Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  20 Ridyard, Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 217.

  21 Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, pp. 134–61. On Geoffrey’s De Infantia see Rodney M. Thomson, ‘Geoffrey of Wells, De Infantia Sancti Edmundi (BHL 2393)’, Analecta Bollandiana 95 (1977), pp. 25–42; Pinner, Cult of St Edmund, pp. 75–9; Paul Anthony Hayward, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’ Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi and the “Anarchy” of King Stephen’s reign’, in Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr, pp. 63–86.

  22 Wells in Somerset has also been suggested as his place of origin, but Norfolk seems more likely, especially given the interest he displays in his text in the north Norfolk coast.

  23 Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, pp. 134–5.

  24 Geoffrey points out that this was not the more famous Offa of Mercia, nor the devout Offa of Essex mentioned by Bede, but the last king of the East Angles before the time of St Edmund [Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, pp. 144–5].

  25 Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, pp. 150–1.

  26 Ibid., pp. 156–7.

  27 For a summary of the various theories, see McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, pp. 6–39.

  28 See for example William of Jumièges, Gesta Normannorum Ducum, vol. 1, pp. 12–17.

  29 Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, pp. 156–7.

  30 Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 123–6.

  31 Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, pp. 158–9.

  32 The idea that Edmund was originally from Saxony seems to arise from his interpretation of a comment by Abbo about Edmund’s descent ex antiquorum Saxonum, ‘from the Old Saxons’; it is likely that by this Abbo meant no more than that Edmund came from the ancient line of East Anglian kings, but it became a common understanding of Edmund’s origins (Whitelock, ‘Fact and fiction in the legend of St Edmund’, p. 219).

  33 On the relation of this aspect of the De Infantia to contemporary concerns about royal inheritance in the light of the civil war which followed Henry I’s death in 1135, see Hayward, ‘Geoffrey of Wells’ Liber de infantia sancti Edmundi’.

  34 It is tempting to suggest that Geoffrey’s emphasis on this particular image might relate to his own origins: when he names himself Galfridus de Fontibus, he translates his surname (presumably the town of his birth), identifying himself as Geoffrey of ‘wells’ or ‘springs’.

  35 ‘gnydia mundu nu grisir, ef þeir visse, hvat enn gamle þyldi’ [Olsen (ed.), Völsunga saga ok Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, p. 158].

  36 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 660–5; Olsen (ed.), Völsunga saga ok Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, pp. 161–2.

  37 Roger of Wendover, Chronica, sive Flores Historiarum, ed. H. O. Coxe (London, 1841), vol. 1, pp. 303–15. Roger died in 1236, and he was probably working on his chronicle from c.1220 to his death.

  38 ‘probetur, si illum Deus velit a periculo liberare’ (Roger of Wendover, Chronica, vol. 1, p. 306).

  39 On this manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 240, see Pinner, Cult of St Edmund, pp. 86–8.

  40 John Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund, ed. Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards (Heidelberg, 2009), pp. 64–71. On the context of Lydgate’s poem, see Pinner, Cult of St Edmund, pp. 89–111; Cynthia Turner Camp, Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History-Writing in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 173–209.

  41 Lydgate, Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, p. 12. This manuscript is now London, British Library, Harley MS. 2278.

  42 Ibid., p. 64.

  43 Ibid., pp. 11–18.

  44 Thomas Elmham, Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis, ed. Charles Hardwick (London, 1858), p. 221.

  45 Hervey (ed.), Corolla Sancti Eadmundi, p. xxxi.

  46 Phelpstead, ‘King, martyr and virgin’, pp. 42–4.

  47 See Timothy Bolton, ‘Was the family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof a lost line of the ancestors of the Danish royal family?’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 51 (2007), pp. 41–71 (67).

  48 The text is printed in Carl Horstmann (ed.), Nova Legenda Anglie (Oxford, 1901), vol. 2, pp. 727–31, and translated in R. M. Serjeantson, ‘A mediæval legend of St Peter’s, Northampton’, Associated Architectural Societies’ Reports and Papers 29 (1907), pp. 113–20.

  49 This manuscript (London, British Library, Additional MS. 38817) was made in the second half of the twelfth century, but the Ragner text is a somewhat later addition; see Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1991), p. liv.

  50 For a description of this manuscript, now Dublin, Trinity College MS. 172 (B. 2. 7), see M. L. Colker, Trinity College Library, Dublin: Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Latin Manuscripts (Dublin, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 310–20, and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, ed. Rosalind C. Love (Oxford, 2004), pp. lv–lvi.

  51 ‘Norweganum genere, mire simplicitatis et pacientie uirum’ (Horstmann, Nova Legenda Anglie, vol. 2, p. 728).

  52 Hugh Candidus, The Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, ed. W. T. Mellows (London, 1949), p. 60; see David Rollason, ‘Lists of saints’ resting-places in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 7 (1978), pp. 61–93 (71).

  53 John H. Williams, ‘From “palace” to “town”: Northampton and urban origins’, Anglo-Saxon England 13 (1984), pp. 113–36 (126–7). See also L. Whitbread, ‘St Ragner of Northampton’, Notes and Queries CXCV (November 1950), pp. 511–12.

  54 The date of St Ragner’s feast was added to the calendar of a Missal which probably belonged to St Peter’s in the fifteenth century; on this manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Lat. liturg. b. 4) see F. Madan and H. H. E. Craster (eds), A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Oxford, 1924), vol. 6, p. 187 (SC 32703).

  55 On Fremund see Pinner, Cult of St Edmund, pp. 105–11; in the Dublin manuscript, the Inventio is followed by an account of the passion of St Fremund. For Eadwold, see Tom Licence, ‘Goscelin of St. Bertin and the Life of St. Eadwold of Cerne’, Journal of Medieval Latin 16 (2006), pp. 182–207.

  56 There was an English cognate, dryhten, which was also used to refer to God in Middle English poetry, although it was becoming increasingly rare; however, this text explicitly identifies drotin as a Norse word.

  57 Ron Baxter, ‘St Peter, Northampton’, The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland. Available at http://www.crsbi.ac.uk/site/248/ (accessed 2 June 2017).

  58 Ivar probably died in Ireland in 873 (Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, pp. 234–6).

  59 The manuscript is Cambridge, Pembroke College MS. 82, and these notes are reproduced in M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Pembroke College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1905), p. 71. See also Kari Anne Rand, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XVIII: Manuscripts in the Library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1; N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), p. 124.

  60 On the idea of Tostig as founder or re-founder of Tynemouth, see Paul Anthony Hayward, ‘Sanctity and lordship in twelfth-century England: Saint Albans, Durham, and the cult of Saint Oswine, king and martyr’, Viator 30 (1999), pp. 105–44 (128–31).

  61 Roger of Howden, Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs (London, 1868), vol. 1, pp. lxxx–lxxxii and 39.

  62 Edward Edwards (ed.), Liber Monasterii de Hyda (London, 1866), p. 10; R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London, 1952), p. 43. The manuscript is London, British Library, Additional MS. 82931, a collection of charters, annals and other documents relating to Hyde Abbey, made in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.

  63 Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: History of the English, ed. Ian Short (Oxford, 2009), pp. 172–3.

  64 Margaret Gelling and Ann Cole, The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford, 2000), pp. 178–80.

  65 Charles Plumme
r (ed.), Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Oxford, 1899), vol. 2, p. 93.

  66 Olsen (ed.), Völsunga saga ok Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, p. 169.

  67 On this text and its sources, see Gillian Fellows Jensen (ed.), Hemings þáttr Áslákssonar (Copenhagen, 1962); Hemings þáttr, trans. Anthony Faulkes (Dundee, 2016), pp. 6–8; Margaret Ashdown, ‘An Icelandic account of the survival of Harold Godwinson’, in Clemoes (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons, pp. 122–36.

  68 Fellows Jensen (ed.), Hemings þáttr, p. 46.

  69 Hilda Roderick Ellis, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (New York, 1968), pp. 30–9, 100–20.

  70 Sarah Semple, ‘A fear of the past: the place of the prehistoric burial mound in the ideology of Middle and Later Anglo-Saxon England’, World Archaeology 30/1 (1998), pp. 109–26; Howard Williams, Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 198–211; Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, ‘The hill of the dragon: Anglo-Saxon burial mounds in literature and archaeology’, Folklore 61/4 (1950), pp. 169–85.

  71 Michael Swanton (ed.), Beowulf (Manchester, 1997), lines 2802–8 and 3156–62.

  72 On Beowulf’s burial-mound see Fred C. Robinson, ‘The tomb of Beowulf ’, in ‘The Tomb of Beowulf’ and Other Essays on Old English (Oxford, 1993), pp. 3–19; Williams, Death and Memory, pp. 200–4. For different (sometimes very mundane) reasons cited in Norse literary sources for burial on a headland, see Ellis, The Road to Hel, p. 37.

  73 Stefan Brink, ‘Law and legal customs in Viking Age Scandinavia’, in Judith Jesch (ed.), The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 87–127 (100–2); for examples from Norse, Irish and Welsh tradition, see Ellis, The Road to Hel, pp. 105–11.

  74 McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, p. 247, and see Lukman, ‘Ragnarr Lothbrok, Sigifrid, and the saints of Flanders’, pp. 39–40. McTurk also notes a possible Orkney connection, observing that the Maeshowe inscription which names Lothbrok is in a burial-mound. For an alternative view, see Ashman Rowe, Vikings in the West, pp. 239–41.

  75 Johnson South (ed.), Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, pp. 50–3.

  76 ‘duc eum cum toto exercitu super montem qui uocatur Oswigesdune et ibi pone in brachio eius dextero armillam auream, et sic eum omnes regem constituant’ (ibid., pp. 52–3).

  77 David Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 245–6; William M. Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071–1153 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 29–32.

  78 Smyth, Scandinavian York and Dublin, vol. 2, pp. 267–8.

  79 For instance in Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis Ecclesie, ed. David Rollason (Oxford, 2000), pp. 122–3.

  80 O’Brien O’Keeffe (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS. C, pp. 91–2.

  81 Alexandra Sanmark and Sarah Semple, ‘Places of assembly: new discoveries in Sweden and England’, Fornvännen 103 (2008), pp. 245–59; Howard M. R. Williams, ‘Placing the dead: investigating the location of wealthy barrow burials in seventh-century England’, in Martin Rundkvist (ed.), Grave Matters: Eight Studies of First Millennium AD Burials in Crimea, England, and Southern Scandinavia (Oxford, 1999), pp. 57–86; Sarah Semple, Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape (Oxford, 2013), pp. 1–2, 87.

  82 Margaret Gelling, The Place-Names of Berkshire (Cambridge, 1974), Part 2, pp. 481–2.

  83 Williams, Death and Memory, pp. 207–11.

  84 John Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Oxford, 1998), pp. 35–41; Williams, Death and Memory, p. 211.

  85 On the language here see Page, ‘A Most Vile People’, pp. 27–8, and on the significance of the choice of site, Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900 (London, 2003), p. 157.

  86 ‘Per mandata ducis rex hic Heralde quiescis, / Ut custos maneas littoris et pelagi’ [Frank Barlow (ed.), The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens (Oxford, 1999), pp. 34–5].

  87 William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. R. H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1998), pp. 140–1.

  88 Laura Ashe, ‘Harold Godwineson’, in Neil Cartlidge (ed.), Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 59–80; Barlow, The Godwins, pp. 156–60; Marafioti, The King’s Body, pp. 230–47.

  89 Gillian Fellows-Jensen, ‘The myth of Harold II’s survival in the Scandinavian sources’, in Gale R. Owen-Crocker (ed.), King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 53–64.

  90 van Houts, ‘Scandinavian influence in Norman literature’, pp. 111–12.

  91 Barlow, The Godwins, pp. 160–70.

  92 Holman, The Northern Conquest, pp. 181–9.

  93 Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, p. 54.

  94 On the promotion of Edmund as a national saint, see Bale (ed.), St Edmund, King and Martyr, pp. 15–17.

  chapter 3: the story of siward

  1 ‘Tradunt relaciones antiquorum quod vir quidam nobilis, quem Dominus permisit, contra solitum ordinem humane propaginis, ex quodam albo urso patre, muliere generosa matre, procreari, Ursus genuit Spratlingum; Spratlingus Ulsium; Ulsius Beorn, cognomento Beresune, hoc est filius ursi. Hic Beorn Dacus fuit natione, comes egregius et miles illustris. In signum autem illius diversitatis speciei ex parte generantium, produxerat ei natura paternas auriculas, sive ursi. In aliis autem speciei materne assimilabatur. Hic autem, post multas virtutis ac milicie experiencias, filium genuit fortitudinis et milicie paterne probum imitatorem. Nomen autem huic Siuuardus’ [Francisque Michel (ed.), Chroniques anglonormandes (Rouen, 1836–40), vol. 2, pp. 99–142 (104–5); my translation].

  2 On the manuscript, now Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. 852, see Chrétien Dehaisnes, Manuscrits de la bibliothèque de Douai (Paris, 1878), and Bertram Colgrave (ed.), Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 39–42.

  3 For discussion of the text see Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 127–35; Axel Olrik, ‘Siward Digri of Northumbria: a Viking saga of the Danes in England’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society VI (1908–9), pp. 212–37; A. H. Smith, ‘The early literary relations of England and Scandinavia’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society XI (1928–1936), pp. 215–32; Wilson, Lost Literature of Medieval England, pp. 56–7; Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels and Analogues (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 125–33; Bolton, ‘Family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof’; Eleanor Parker, ‘Siward the dragon-slayer: mythmaking in Anglo-Scandinavian England’, Neophilologus 98 (2014), pp. 481–93.

  4 On Siward’s career, see William Kapelle, The Norman Conquest of the North (London, 1979), pp. 27–49; Keynes, ‘Cnut’s earls’, pp. 65–6; Whitelock, ‘The dealings of the kings of England with Northumbria’, pp. 83–5.

  5 Keynes, ‘Cnut’s earls’, pp. 57–8.

  6 For discussion see Bolton, ‘Family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof ’.

  7 Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio, pp. 168–71.

  8 Kapelle, Norman Conquest of the North, pp. 28–9. In Siward’s time this earldom included the shires of Huntingdon and Northampton, and probably also Rutland, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire; see Forrest Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof of Northumbria’, Archaeologia Aeliana 30 (1952), pp. 149–215 (157–63).

  9 Kapelle, Norman Conquest of the North, pp. 31–3.

  10 Cubbin (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. D, p. 74.

  11 Christopher Morris, Marriage and Murder in Eleventh-Century Northumbria: A Study of ‘De Obsessione Dunelmi’ (York, 1992), p. 25.

  12 Cubbin (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. D, p. 74.

  13 See Bruce Dickins, ‘The cult of S. Olave in the British Isles’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society XII (1937–45), pp. 53–80 (55); Edvard Bull, ‘The cultus of Norwegian saints in England and Scotland’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society VIII (1913–14), pp. 135–48; Townend, ‘Knútr and the cult of St Óláfr’.

  14 Townend,
Viking Age Yorkshire, p. 196.

  15 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 574.

  16 For other instances of digri (from ON digr ‘big, fat’), see Gösta Tengvik, Old English Bynames (Uppsala, 1938), p. 310.

  17 ‘Siwardus, dux Northumbrorum, Dan[ic]a lingua ‘Digara’, hoc est fortis, nuncupatus’ [Frank Barlow (ed.), The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster (Oxford, 1992), p. 34]. The byname also appears in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum, where Siward’s son Waltheof is described as ‘filius Siwardi magnificentissimi comitis, quem Digera Danico uocabulo, id est fortem, cognominabant’ (‘son of Siward, the very grand earl called Digera in Danish, which means “the Mighty”’, vol. 1, pp. 468–9), and it is included as a marginal note in the Gesta antecessorum (in the Douai MS, but not the Delapré text), perhaps copied from William of Malmesbury.

  18 Kapelle, Norman Conquest of the North, pp. 30–1. The name Waltheof is an anglicisation of Old Norse Valþjófr, but it is not recorded in Siward’s native Denmark until the sixteenth century; see Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, pp. 330–1.

  19 David Bates, William the Conqueror (New Haven, 2016), pp. 209–10.

  20 On the sources for Waltheof’s life, see Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof of Northumbria’, pp. 149–215; Ann Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 63–5, 146–7.

  21 For discussion see Bates, William the Conqueror, p. 350.

  22 On the development of the cult see Carl Watkins, ‘The cult of Earl Waltheof at Crowland’, Hagiographica III (1996), pp. 95–111.

  23 Jesch, ‘Skaldic verse in Scandinavian England’, p. 322.

  24 Thorkell Skallason, Valþjófsflokkr, ed. and trans. Kari Ellen Gade, in Gade (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From c.1035 to c.1300 (Turnhout, 2009), Part 1, pp. 382–4.

  25 Forrest Scott, ‘Valþjófr jarl: an English earl in Icelandic sources’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society XIV (1953–7), pp. 78–94.

  26 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1969–80), vol. 2, pp. xxv–xxix, 322–51.