Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  27 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 344–5.

  28 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 348.

  29 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, pp. 468–9.

  30 ‘Anglorum astipulationi diuinitas assentiri uidetur, miracula multa et ea permaxima ad tumbam illius ostendens’ [William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. Michael Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 488–9].

  31 Watkins, ‘The cult of Earl Waltheof at Crowland’, p. 102. For a variety of views on the uses of Waltheof’s cult in the twelfth century see Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, pp. 146–7; Joanna Huntington, ‘The taming of the laity: writing Waltheof and rebellion in the twelfth century’, Anglo-Norman Studies 32 (2009), pp. 79–95; Emma Cownie, Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England 1066–1135 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 119–21.

  32 Watkins, ‘The cult of Earl Waltheof ’, pp. 97–8.

  33 Michel (ed.), Chroniques anglo-normandes, vol. 2, pp. 123–31.

  34 This survives only in a seventeenth-century transcript of a manuscript from Delapré, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dugdale 18; see N. Denholm-Young, ‘An early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman MS’, The Bodleian Quarterly Record 6 (1931), pp. 225–30; John Spence, Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 147–52.

  35 See for instance John Spence, ‘Genealogies of noble families in Anglo-Norman’, in Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy (eds), Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Late-Medieval Britain and France (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 63–77 (70). It might also conceivably refer not to the language in which the book was written but to a chronicle about the English, such as Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, which contains two stories about Siward.

  36 Denholm-Young, ‘An early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman MS’; Spence, ‘Genealogies of noble families in Anglo-Norman’.

  37 The text is printed by Michel (ed.), Chroniques anglo-normandes, vol. 2, pp. 104–11, and most of it is translated in Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 129–33.

  38 This was first suggested by Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford, 1870–6), vol. 1, pp. 791–2.

  39 We might compare the dispute on the bridge to a comment by Gaimar that under the Danish kings, the English were expected to give the Danes precedence when they met at a bridge-crossing; Gaimar claims that the English would be punished if they did not give way, and that this was the cause of great resentment against the Danes (Estoire des Engleis, pp. 259–61). Perhaps Gaimar had heard a story like that told of Siward and Tostig in the Gesta antecessorum, or the author of the Gesta had read Gaimar, although for the purposes of the Gesta both men are Danish.

  40 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, pp. 376–9.

  41 Bjarni Einarsson (ed.), Egils saga (London, 2003), pp. 31–2.

  42 Olrik, ‘Siward Digri’, p. 226.

  43 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London, 2015), p. 298 (Act 5, Scene 9).

  44 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, pp. 378–81.

  45 Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 128–9; Olrik, ‘Siward Digri’, pp. 212–37 (226).

  46 Heather O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (London, 2007), pp. 51–4.

  47 R. G. Finch (ed.), Völsunga saga (London, 1965), pp. 2–3. For more examples, see Ellis, The Road to Hel, pp. 105–11.

  48 Finnbogi Guðmundsson (ed.), Orkneyinga saga (Reykjavík, 1965), pp. 24–7.

  49 E. H. Lind, Norsk-isländska personbinamn från medeltiden (Uppsala, 1920–5), cols. 60–1.

  50 Jesch, ‘England and Orkneyinga saga’, pp. 231–2.

  51 Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 126–7.

  52 Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar, ch. 22, in Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson (Reykjavík, 1941–51), vol. 3, p. 96.

  53 Finnur Jónsson (ed.), Morkinskinna (Copenhagen, 1932), pp. 272–9, and Finnur Jónsson (ed.), Fagrskinna (Copenhagen, 1902–03), pp. 287, 292–4; for translations see Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157), trans. T. M. Andersson and K. E. Gade (Ithaca and London, 2000), pp. 268–73, and Fagrskinna, a Catalogue of the Kings of Norway, trans. Alison Finlay (Leiden, 2004), pp. 225–31.

  54 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, pp. 479–81; see R. I. Page, Chronicles of the Vikings (London, 1995), pp. 100–4.

  55 See Scott, ‘Valþjófr jarl’.

  56 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 664–5.

  57 The historical Sigurðr was active in northern France from c.880 until his death in 887; see Lukman, ‘Ragnarr Lothbrok, Sigifrid, and the Saints of Flanders’, p. 9.

  58 Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, pp. 40–50; McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, pp. 96–8.

  59 For discussion of the name, see Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, ed. Peter Fisher and Hilda Ellis Davidson (Cambridge, 1979–80), vol. 2, p. 155.

  60 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 638–41. Lukman argues that this story originates from Flemish hagiography surrounding the healing sand of the grave of St Arnulf; see ‘Ragnarr Lothbrok, Sigifrid, and the saints of Flanders’, p. 24.

  61 Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon, pp. 42–4.

  62 By contrast, a twelfth-century text added to a manuscript of John of Worcester’s Chronicle does record Waltheof’s Northumbrian maternal ancestry, and makes him a descendant of Ælla; see McGuigan, ‘Ælla and the descendants of Ivar’.

  63 On this element of the Siward narrative see Bolton, ‘Family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof ’.

  64 For examples and discussion see J. Michael Stitt, Beowulf and the Bear’s Son: Epic, Saga, and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition (New York and London, 1992); Gwyn Jones, Kings, Beasts and Heroes (London, 1972), pp. 129–43; John McKinnell, Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 126–46.

  65 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 734–7 (737).

  66 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 549. Plummer examines the differences between the accounts of Beorn’s death in John of Worcester’s chronicle and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle C, D and E in Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, vol. 2, pp. 229–31. John of Worcester is the only one to provide a genealogy for Beorn in his narrative of the events of 1049.

  67 Bolton, ‘Family of Earl Siward and Earl Waltheof ’.

  68 See Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Scandinavian personal names in the Liber Vitae of Thorney Abbey’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society XII (1937–45), 127–53 (134–5), and Keynes, ‘Cnut’s earls’, pp. 62–4; see also Campbell (ed.), Encomium, pp. 82–7. The story of his death is told in Óláfs saga helga, ch. 152–3, where Ulf ’s family connection with Godwine is mentioned (Snorri, Heimskringla, vol. 2, pp. 283–6).

  69 Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, p. 104; History of the Archbishops, pp. 124–5. See Freeman, The Norman Conquest, vol. 2, pp. 60–5.

  70 Barlow, The Godwins, pp. 47–55.

  71 Three of Svein’s sons also took part; John of Worcester names two of them as Harold and Cnut, and Gaimar names a third son, ‘Buern Leriz’ (Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, p. 294).

  72 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 3, pp. 8–14, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, p. 480, and Cecily Clark (ed.), The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154 (Oxford, 1970), p. 5.

  73 Walter Map, De nugis curialium, ed. M. R. James, revised by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), pp. 432–7; Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 740–3. The composition of De nugis curialium is usually dated to c.1181–2.

  74 Godwine probably did go to Denmark on Cnut’s orders, perhaps in 1022–3; the evidence for his expedition is discussed by Keynes, ‘Cnut’s earls’, pp. 70–4.

  75 Walter de Gray Birch (ed.), Vita Haroldi, The Romance of the Life of Harold, King of England (L
ondon, 1885), pp. 13–15.

  76 See Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 224–9; G. N. Garmonsway, Canute and his Empire (London, 1964), pp. 8–9; Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 182–221.

  77 The numerous stories about Godwine are collected by Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 213–36; see also Barlow, The Godwins, pp. 31–3; Mason, The House of Godwine, pp. 31–3.

  78 Bjarni Guðnason (ed.), Danakonunga sögur, pp. 109–11.

  79 Walter Map, De nugis curialium, pp. 412–37.

  80 Barlow, The Godwins, pp. 23–4.

  81 For discussion of how such information may have become known at Worcester, see A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson (eds), The Crawford Collection of Early Charters and Documents now in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1895), pp. 143–4, and Keynes, ‘Cnut’s earls’, pp. 46–7.

  82 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 549.

  83 For the text see the appendix in T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin (eds), Lestorie des Engles solum la translacion Maistre Geffrei Gaimar (London, 1888–9), vol. 1, pp. 339–404; for a translation see ‘The Life of Hereward the Wake’, trans. Michael Swanton, in T. Ohlgren (ed.), Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English (Stroud, 1998), pp. 12–60.

  84 J. D. Martin, The Cartularies and Registers of Peterborough Abbey (Peterborough, 1978), pp. 7–12; N. R. Ker (ed.), Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford, 1969–2002), vol. 4, pp. 162–4.

  85 Blake (ed.), Liber Eliensis, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi.

  86 On the historical evidence for Hereward’s life, see J. Hayward, ‘Hereward the outlaw’, Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988), pp. 293–304, and Hart, The Danelaw, pp. 625–48; for the plundering of Peterborough see Clark (ed.), The Peterborough Chronicle, pp. 2–4. According to the twelfth-century Peterborough writer Hugh Candidus, Hereward’s actions caused particular outrage because he was a tenant of the monastery, a statement confirmed by Domesday Book (Hugh Candidus, Chronicle, pp. 77–82). On Hereward’s Domesday holdings, see C. W. Foster and Thomas Longley (eds), The Lincolnshire Domesday and the Lindsey Survey (Horncastle, 1924), p. 58.

  87 On Hereward and Robin Hood see J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (London, 1982), pp. 64–75; Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London, 2000), pp. 10–38.

  88 For discussion of the episode, see Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Hereward and Flanders’, Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1999), pp. 201–23 (215–7); P. G. Schmidt, ‘Biblisches und hagiographisches Kolorit in den Gesta Herwardi’, in Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (eds), The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley (Oxford, 1985), pp. 85–95; Axel Olrik, The Heroic Legends of Denmark (New York, 1919), pp. 374–5.

  89 ‘Fabula Danorum’ is an emendation of the manuscript’s fabula davorum; see Hardy and Martin (eds), Lestorie des Engles, vol. 1, p. 343.

  90 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 339.

  91 Clark (ed.), The Peterborough Chronicle, pp. 2–4.

  92 A. J. Holden (ed.), Le Roman de Waldef (Cologny-Genève, 1984); see Rosalind Field, ‘Waldef and the matter of/with England’, in Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson (eds), Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 25–39.

  93 Holden (ed.), Le Roman de Waldef, lines 11821–12518.

  94 Waldef, like Hereward, saves a woman from a forced marriage by arriving at the wedding feast in Dublin, where she recognises him by means of a ring. Both may have borrowed the episode from an early version of another romance; see Judith Weiss, ‘Thomas and the Earl: literary and historical contexts for the Romance of Horn’ in Rosalind Field (ed.), Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 1–13.

  95 In a number of Old Norse sagas, a fight against a bear, a berserkr, or a man named Björn features as part of the hero’s initiation into manhood; see Mary Danielli, ‘Initiation ceremonial from Old Norse literature’, Folklore 56/2 (1945), pp. 229–45.

  96 The Crowland Chronicle purports to be the work of Abbot Ingulf (1085– 1108) with continuations by later writers, and is therefore often known as ‘the chronicle of Pseudo-Ingulf’; see Walter de Gray Birch (ed.), The Chronicle of Croyland Abbey by Ingulph (Wisbech, 1883) and Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, with the continuations by Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers, trans. Henry T. Riley (London, 1854), pp. 134–43.

  97 Field, ‘Waldef and the matter of/with England’, pp. 29–31.

  chapter 4: danish sovereignty and the right to rule

  1 For examples and discussion see Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge, 2005) and Frankis, ‘Views of Anglo-Saxon England’.

  2 For discussion of the date and context of Gaimar’s work, see Ian Short, ‘Patrons and polyglots: French literature in twelfth-century England’, Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992), pp. 229–49; Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. ix–xvi; Paul Dalton, ‘The date of Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, the connections of his patrons, and the politics of Stephen’s reign’, The Chaucer Review 42 (2007), pp. 23–47.

  3 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, p. ix; see also Short, ‘Patrons and polyglots’, pp. 243–4.

  4 Alexander Bell, ‘Gaimar’s early “Danish” kings’, PMLA 65/4 (1950), pp. 601–40; Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Geffrei Gaimar, vernacular historiography, and the assertion of authority’, Studies in Philology 93 (1996), pp. 188–206.

  5 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. 50–3.

  6 For the treatment of this incident in other chronicles, see Page, ‘A Most Vile People’, pp. 21–5.

  7 This is probably a reference to Adelbriht, the king Gaimar names as Havelok’s father-in-law and a Danish king of Norfolk; see Estoire des Engleis, pp. 4–7.

  8 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. 114–15.

  9 Ibid., pp. 234–7.

  10 Margaret Ashdown discusses the meeting and the traditions surrounding it in ‘The single combat in certain cycles of English and Scandinavian tradition and romance’, The Modern Language Review 17 (1922), pp. 113–30; see also Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 191–5.

  11 O’Brien O’Keeffe (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS. C, p. 103.

  12 Campbell (ed.), Encomium, pp. 24–31.

  13 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, pp. 316–9.

  14 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, pp. 360–1.

  15 Walter Map, De nugis curialium, pp. 424–7.

  16 Rogerof Wendover, Chronica, vol. 1, pp. 457–9; forcommentonthisepisode see Phillip Pulsiano, ‘ “Danish men’s words are worse than murder”: Viking guile and The Battle of Maldon’, Journal of English and German Philology 96 (1997), pp. 13–25 (21–2).

  17 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. 236–7.

  18 See for instance William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, p. 319.

  19 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve and Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 248–51.

  20 For a list, see Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, ed. Fisher and Davidson, vol. 2, pp. 25–6. The etymology comes ultimately from Isidore of Seville, and is mentioned by several Norman historians; Orderic Vitalis, in tracing the descent of the Normans from Troy, comments that the Danes took their name from Danus, son of Antenor, who settled in the north after escaping from the sack of Troy (Ecclesiastical History, vol. 5, pp. 24–5).

  21 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, pp. 18–25.

  22 M. C. Gertz (ed.), Scriptores Minores Historiæ Danicæ Medii Ævi (Copenhagen, 1917–18), vol. 1, p. 43. Saxo used this text as one of his sources, but he gives Dan a different father and origin and places him 20 generations further back in history; see Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Friis-Jensen and Fisher, vol. 1, p. 19, n. 1.

  23 Snorri, Heimskringla, vol. 1, pp. 4–5, 35.

  24 It is tempting to connect Saxo’s ‘Angul’ with the warrior ‘Engle’ from whom Robert Mannyng says the English took their name, but both names could be derived independently from etymological
speculation [Robert Mannyng, The Chronicle, ed. Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, NY, 1996), pp. 440–2].

  25 On the belief, found in this saga and others, in the myth of a pre-Cnut Viking empire which included the British Isles, see Ashman Rowe, ‘Helpful Danes and pagan Irishmen’.

  26 See Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, p. 119; Scott Kleinman, ‘The legend of Havelok the Dane and the historiography of East Anglia’, Studies in Philology 100 (2003), pp. 245–77 (263); Spence, Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles, pp. 89–90. This right is also mentioned in William of Newburgh’s Historia Regum Anglicarum, in Richard Howlett (ed.), Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I (London, 1884), vol. 1, p. 368.

  27 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. 140–55; see Alexander Bell, ‘Buern Bucecarle in “Gaimar”’, Modern Language Review, 27 (1932), pp. 168–74.

  28 For discussion of this story see Bell, ‘Buern Bucecarle in “Gaimar”’, and McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, pp. 210–35. McTurk compares a thirteenth-century story about Ælla, the Narratio de uxore Aernulfi ab Ella rege Deirorum violate. See also Wright, Cultivation of Saga, pp. 107–16.

  29 Jane Zatta, ‘Gaimar’s rebels: outlaw heroes and the creation of authority in twelfth-century England’, Essays in Medieval Studies 16 (1999), pp. 27–40.

  30 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. 411–12.

  31 Ibid., pp. 156–61.

  32 On the developing English identity of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy in the twelfth century, see Ashe, Fiction and History.

  33 For a description of the many incarnations of the legend from the twelfth century to the present day, see Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York, 1996); Ronald S. Crane, ‘The vogue of Guy of Warwick from the close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic revival’, PMLA 30 (1915), pp. 125–94.

  34 Alfred Ewert (ed.), Gui de Warewic: roman du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1932–3); Judith Weiss (ed.), Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic: Two Anglo-Norman Romances (Tempe, 2008). For discussion of the Anglo-Norman poem, see Marianne Ailes, ‘Gui de Warewic in its manuscript context’, in Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (eds), Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 12–26.