Author: Charles Whistler
Release Date: July 7, 2004 [EBook #12847]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of this project gutenberg
EBOOK Havelok the Dane ***
Produced by Martin Robb.
Havelok the Dane: A Legend of Old Grimsby and
Lincoln.
By Charles W. Whistler
Preface.
If any excuse is needed for recasting the ancient
legend of Grim the fisher and his foster-son Havelok
the Dane, it may be found in the fascination of the
story itself, which made it one of the most popular
legends in England from the time of the Norman conquest,
at least, to that of Elizabeth. From the eleventh
to the thirteenth centuries it seems to have been
almost classic; and during that period two full metrical
versions—–one in Norman-French and
the other in English—– were written,
besides many other short versions and abridgments,
which still exist. These are given exhaustively
by Professor Skeat in his edition of the English poem
for the Early English Text Society, and it is needless
to do more than refer to them here as the sources from
which this story is gathered.
These versions differ most materially from one another
in names and incidents, while yet preserving the main
outlines of the whole history. It is evident
that there has been a far more ancient, orally-preserved
tradition, which has been the original of the freely-treated
poems and concise prose statements of the legend which
we have. And it seems possible, from among the
many variations, and from under the disguise of the
mediaeval forms in which it has been hidden, to piece
together what this original may have been, at least
with some probability.
We have one clue to the age of the legend of Havelok
in the statement by the eleventh-century Norman poet
that his tale comes from a British source, which at
least gives a very early date for the happenings related;
while another version tells us that the king of “Lindesie”
was a Briton. Welsh names occur, accordingly,
in several places; and it is more than likely that
the old legend preserved a record of actual events
in the early days of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in
England, when there were yet marriages between conquerors
and conquered, and the origins of Angle and Jute and
Saxon were not yet forgotten in the pedigrees of the
many petty kings.
One of the most curious proofs of the actual British
origin of the legend is in the statement that the
death of Havelok’s father occurred as the result
of a British invasion of Denmark for King Arthur, by
a force under a leader with the distinctly Norse name
of Hodulf. The claim for conquest of the north
by Arthur is very old, and is repeated by Geoffrey
of Monmouth, and may well have originated in the remembrance
of some successful raid on the Danish coasts by the
Norse settlers in the Gower district of Pembrokeshire,
in company with a contingent of their Welsh neighbours.
