A History of the Vikings
Chapter 3
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in Zealand, a place that was also the site of Hrothgar's hall Heorot, the scene of Beowulf's contest with Grendel. Of Hrolf Kraki, Snorri wrote, 'Among the kings of old his was the most gentle disposition, his the most fearless nature, and none was more dearly loved than he' (1); and Saxo Grammaticus said, 'All the ages after him have honoured his great name and the lustre of his deeds.' (2)
1. Edda, Skáldskaparmál, 48.
2. II, 82 (ed. Müller).
3. Edda, Skáldskaparmál, 43. There are other explanations in the Hrólfssaga and Saxo Gesta Danorum. The most likely theory is that it was because Ali had married Hrolf's aunt and because H. therefore desired to avenge the death of his relative by marriage that he undertook the expedition; see A. Olrik, Danmarks heltedigtning, Copenhagen, 1903, p. 38.
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gave to Hrolf a horn full of gold and a famous ring called Svíagrís, and bade him ride away. But Adils with a party of Swedes pursued Hrolf and his men who were now in full flight across the Fyris plain. Hrolf therefore flung the gold down on to the road, whereat the Swedes checked their pursuit in order to recover it. But Adils bade them ride on, and himself began to draw near to the fleeing Hrolf. So Hrolf took the ring and threw it towards Adils, telling him he might receive it as a gift. Adils rode at the ring and recovered it at the point of his spear. Then Hrolf Kraki looked back and, seeing how Adils bent down, cried out, 'Now I have made him who is mightiest of the Swedes bent as a swine is bent!'
Such is the story in the prose Edda, and it is retold in an expanded and different form in the Hrólfssaga and also by Saxo Grammaticus. Yet each version ends with the flight of Hrolf Kraki and his men from Uppsala, so that it may well be that the narratives enshrine the memories of a serious war between the Swedes and the Danes at the end of the seventh century, a war in which the Danes, though ultimately driven off, were the attacking party. It is possible, moreover, that the Danes themselves had suffered from Swedish oppression shortly before Hrolf's rise to power, for a curious legend has survived to the effect that before Hrolf came to the throne the Swedish king Adils, taking advantage of Denmark's weakness after the death of the brothers Hroar and Helgi, imposed a dog-king upon the Danes (1) and acted in every way as the master of Danish politics. This preposterous tale can perhaps be connected with the attacks said to have been made by Adils on the Danish coast near Sleswig that are described by Saxo Grammaticus, (2) and the fighting between Helgi, the Danish king, and this same Adils that is recorded in the sagas.
In addition to the tales of the kings at Leire, Danish tradition has likewise something to say of kings in Jutland. It was at the court of one of these kings, Feng by name, that Ambloth lived, Ambloth who is known to all the world as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. It is hard to say if there really was a long dynasty of Jutish kings still ruling in Jutland after the migration of the principal body of the Jutes, and possessing their country as a kingdom entirely distinct from that of the eastern Danes in Scania, Zealand, and the islands; for it may well have been
1. Leire Chronicle, ed. M. Cl. Gertz (Script. Min. Hist. Danicae, Copenhagen, 1917), Cap. V, p. 48, and cf. Gesta Danorum, ed. M. Lorenzen, Samfund t. udgivelse af gammel nordisk litt., XVIII, p. II.
2. IV, 162 (ed. Müller).
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that the kings in Jutland were chieftains of Jutish blood who had won only some transitory independence, either by revolt against the Leire king or as a gift from him. Thus, indeed, of Hamlet's father and uncle it is said that it was Rorik Slenganboge, a king in Leire after Hrolf Kraki, who had made them chiefs in Jutland. (1) The chronicles also name two other kings as ruling Jutland, Vermund and Offa. Vermund is said to have been a contemporary of the Swedish king Adils and there are records of two raids by the Swedes on the Danish coast near Sleswig during his reign. But both he and Offa, his son, were in all probability Angles, as indeed their names suggest, who ruled in Sleswig before the migration of the Anglian folk. (2) The Danes tell the grand story of how Saxon aggression was frustrated by Offa's personal valour in defeating single-handed two chosen champions of the enemy; but they doubtless believed Offa to be a Dane because this famous exploit is described as having taken place on the Eider banks in what was later Danish territory, whereas the earlier Widsith poem establishes him as an Anglian prince.
The relations between the Jutland kings and the Scyldings at Leire are perplexing enough, but there is yet another complication in the affairs of early Denmark. For it is clear from the poems Widsith and Beowulf that the Scyldings and their folk were principally occupied by a long-sustained and bitter feud between themselves and a dynasty of Heathobard kings. Who these Heathobards were is uncertain, and all that is known about them is that they were a Baltic people, perhaps living in Jutland itself. At first sight it may seem convenient to make a single problem of the double difficulty of Jutish and Heathobard kings by supposing that the Heathobards were in fact the Jutland division of the Danes, a people whose kings soon begin to figure in Danish history of a little later date, and who eventually encompassed the downfall of the Scyldings; but such a view implied the outbreak of a prolonged civil war between two sections of the Danes not long after their arrival in Denmark as invaders struggling for a foothold in a hostile land. This objection naturally leads to the
1. Gesta Danorum, ed. Lorenzen (op. cit.), p. 17.
2. Professor H. M. Chadwick has removed some considerable chronological difficulties here by supposing that the Adils who attacked Vermund's kingdom was not the sixth century king of Sweden but Eadgils, prince of the Myrgings, who is mentioned in the Widsith poem, this giving Vermund a date in the middle of the fourth century. Origin of the English Nation, Cambridge, 1907, p. 135; cf. R. W. Chambers. Widsith, Cambridge, 1912, p. 93.
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consideration of a rival theory which supposes that the Heathobard attack on the Leire kings represents the revolt of the indigenous population against the Danish invaders, this indigenous folk being the Heruls, or rather the remnant of them now left in the Cimbric peninsula. (1) Against this last view it may be fairly urged that the equation of the Heathobards with the Heruls makes the events of the two poems an exact reverse of the historical fact that the Danes attacked and drove out the Heruls. For it is the Heathobards who are the attacking party and it is the Scyldings who are defending their fatherland (2); moreover, Procopius has attested that a section of the Heruls, returning from the Continent, marched peacefully through the land of the Danes at the beginning of the sixth century, and this is very unlikely to have happened if the Danes were at war in this very period with their stay-at-home brethren. The failure of these views, and also of the hypothesis that the Heathobards were the Lombards, has suggested to Dr. Elias Wessén the arresting and revolutionary idea that it was the Heathobards who were the Danes and that the Heruls with whom they strove and whom they eventually conquered were none other than the people ruled by the Scylding princes at Leire. (3) This interpretation, though it is one to be treated with considerable caution, has the merit of explaining several of the puzzling features in the Scylding legends. Thus if the Scyldings were really Heruls it is not hard to understand why their immediate ancestor, being of the pre-Danish population and yet within the Danish realm, bore the name Halfdan (halfa-Dane, (4) and why the story ends with disaster hanging over the Scylding house which seems to end with Hrolf Kraki. Again the ancestor of the Heathobard kings, Frode and Ingjald, was Dan who came, says the Leire Chronicle, (5) from Uppsala in Svitjod just as did the Danes themselves; moreover, the Heathobard dynasty twice contains the rare name Frode, which can perhaps be connected with the Swedish god Frö, the mythological founder of the Ynglings, the royal dynasty of Svitjod. It is therefore an undeniably important theory that Dr. Wessén has suggested, but it is very easy to see that there are two weak points in it. The first of these is that in societies
1. K. Müllenhoff, Beovulf, Berlin, 1889, p. 31, and cf. R. W. Chambers, Beowulf, Cambridge, 1921, p. 24.
2. Beowulf, 913.
3. E. Wessén, K. Vitt. Ant. Akad. Handl., 36 : 2 (1927), 25.
4. Cf. an essay by Kemp Malone, Danes and Half-Danes, Arkiv f. nordisk Filologi, 42 (1926). p. 234.
5. Ed. M. Cl. Gertz, Cap. I, p. 43.
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where feuds were common it is very unwise to overpress coincidences of results into evidence as to the race of the participants; the second is that no ingenuity can explain away the fact that the people who on this view were really the Danes were in fact called Heathobards, whereas the people who were called the Danes were not Danes at all, but Heruls. (1)
There will be little profit gained by a further discussion here of these difficult matters, for it is plain that no satisfactory account can as yet be given of sixth-century Denmark, despite the many legends of its heroes and the attempts of the early mediaeval chroniclers to weld together separate dynasties into a single and imposing line of Danish kings. Certain is it, nevertheless, that the whole of Denmark was not a united state ruled by one all-powerful dynasty, but rather was the country an arena for the struggles between warring and contentious tribes. That the power passed eventually into the hands of the Danes in Jutland may be inferred, but these folk can have acquired no permanent dominion over the whole peninsula and the Danish islands. Indeed, in the seventh century, the eastern Danish kingdom (Scania, and perhaps the Danish islands) must surely have been included in the confederacy of states established by that conquering prince, Ivar Vidfadmi, who has already been named in connexion with the affairs of the Ynglings of Svitjod.
Ivar came of the Danish line of the Scyldings, for his father Halfdan Snjalli, brother of the king of Scania, is said by two medieval genealogies to have been the great-grandson of king Hrothgar of the Beowulf poem. According to the Hervararsaga, (2) he also belonged to the royal family of a mainland division of the Goths who dwelt in Reidgötaland, a district that has been identified almost with certainty as part of north-east Germany, probably East Prussia and Poland. (3) His conquests were considerable, if the sagas are to be believed. He is said not only to have subdued Sweden and the Danish kingdom, but also to have held very extensive dominions on the mainland, this being doubtless a result of his descent from the Reidgothic kings, and to have conquered the East Baltic states of Kurland and Estland. He is also credited with conquests in England, the Hervararsaga explaining that he ruled over the part of the island that is called Northumberland.
1. For the argument on these points see E. Wessén, loc. cit., p. 32.
2. Ed. S. Bugge, Norske Oldskriftselskab Samlinger, VI (Oslo, 1864), p. 290 .
3. Otto v. Friesen, Rökstenen, Stockholm, 1920, p. 108 ff.
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