ABSTRACT
Jacob Langebek (1710-75) held the post of Danish National Archivist, and began the project of editing the Scriptores Rerum Danicarum Medii Ævi, eventually to appear in nine volumes 1772-1834. Although he had not seen Beowulf, he read Wanley’s catalogue entry, item 1 above, carefully enough to draw some original conclusions even from its short citations. In Scriptores: I, 9 (Copenhagen 1772), he comments on the various forms of the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies so far printed, and remarks that while Sceaf is not mentioned by Asser or the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a strange story is told of him by Ethelweard, William of Malmesbury and Simeon of Durham. He then cites the account of the sleeping boy in an oarless boat from William of Malmesbury, adding Ethelweard’s version, the boy in a boat ‘surrounded by weapons’, in footnote p; his versions are virtually identical with those in the footnotes to Chambers 1959:70-1, except that Langebek takes William’s story to refer to Sceaf, not. Sceldius. He then gives what appear to be two conflated versions of the West Saxon royal genealogy from Sceldvea Heremoding to ‘Sceaf who was born in Noah’s ark’ (see Chambers 1959:200-3), and adds the following as a note to Sceldvea in footnote r:
Ethelweard…names this Scyld as the son of Scef. Unless I am mistaken, this is the same Scyld Scefing, of whose posterity was Beowulf a Dane, who made wars against the kings of Sweden, of whom we have an old Anglo-Saxon poem in the Cotton library [cites Hickes, i.e. Wanley, p. 219.]
[On p. 44, footnote e, commenting on ch. 1 of Sven Aggesen’s Historia Regum Danorum, Langebek cites Wanley more fully, including the phrase ex Regia Scyldingorum stirpe ortus, and adds, still in Latin:]
I am surprised that none of the scholars of England has taken the trouble to edit a work of such antiquity, which would infinitely gratify both his own people on account of its poetry, and ours on account of its history.
