The Saga Of King Hrolf Kraki Part 1

THE SAGA OF KING HROLF KRAKI.

JESSE L. BYOCK.

Introduction.

The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki is one of the major Scandinavian legendary tales and belongs to the group of mythicheroic Icelandic stories known as the 'sagas of ancient times', or fornaldar sagas. These texts, which are also sometimes called the 'legendary sagas', are distinctive in that they tell of events that occurred, or are supposed to have occurred, long before the ninth-century settlement of Iceland. A narrative about pre-Viking Age kings and their rivals, Hrolf's Saga, as the text is often called, tells of King Hrolf, a warrior chieftain who ruled in Denmark in about the sixth century AD. Called Kraki (tall, angular and slender like a pole ladder), Hrolf was widely remembered in the medieval North as one of the most magnificent kings of 'ancient times', and the saga draws on a long oral tradition as it describes Hrolf's often treacherous family and recounts the exploits of his famous champions.

Hrolf's Saga, which was written in prose in fourteenth-century Iceland, has close affinities with the Old English verse epic Beowulf, written sometime in the period from the eighth to the early eleventh centuries. Both compositions draw on a common tradition of storytelling, recounting events that may or may not have occurred in the fifth-and/or sixth-century Danish kingdom of the Skjoldungs (Old English: Scyldinga). And both, though differentiated by centuries of independent transmission in different lands, have many of the same characters and settings. The relationship is based on an ancient core of shared storytelling, which displays the extent of a common oral tradition in the medieval North and may echo long-past historical events. Hrolf's Saga and Beowulf share a further similarity. Each provides information about a powerful champion whose bearlike character may reflect the distant memory of early cultic practices.

Medieval Iceland was a suitable place for pa.s.sing down the memory of King Hrolf and his twelve champions. The settlement of Iceland, an island country first colonized by Nors.e.m.e.n in the ninth century, was an offshoot of Viking Age (c. 8001070) exploration and westward expansion across the North Atlantic. At considerable distance from Europe, Iceland was a frontier country. As in such communities elsewhere, the settlers and their descendants tended to venerate the traditions of the mother-culture. The Icelanders' knowledge of the Scandinavian past was so broad that in medieval times they were acknowledged throughout the North to be master storytellers and the keepers of ancient poetic lore. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing about 1200, credits the trustworthiness of Icelanders, who: spend their time improving knowledge of others' deeds, making up for their poverty by their intelligence. They take great pleasure in discovering and commemorating the achievements of all nations; in their view it is as enlightening to discourse on the prowess of others as to display their own.

In recounting their own past and the history of other peoples, Icelandic saga tellers made prose narration a high art. Their sagas were unusual among the literatures of medieval Europe where, with the exception of Ireland, traditional narrative stories were usually told in verse. The introduction in Iceland of the written saga in the twelfth century invigorated the process of narrative innovation. Writing provided Icelandic saga tellers with broader possibilities for reworking and preserving the lore of the past. In the case of the legends surrounding King Hrolf and his retinue of champions, the saga tellers had at their disposal an extensive body of existing heroic lore.

The various stories concerning Hrolf and his heroes were first a.s.sembled in a coherent, single text possibly as early as the thirteenth century. In its present form, Hrolf's Saga was composed around 1400. In 1461 a copy of a saga about Hrolf was included among the 'books in the Norse language' in the library of the monastery of Modruvellir in northern Iceland. Today the earliest of the forty-four known ma.n.u.scripts dates from the seventeenth century, and all of these are copies deriving ultimately from a single common ancestor. The saga author, well aware that he was arranging a compilation of older material, retains the episodic structure of his sources, often telling the audience when one sub-tale ends and another begins: 'Here ends the tale of Frodi and now begins the story of Hroar and Helgi, the sons of Halfdan.'

If the underlying, individual episodes are often discernible, the saga is, nevertheless, a unified work, very much in the matter-of-fact style of the Icelandic family sagas. Even in the pa.s.sages that treat fabulous events and creatures, the text uses an understated tone, relying on realistic-sounding description to create an almost believable story. So too the physical world of the saga is presented in non-fabulous geographical terms, and one can place most events on a modern map. Centred on the court at Hleidargard (Old Norse Hleidr, modern Danish Lejre) on the island of Sjaelland, the action spreads across the legendary landscape of northern Europe from Lapland in the far north to England in the west.

Because the saga, like many medieval tales, is fashioned from disparate parts, it is helpful to keep the basic structure in mind. The text falls into five main sections, each one focusing on a different set of characters. The common connection with Hrolf, the male and female members of his family, and his court unites the episodes, giving the saga a consistent narrative focus. The first section (chaps. 14) gives the often modest Hrolf an ill.u.s.trious pedigree. Opening with a dynastic conflict, the saga plunges into the struggle between King Halfdan and his brother Frodi, who were greatly dissimilar in character. At issue was control of the Danish kingdom. In this first part the saga teller uses the unfolding conflict to introduce Hrolf's tempestuous ancestors. These include the young princes; Helgi, Hrolf's father; Hroar, his uncle; and Signy, his aunt.

The second section (chaps. 513) traces events in the lives of Helgi and Hroar. In particular, the narrative at this point follows the actions of Helgi, a man with large and sometimes uncontrollable appet.i.tes. Despite the fact that on each occasion the women caution him not to act on his impulse, Helgi plunges into a series of unfortunate s.e.xual liaisons. The stories of the women then enter the tale, and here we first meet Hrolf's mother Yrsa, a person of uncommon heritage. The events of Yrsa's life, including her marriages and wishes, form a narrative thread, linking different sections of the saga and touching the lives of many of the characters. Toward the end of the second section King Hrolf is born, the offspring of a curious parentage. In the next section (chaps. 1416) the saga turns to Hrolf's champions, explaining how the Swede Svipdag battles the berserkers of King Adils of Sweden before coming into King Hrolf's service.

The fourth section (chaps. 1624) takes the tale to Norway and Lapland and is one of the saga's episodic gems. Virtually a fully formed tale in itself, it recounts the fate of Bjorn, the 'manbear'. This tragic tale of ancient magic offers insight into the supernatural gifts of Bjorn's sons, including the bearlike nature of Bodvar Bjarki. A sword hidden in a cave and embedded in stone awaits the rightful heir among Bjorn's three sons. In this section each occurrence is more extraordinary than the preceding one. Not the least of these is the shield wall constructed of bones with its occupant Hjalti, the champion who confronts and conquers fear.

Up to this point Hrolf himself plays a relatively minor role in the saga. Like Charlemagne in the sequence of Norse stories named after him or like Arthur in medieval Romance tradition, Hrolf the great king of the North is often overshadowed by the individual stories about his champions. With all the pieces in place, however, the fifth and last part of the saga (chaps. 2434) concentrates on King Hrolf himself and his unfolding destiny. The retinue of champions has reached its full strength, and the central female characters have been introduced into the saga. In the Scandinavian dynastic struggles that form the major underlying theme in the rest of the saga, King Adils of Sweden emerges as Hrolf's princ.i.p.al opponent. Here both Bodvar Bjarki and the G.o.d Odin (in the guise of Hrani) play crucial, though very different, roles.

Hrolf's Saga devotes a significant share of the narrative to the destiny of female characters, and a significant feature of the text is that important events turn on decisions made by women. Queens, sorceresses, a freeman's loyal daughter and an elfin woman and her daughter all change the destiny of those who encounter them. Kings and jarls (earls) frequently seek the advice of the women, and the intimate details of marriages, whether good or bad, are exposed. This emphasis is possible because a number of prominent male heroes in Hrolf's Saga are only marginally involved in stories of maturation, whereby a boy, such as Sigurd in The Saga of the Volsungs, comes of age. According to the basic maturation story, a 'helper' or 'donor' a.s.sists the boy in acquiring special weapons and/or knowledge. The youth uses these acquisitions to prove himself through deeds, finding in the end a bride and thereby consummating the transition to manhood. To be sure, elements of this traditional pattern are found in Hrolf's Saga, as for instance in the intertwined stories of Bodvar Bjarki and Hjalti. In the main, however, Hrolf's Saga, like Beowulf, is about mature people. The action concentrates on adults such as Queen Yrsa and her husbands, King Helgi and King Adils, and the saga probes deeply into the often complex emotional and s.e.xual needs of such individuals.

While King Hrolf remains the central focus, it is frequently the women who connect the saga's different episodes, binding the individual pieces of story into a cohesive whole. Consider Queen Yrsa: she first enters the tale as an impoverished child of uncertain birth. Taken captive at an early age, Yrsa is forced to marry King Helgi. Against the odds, the union is good; she comes to love Helgi and he her. The ramifications of this love and the psychological unease caused by the abrupt termination of the marriage, affect the lives of almost all of the saga's subsequent characters. And what a story it is. Yrsa, forced by conventions of morality, throws her happiness away and as a grown woman returns to live with Queen Olof, the mother who hates her. From this point on, Yrsa's life is a dilemma. Her previous husband, King Helgi, remains in love with her. But Helgi, although normally a forceful man, becomes immobilized, his heart broken. In what we now would understand as a deep depression, Helgi retires to his bed. Yrsa, too, suffers cruelly. Her only route of escape from Queen Olof is marriage to King Adils of Sweden, a man whom she dislikes. From Yrsa's second forced marriage will come her greatest loss.

Queen Yrsa does not employ magic, but many of the other women of the saga do. Queen White, the Lapp king's daughter, Heid, the seeress, and Queen Skuld all find empowerment in magic and sorcery. Skuld, the enigmatic half-elfin woman, proves to be a fearful opponent, conjuring up among other feats a monstrous boar. Men in the saga also utilize magic as we see in the behaviour of Vifil the commoner, the warrior Bodvar Bjarki and King Adils. The example of these characters makes The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki a valuable text for understanding the northern perception of magic and sorcery in the late medieval period. The reader wanting more information concerning such subjects is directed to the Explanatory Notes at the end of the book. There I draw distinctions between different types of magic encountered in the saga and discuss the meanings of terms such as wizards, sorcerers and fetches. The endnotes are also designed to a.s.sist the reader wanting additional information about the relationship between Hrolf's Saga and other medieval Scandinavian and English texts.

The Sagas of Ancient Times and Heroic Lays.

As mentioned, Hrolf's Saga belongs to the group of mythicheroic Icelandic stories known as the 'sagas of ancient times', or fornaldar sagas. For the medieval Icelanders themselves, the fornaldar sagas were set in the most distant Scandinavian past, a time of myth and legend. Along with the Saga of the Volsungs, Hrolf's Saga is the best known of these tales of ancient times. These two texts, which are similar in many ways, are major examples of a large genre of storytelling which was popular in medieval Iceland. Both the Volsung story, concerned with Sigurd the dragon slayer and his family, and Hrolf's Saga combine legendary, mythic and Romance traditions which were known beyond the sh.o.r.es of Scandinavia. Containing many international folktale motifs, both sagas derive in part from older heroic poetry, and each contains traces of the mythology of the G.o.d Odin. Both sagas have a similar social theme: the tragedy of strife among n.o.ble kindred. Whereas the Volsung Saga tells mostly of deadly rivalries between individuals from different kingdoms tied together by marriage, Hrolf's Saga tends to focus more on quarrels among siblings within the Danish royal family. It is perhaps not entirely by chance that the opening conflict in Hrolf's Saga involving a royal uncle, mother and nephew triangle (Frodi, his brother Halfdan's wife and Halfdan's avenging sons) reveals a narrative structure reminiscent of that of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a story taken from medieval Danish sources.

Although some of the fornaldar sagas were written later than the better known family and kings' sagas, many of them preserve the memory of ancient historical events and of the people involvedin them. For example, embellished though their stories are with myth and legend, it is probable that the kings mentioned in Hrolf's Saga, such as Frodi, Halfdan, Helgi and Hrolf, were historical chieftains, who lived in Denmark during the Migration Period of the fifth and sixth centuries. Long before Iceland's colonization in the ninth century, the names of these kings were carried to England. They were preserved in Anglo-Saxon written sources which may have depended upon oral tradition from northern Europe carried to Britain at the time of the Germanic invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries. Some of these invaders came from Denmark.

The materials that make up Hrolf's Saga survived the transition from pagan to Christian society as well as the accompanying shift from oral to written culture. Many of the legends incorporated in the saga were transmitted orally as heroic lays during the Viking Age. We know something about one of these poems, 'The Lay of Bjarki' (Bjarkamal), a heroic lay from the mid-tenth century. Although Bjarkamal is no longer fully extant, it is worthwhile to consider the way in which its contents survived independently of Hrolf's Saga.

Significant parts of Bjarkamal are preserved in the work of Saxo Grammaticus, who translated the lay into Latin hexameters in his History of the Danes (Gesta Danorum). Of crucial importance is the fact that a few of the lay's verses are quoted in the Old Icelandic by Snorri Sturluson (11791241), the powerful Icelandic chieftain and man of letters who inserted the verses into his Prose Edda as well as into Saint Olaf's Saga. In both instances these originally oral stanzas were incorporated into the written texts because they possessed the timeless power to move audiences, whether pagan or Christian. The heroic deeds of King Hrolf and his champions had long since become a symbol for courage and the prowess of a warrior in medieval Scandinavian culture.

According to Snorri in Saint Olaf's Saga, Bjarkamal was recited on the morning of the important battle of Stiklestad in 1030. The Christian king of Norway, Saint Olaf, ordered his personal skald, the Icelander Thormod Kolbrun's-poet, to rouse the king's army, inciting it to battle against his pagan foes by reciting the opening verses of Bjarkamal. These were the same verses that Bodvar Bjarki was said to have sung at Hleidargard half a millennium earlier when inciting King Hrolf's warriors to stand firm in their last battle: The day has arisen,

the c.o.c.k's wings resound.

Time is for thralls

to get to their work.

Awake now, be awake,

closest of friends,

all the best

companions of Adils.

Har the Hard-griper,

Hrolf the Bowman,

good men of n.o.ble lineage,

who never flee.

I wake you not for wine

nor for women's mysteries.

rather I wake you for

the hard game of war.

Skjold and the Skjoldung Dynasty: The Legendary Past.

Hrolf Kraki was a Skjoldung, a scion of one of the foremost dynasties of ancient Scandinavia. Hundreds of years after this Danish royal house of the Migration Period had pa.s.sed from the scene, both its origin and its membership remained subjects of intense interest and sharp debate throughout the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon worlds. Indeed, the legends about the Skjoldungs were a facet of shared cultural ident.i.ty throughout the North. According to Sven Aggesen, a Danish monk who wrote late in the twelfth century a Latin history of the Danish kings, the dynasty's founder was called Skjold 'Shield' because 'his excellent defence tirelessly protected all the borders of the kingdom'. Hrolf's Saga is the princ.i.p.al surviving source of the story regarding this famous dynasty.

Remnants of the Icelandic Saga of the Skjoldungs (Skjoldunga Saga), an anonymous history of Denmark's ancient kings, also yield much background information about Hrolf's family. From the founder Skjold, the text traces the line through twenty generations. The account ends with Gorm the Old, a Viking Age king who died around the year 940 at the dawn of the historical era in the North. The Saga of the Skjoldungs is one of the earliest written sagas of whose existence there is evidence. It may have been already on parchment before 1200, which would mean that it originated in the period just at the start of saga writing in Iceland. We do know that a saga about the Skjoldungs existed in some form in the 1220s, when Snorri Sturluson relied on it as a source for sections of his Prose Edda. Unfortunately, the original text was lost in the seventeenth century, but a sixteenth-century Latin summary still exists. Numerous authors and historians from the early thirteenth to the seventeenth century used the saga as a source for their writings which, together with the Latin summary, make it possible to reconstruct a substantial part of the original.

The Saga of the Skjoldungs would appear to preserve very old traditions. It a.s.serts, for instance, that the Skjoldung family was of divine origin, descended from 'Scioldus, the son of a certain Odinus, who is called by the common people Othinus'. In a manner acceptable to Christians, the Skjoldung text cloaked this connection with the G.o.d by describing Odin as a powerful man who originally came from Asia. In claiming descent from Odin, the Saga of the Skjoldungs relies on Norwegian tradition, which differs from information offered by Danish medieval commentators. The differing medieval interpretations of the origin of the family are evidence of embryonic national sentiment. Most of the Danish commentators, including Saxo Grammaticus, traced the family's royal origin from a mythic founder named Dan. The Danish view notwithstanding, the Icelandic/Norwegian version of the story preserved in the Saga of the Skjoldungs is certainly older. Snorri Sturluson, who relied on several sources including oral story and verse, corroborates the genealogy. The claim of divine descent from Odin is by no means unique to the Skjoldungs. Such claims were part of a pattern widespread among Germanic dynasties. Other legendary/mythic houses, such as the Volsungs and their descendants, Norway's medieval dynasty, likewise traced their lineage in whole or in part to the father of the G.o.ds.

Awareness of the fame of the Skjoldungs' first human founder allows the modern reader to form an idea of the extent of the legendary material that surrounded Hrolf's family in the earlier and later Middle Ages. Writing in Denmark in the twelfth century, Saxo Grammaticus described Skjold as a just and righteous ruler who possessed extraordinary strength. As evidence of his youthful prowess, Saxo reports Skjold's boyhood encounter with a menacing bear: In his youth, Skjold won fame among his father's huntsmen by defeating a huge beast, an extraordinary feat that foretold the future quality of his courage. He had requested permission from the guardians who were carefully raising him to watch the hunting, when he met a bear of exceptional size. Although Skjold was unarmed, he nevertheless succeeded in tying the bear up with his belt, and then he gave it to his companions to kill.

Skjold also connects Hrolf's Saga and Beowulf. Skjold is called Scyld Scefing in Beowulf and is noted there as a prominent ancestor. Beowulf opens with an account of the miraculous origin of the Danish dynasty, telling how Scyld Scefing, while still a child, was from some unspecified place mysteriously set adrift in a small boat. Carried over the sea to Denmark, Scyld Scefing arrived unenc.u.mbered by any previous ties. By force of character and strength of arms, Scyld rose to a position of great power.

Although not exactly parallel to the biblical story, the tale of the child from across the water is a widespread motif that at once recalls the story of Moses. Perhaps in part because of this connection, the account of Scyld's mysterious arrival did not die out in Anglo-Saxon times; instead, it continued to arouse interest in England after the Norman conquest. According to William of Malmesbury who in the early twelfth century wrote a History of the Kings of the English (Gesta Regum Anglorum), the epithet Scefing, 'of the sheaf', was given to the boy by the people who found his boat washed up on the sh.o.r.e because 'a handful of grain' accompanied the sleeping child. The founder of the Danish royal dynasty was thus linked with two symbols of successful kingship: the shield, representing the protection of military strength, and the sheaf, suggesting the fertility of the land.

In Iceland, by the period of saga writing, the Skjoldungs' fame had acquired a new venue. Prominent Icelandic families, presuming to be of distant royal descent, now claimed the aura of the family's divine origin. This 'ancestral' connection with the Skjoldungs is a factor that may have contributed to the ongoing interest in the dynasty and especially in Hrolf, its most famous king. The mixture of influences contributing to Icelandic self-ident.i.ty during the saga-writing era can be seen in the example of the powerful Oddaverjar family from the south of Iceland. Among those identified as family ancestors in a twelfth-century genealogy called Forefathers' List (Langfeatal), are the biblical Adam, the kings of Troy (including Priam), the G.o.d Odin, as well as a number of the Skjoldung kings, among them Halfdan, Helgi, Hroar and Hrolf Kraki. At the very least the Skjoldungs were thought to be worthy of good company.

The Icelandic fascination with the Skjoldungs and in particular with King Hrolf is attested to by still another major Icelandic text. The Book of Settlements (Landnamabok), written princ.i.p.ally in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, gives information about Iceland's first settlers. Among its many entries it tells a curious story about one of Iceland's original settlers, who, around the year 900, entered the by then ancient grave mound of King Hrolf and his warriors. Before coming to Iceland this colonist, named Skeggi of Midfjord, raided as a Viking in the Baltic. While in Denmark, he broke into Hrolf's grave mound, where he found more than just the king's treasure and remains. Skeggi stole Hrolf's sword Skofnung, Hjalti's axe and other valuables. Skeggi, however, went too far when he tried to steal Bodvar's famed sword, Laufi. Bodvar, still on watch after all those centuries, attacked Skeggi, and the situation was perilous for the grave robber until King Hrolf rose to his defence. With that powerful a.s.sistance, Skeggi escaped, taking the treasures with him. Did the medieval Icelanders believe such stories? It is hard to say. The concept that the dead live on in their burial mounds is well known in Icelandic lore, usually but not exclusively in descriptions of places distant from Iceland.

Whatever the medieval Icelanders' belief was in stories of the living dead, the sword Skofnung had a history of its own half a millennium after Hrolf's death. In Iceland Skeggi lent Skofnung to the poet Kormak for use in a duel. The sword was returned and later Skeggi's son lent Skofnung to his kinsman Thorkel, the fourth husband of Gudrun in Laxdla Saga. Their son Gellir took the sword with him on a pilgrimage to Rome. Gellir died on his way home (c. 1073) and was buried at Roskilde (Hroar's spring), the town adjacent to Lejre from where the sword was first taken. Knowledge of Skofnung ends at this point.

Archaeology and the Legendary Hleidargard.

According to Hrolf's Saga, the seat of the Skjoldung dynasty was Hleidargard. Gard means courtyard, farm, estate or stronghold and the Icelandic information about Hleidargard corresponds to information from medieval Denmark. As early as the twelfth century, Danish historians a.s.sociated the legendary Hleidr with the small village of Lejre on the central Danish island of Sjaelland. Lejre, a site with a long history of prehistoric habitation, lies a short distance inland from Roskilde. It is surrounded by Stone Age and Bronze Age mounds and there are many indications of Iron Age habitation.

There is little doubt that in the early Middle Ages Hleidr was a centre of power, and, although there is no sure proof, it has often been surmised that it was the site of Heorot, the Danish hall to which Beowulf came, or a similar royal dwelling. In any event, both Hrolf's Saga and Beowulf treat the state of the king's hall as an indication of royal strength. In Beowulf the fiend Grendel ravages Heorot, whereas in the saga a troll-like dragon comes to Hleidargard, destroying the king's peace.

Following earlier, sometimes romantic investigations, systematic archaeology began at Lejre in the 1940s. Major finds were discovered in 19868 when excavations under the leadership of the Danish archaeologist Tom Christensen uncovered traces of a huge (48.3 meters in length by 11.5 meters in width), possibly royal, Viking Age hall. Dated by radiocarbon to the mid-ninth century, the hall stands partially on top of an earlier hall of similar size and construction, from around the year 660 AD. Because of the way the two structures sat, one on top of the other, the decision was made to concentrate on the better preserved and more accessible Viking Age building, diminishing somewhat our knowledge of the older hall. A small number of artifacts that were Ill.u.s.tration 1. Interior of the reconstructed ninth-century Great Hall at Lejre.

Excavations led by the Danish archaeologist Tom Christensen uncovered the remains of two halls built successively on the same spot. These huge buildings, one from the mid-seventh-century Migration Period, the other from the ninth-century Viking Age, stood at the centre of a settlement. Pictured above is a reconstruction of the interior of the Viking Age hall. On both sides against the walls are tiered side benches where people sat and slept at a.s.signed places. At mealtimes, tables were placed in front of the benches. In the centre of the floor are stones for the fire. The unusually high ceiling allowed smoke to rise and escape through ports at each end of the roof. The steeply pitched roof was supported by two interior rows of ma.s.sive timbers or 'posts', whose size may be judged by comparison with the man at centre right and the door at the far end.

Ill.u.s.tration 2. Reconstruction of the ninth-century Great Hall at Lejre (43.3 metres in length) A ma.s.sive wooden building, this princely Viking Age dwelling covered approximately 500 sq. metres. The largest hall thus far found in Scandinavia, its size can be judged from the man entering the door toward the middle right. The gables at either end of the curved roof ridge were probably ported to let smoke escape. The end view (Ill.u.s.tration 3) details the shingled roof construction and the covered walkway under the eaves of the roof.

found in and around the site corroborate the dating of the great halls and the surrounding settlement to the period from 600 to 900.

The oldest of the halls appears just a little too young to be identified with Beowulf's Heorot or Hleidargard of Hrolf's Saga. It is, however, possible that these halls replaced an older structure in the vicinity, whose remains have been obscured or have yet to be found. The large nearby burial mound called Grydehj, 'Pot Mound', is evidence of earlier chieftains being connected with the site. Dated by radiocarbon and artifacts, including gold threads and pieces of bronze, to approximately AD 550, the Grydehj mound was a rich burial. It contained one of the few princely graves known from the Migration Period in Denmark and was most likely erected for a person of considerable political power.

The presence of a ninth-century hall at Lejre may also have been a strong influence on the reinvigoration, in the Viking period, of older legends about the site. Medieval literary accounts preserve the memory of Lejre's social and political prominence during the Viking Ill.u.s.tration 3. End view (11.5 metres in width) Ill.u.s.tration 4. Cross section of the Viking Age hall Much of the archaeological evidence for the hall comes from the remains of the 'post holes'. These were pits that anch.o.r.ed the lower ends of the ma.s.sive interior vertical timbers and the smaller angled exterior 'raking posts' that supported the ends of the roof and walls. See the subterranean portion of ill.u.s.tration 4.

Age. For example, the German chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg knew Lejre as an important capital and pagan cult site. In 1015 he wrote the following description of Lejre based on information learned earlier in 934 when, the German Emperor Henry I had invaded Denmark: I have heard strange stories about their sacrificial victims in ancient times, and I will not allow the practice to go unmentioned. In one place called Lederun (Lejre), the capital of the realm in the district of Selon (Sjaelland), all the people gathered every nine years in January, that is after we have celebrated the birth of the Lord, and there they offered to the G.o.ds ninety-nine men and just as many horses, along with dogs and hawks.

The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki and Beowulf.

The Anglo-Saxons were well aware that their own ancestry derived, at least in part, from the Danes. It is therefore not surprising that the Ill.u.s.tration 5. Archaeological plan of the two Great Halls at Lejre from the seventh and ninth centuries Remains of the ninth-century Viking Age hall, in grey, sit over a less well-preserved seventh-century Migration Period hall, in black. Clearly visible are the outline of the walls and the rows of post holes from both interior supporting posts and exterior raking posts. The two halls, although separated by several centuries, appear to have been of very similar construction. The Viking Age hall reused a row of external raking post holes (marked by an arrow) from the older building. Incorporating existing post holes greatly simplified the construction of the new building and suggests that the later hall was built shortly after the demolition of the earlier one. The archaeology presents a picture of continuous habitation between at least two periods of ma.s.sive construction. The site shows much evidence of repair over the centuries and some post holes were reused perhaps as many as five times. Cow, sheep and pig bones found in post holes from the oldest hall carbon-14 date to around the year 660. Remnants of bone from the Viking Age building date to c. 890. (All ill.u.s.trations by permission, Tom Christensen, Roskilde Museum) earliest accounts of the characters in Hrolf's Saga come from Anglo-Saxon England, where writing in Roman letters had been adopted in the seventh century, several centuries earlier than in Scandinavia. For the Anglo-Saxons, the kings of Norse legend represented the heroic era of their own history. This trans-North Sea connection is made especially clear in the poem Widsith, written perhaps as early as the seventh century, though it may be later. Widsith is shaped to resemble the song of a wandering Anglo-Saxon bard, unfolding his knowledge of the Germanic heroic age. The poet tells of Hrothgar (Hroar) and Hrothulf (Hrolf) and, in agreement with the genealogy of Hrolf's Saga, calls them uncle and nephew. According to the poem, these chieftains ruled for many years in peace at Heorot, overcoming their foes.

Both Hrothulf/Hrolf and Hrothgar/Hroar also appear in Beowulf, and a comparison shows some differences between the Old English and Icelandic stories. In Hrolf's Saga Hroar is a notable figure, though a secondary one, ruling over the northern English kingdom of North-umberland until forced into a disastrous conflict. In Beowulf, King Hrothgar is a character of central importance. He is the builder of the magnificent hall Heorot, the object of the monster Grendel's depredations. Moreover, Hrothgar, as in Widsith, is king of the Danes. The poet of Beowulf hints darkly, however, that there will be strife among the kinsmen: 'their peace still held, each one to the other was true'. When Hrothgar's wife, having no real choice, commends her sons to her nephew Hrothulf, she fears that he will do them harm. Although the stories are somewhat different, the theme of betrayal and danger in the unclenephew relationship exists in both the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian stories.