robert Mannyng makes reference to a man named Skardying or Scarthe, who was said to be the founder of Scarborough, and his brother Flayn.52 This Scarthe may be identified with a character in the Old Norse Kormaks saga, the hero’s brother Thorgils, who has the nickname Skarði; Kormakr and Thorgils/Skarði are said in the saga to have established Scarborough while raiding in Britain.53 Mannyng attributes his information to two otherwise unknown authors, ‘Thomas of Kendale’ and ‘Master Edmond’, who both tell the story of Scarthe and Flayn. These lost narratives may have been in chronicle form or, since Mannyng calls the work of Thomas of Kendale a ‘tale’, they may have been closer to a verse narrative like Havelok.54 Mannyng does not recognise the Scandinavian connection, since he associates Scarthe and Flayn with the earlier Anglo-Saxon settlement of England (linking them to another onomastic story involving the hero Engle, namesake of the English). However, the parallel with the pair of brothers in Kormaks saga suggests that other northern towns besides Grimsby may have looked back to Scandinavian settlement as a local myth of origins. Later writers like Gervase Holles were able to deduce the possibility of Scandinavian founders from etymology: Holles compares his theory on the origin of Grimsby to some other Lincolnshire examples, saying confidently ‘I know noe reason, why Grimsby should not import ye dwelling of Grime, & receaue this denomination from him, as well as Ormes-by from Orme, and Ketels-by from Ketell, two Danish captaines under Canute, in the dayes of King Ethelred’.55 By the time Holles was writing in the seventeenth century, folklore, medieval legend and antiquarian speculation about England’s Danish history had become very difficult to disentangle – and this brings us to the subject of the epilogue.

  EPILOGUE:

  The Danes in English

  folklore

  The stories we have been looking at offer a variety of perspectives on the Vikings and their relationship with England. In these narratives, Danish characters of the Viking Age feature not just as foreign invaders, conquerors and settlers, but as individuals with names, families and motivations of their own, which go beyond the stereotypical idea of Viking greed and love of violence. These narratives explore a range of interpretations to explain how people of Danish birth came to settle in England: whether they are in search of vengeance, or seeking to claim their birthright, or led by divine providence, or merely hoping to pursue their trade in peace, like Grim and his family in Havelok, their behaviour is motivated and satisfactorily explained within the world of the narrative. In their own way, these stories propose answers to some of the questions about the Vikings which have occupied historians for centuries: why did the Vikings come to England, and what impact did their presence have?

  In these stories the Danes have a complex and ongoing relationship with England, especially with the regions around its eastern coast. It is not surprising that this area should feature so prominently in these narratives: to the inhabitants of eastern England in the Middle Ages, Denmark was geographically closer and easier to reach than some parts of England, a near neighbour and trading partner, and when the characters in these stories freely cross and recross the sea between England and Denmark they are perhaps reflecting how the audience of these texts conceptualised their North Sea world. No wonder they could imagine many ways in which Danes might have crossed the sea to settle in the Viking Age, as merchants and traders as well as invaders.

  However, these narratives are unusual, in part because they are so specific. They tell the stories of particular Viking warriors or Danish settlers, mostly localised to certain places or to specific moments in the Viking Age. However far away from historical reality these legends may have developed,
Lothbrok and his sons belong to East Anglia in the time of St Edmund, Siward and Waltheof to Huntingdon and Northumbria in the time of Edward the Confessor, Havelok and Grim to Grimsby and a romance version of Anglo-Saxon England – although exactly where they fit into pre-Conquest history varies between different interpretations of the story. The fact that they are so closely tied to particular places, to specific towns and landscapes, is a huge part of their power: nothing illustrates this better than the story of Havelok, which is so firmly rooted in the real world of Lincoln and Grimsby, melding with the more distantly imagined worlds of Anglo-Saxon England and Viking Age Denmark. However, this focus on named individuals – though not the link to specific places – is part of what makes these stories distinctive.

  It is far more common for English writers, in the medieval period and afterwards, to see the Danes in much more generalised and hostile terms. Particularly interesting is the widespread role played by the Danes in English folklore, where they typically feature as a vague and undifferentiated enemy force, nameless but powerful despoilers and destroyers. Traditions from all over the country, collected by local historians and antiquarian scholars after the end of the medieval period, attribute many kinds of activities to ‘the Danes’; legends abound linking them to local customs, place-names and landmarks, ranging from battlefields, earthworks and stone circles to barrows and caves.1 It has been said that ‘more references to the Danes occur in popular lore of the [early modern] period than to any other invading host, from the Romans to the Normans’.2 The very widely distributed nature of these traditions suggests that some of these stories may have originally been popular legends, but many also arose as learned attempts by scholars to account for ancient landscape features at a time when knowledge of prehistory was rudimentary: in the absence of reliable ways of dating such features of the landscape, anything from Neolithic monuments to Roman earthworks came to be attributed to ‘the Danes’. As Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson put it, early antiquaries ‘solved most dating problems connected with ancient sites by reference to Romans and Danes, and so, it seems, did locals’.3

  These inquiries into the history of the English landscape also came at a time when there was a burgeoning scholarly interest in the Viking Age in both Britain and Scandinavia.4 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Old Norse and Old English texts and the work of medieval historians like Saxo Grammaticus began to be rediscovered, and were studied for the evidence they might provide into the early history of the Germanic peoples, their culture, language, customs and myths. Scholars attempted to investigate the shared ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians – usually understood to be the ‘Goths’ and other northern European peoples – and to explain the relationship between the Norse gods described in medieval sources and the much more scantily attested belief system of the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons. Scandinavian and Icelandic scholars corresponded with British antiquarians, sharing ideas, texts and linguistic expertise. This was valuable and pioneering work, although sometimes they misunderstood their medieval sources in ways which invented new and pervasive legends about the Vikings: the idea (still sometimes encountered today) that the Vikings drank from the skulls of their enemies arose from a misinterpretation of a poem about Ragnar Lothbrok by the Danish scholar Ole Worm in his Literatura Runica of 1636.5

  In this context, it is not surprising that antiquarian sources of the period are full of speculation about ‘the Danes’ and what they did in England. Many of the traditions they cite are ascribed to popular legends associated with particular places or landmarks, but – as we saw with Gervase Holles’ speculations about the Danish history of Grimsby – it is difficult to know how far scholarly theorising and popular tradition have become entwined. The boundaries between learned and popular interpretations of England’s early history were very porous, and we have already seen how medieval historians like Henry of Huntingdon or Gaimar incorporated what may at the time have been oral legends about figures like Siward or Havelok into larger narratives of English and British history. The role of archetypal foreign enemy, attributed to ‘the Danes’ in later popular and antiquarian tradition, was one they had already begun to fill in the medieval period: by the twelfth century it was already common to attribute any rupture or unexplained gap in the early history of a particular church or community to an attack by the Vikings.6 They performed a convenient historiographical function, aided of course by the fact that Viking activity in the Anglo-Saxon period was indeed widespread, destructive, and well-attested by early sources. Even so, it seems highly unlikely that the Danes were to blame for every atrocity attributed to them by medieval historians, and still less likely that they can have been responsible for most of the activities ascribed to them in post-medieval tradition. It is debatable to what extent this should be thought of as a continuation of the medieval narratives about the Danes which have been the subject of this book, rather than a distinct phenomenon originating towards the end of the fifteenth century.7 There are, however, some particularly striking examples which are comparable with the medieval sources, and which are worth exploring here. What the plentiful and various appearances of ‘the Danes’ in English folklore indicate more than anything, though, is how the idea of England’s Viking history continued to capture the popular imagination, far outside areas of former Scandinavian settlement and long after the end of the medieval period.

  Danes in the landscape

  Many of these stories about the Danes in post-medieval sources are aetiological: that is, they purport to explain the origin of place-names and landscape features as the sites of Danish war-camps, battlefields, or burial-places of slaughtered Viking armies. Any place with a name that sounded or looked anything like ‘Dane’ was fertile ground for nurturing stories about a link to the Danes. Examples include Danes Moor and Daventry in Northamptonshire, Danesborough in Somerset, and Danbury in Essex, all said to be the sites of Danish camps or battles against the Danes; similarly Bloodsdale, at Drayton near Norwich, and Bloodmere Hill, in Pakefield, Suffolk, were said to have got their names from the blood spilled in battle against the Danes there.8 The fifteenth-century chronicle of Crowland Abbey provides a good example of this kind of folk etymology in its explanation of the name of the village of Threekingham, near Sleaford in Lincolnshire. The name Threekingham (sometimes found as Threckingham) is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and probably means something like ‘the homestead of the family of Tric’,9 but the Crowland chronicle explains that it came about because three Danish kings were buried near the village after a great battle in 870. The chronicle says the village had previously been called Laundon, but was then renamed ‘Trekyngham’, that is, ‘the village of the three kings’.10 Whatever the source of this belief, it was an enduring legend. Threekingham held a yearly fair which was believed to commemorate the killing of the kings, and was held on an area of ground said to have been the battlefield; three stone coffins in the church, and also various tumuli around the village, were claimed as the burial-places of the three kings.11 By the nineteenth century, the name of the neighbouring village of Folkingham was being attributed to the same origins: in this case it was said to derive from fall-king-ham, because the kings fell there.12

  Such explanations almost always involve warfare, battles and other kinds of conflict against the Danes, rather than any more peaceful kind of interaction. They are reminiscent of the medieval references to the death of Ivar at Hungerford (explaining the name as Hyngarford) and Beorn at Frindsbury, although the Danes in question are not usually identified as specifically as this. Other traditions surround barrows, earthworks and monuments said to be the burial-sites of the Danes, although in fact they are often much older than the Viking Age. From Sussex comes a legend linked to Kingley Vale, near Chichester, where a group of Bronze Age barrows known as the Kings’ Graves are said to be the burial-place of Danish warriors killed in battle there. Some modern versions of the story say that the Danes lie buried beneath the roots of a nearby grove of ancient yew trees,
and that at night the trees are haunted by the ghosts of Viking warriors.13

  Stone circles were also sometimes linked to the Danes, including in the medieval sources; in one fifteenth-century chronicle, Havelok is said to have been buried at Stonehenge.14 The Rollright Stones, on the border between Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, have a particularly interesting legend linking them to Danish invasion. The Rollright Stones, a complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, comprise one of the most important megalithic monuments in Britain. They include three distinct elements: a burial chamber constructed of huge standing stones, known as the Whispering Knights, a single monolith called the King Stone, and a circle of 77 closely spaced stones, ‘the King’s Men’. The names given to the stones derive from a local legend, first recorded in the sixteenth century, which explained the origin of these monuments by saying they were an army of men who had been turned into stone. A warrior and his army were riding towards Long Compton – the next village to the Rollright Stones, over the border in Warwickshire – because it had been prophesied that if he came within sight of Long Compton, he would be king of England. Before the army could reach Long Compton, however, they were all turned into stone. There was a local rhyme recording the prophecy: