SOURCE: "Havelok the Dane," in The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1969, pp. 161-72.

In the following excerpt, Mehl praises Havelok the Dane for its emphasis on direct speech, its vivid and elaborate descriptions, its use of a narrator as an intermediary between story and reader, and for its ambitious structure and unity of theme.

… It seems at first sight as if Havelok the Dane and King Horn are only slightly different variations of the same type of tale and they are therefore often grouped together in literary histories. They are both among the earliest Middle English romances, are preserved side by side in the same manuscript (Laud Misc. 108), and have several story-motifs in common. On closer inspection, however, it appears that in structure, theme and narrative technique the two poems are very different from each other and this is why they...