ABSTRACT

But I do not wish to go too deeply into the geography and oldest history of the Anglo-Frisians. It is enough, if it is established that at the time of the blooming of their epic poetry, out of which the legends we are treating arise, that is in the fifth century and at the beginning of the sixth, these peoples possessed all those lands later occupied by the East Germanic Danes. But attacks by the Danes breaking out from southern Sweden, of whom the Heaðobeards of Beowulf were a constituent people (in Widsið they are called wicingas, i.e. ON víkingar ‘pirates’), were already taking place in the 5th century and were no doubt one reason for the oppressed Ingvaeonic tribes to leave their islands and emigrate to England. Such an attack was victoriously repelled æt Heorote, Hroðgar’s royal seat, which is to be sought for on Sjælland. That the Heaðobeards are Danes is made probable independently of Saxo’s portrayal by the specifically Danish royal name Froda (Frotho). As Danes cannot now have fought against Danes and as Saxo would certainly not have made the eventually subjected people into Danes, if the victors had really been Danes, Hroðgar’s people must have been West Germanic Ingvaeones. Besides the designation of their king as eodor (frea) Ingwina, ‘lord of the friends of Ing’, ll. 1045, 1320 [1044, 1319 in modern editions], another circumstance falls heavily in the scale for this, which is that not a single name of the Beowulf-Danes bears even one trace of East Germanic origin. Instead they are all pure Anglo-Frisian, following their phonetics and their root-words. And then consider the inner nature of the legends themselves and the character of the people who act in them! It seems to me that there is a monstrously great gap which separates Old English poetry both in material and formal respects from Old Danish, which latter is well enough known to us. Call to mind the coarse stories of Saxo, often verging on crudity, and put them

Lombards, as it is in general alien to the poetry of the Scandinavian peoples. The ruling opinion today, shared even by Müllenhoff, that the English would in their national epic have celebrated the events and heroes of a racially different people is also on general grounds extremely questionable, and Müllenhoff (1889:88) has admittedly not mastered the difficulties which face it. That the Angles and the Saxons are never mentioned at all in Beowulf remains absolutely inexplicable if one does not take the name Dene in this epic as a collective designation of the Ingvaeonic tribes, who at the time of the poem’s action inhabited the districts later taken into their possession by the Danes. [A note extends the remark to The Rune Poem, claiming that ‘East-Danes’ there must mean the Ingworshipping English.] One should not forget that the Beowulf-poem first originated in England and hardly before the 7th/8th century. By that time memory of the old tribal seats and the prehistory of the nation was already very hazy. Probably they still recognised Angul as part of the ancient homeland, but the other ancient sites were almost completely forgotten. In particular almost nothing was known any longer of the one-time stay on the islands of the Kattegat. But the old legends told about events which, although they take place in the English people’s prehistory, nevertheless were said to have been carried out on the Danish islands. That seemed to stand in contradiction of the geographical-historical relationships which were known and current. It was attempted first of all to reconcile this contradiction by making the Engle into Dene. But the matter was not settled by the change of name alone. They went further and sought out a connection of the main characters of the Anglian legend to the Danish royal house of the Skjöldungar. One may suppose that this circumstance provided its immediate cause, that the legendary Anglian royal house of Hroðgar traced itself back to Sceldwa, the son of Sceaf, and therefore had a claim to the name Scildings. So it came about that Hroðgar was made a son of Healfdene, by whom is meant the oldest king of the Danes Halfdan or Haldan, and he received a brother Halga, that is Helgi, the brother of Halfdan. Heoroweard is also a Danish name, carried by a son of Heorogar, the brother of Hroðgar; it corresponds, as Müllenhoff has shown (1889:34 ff.) to the Danish Hyarwarth. But not one of the three Danes plays any role in the Anglian legend, on the epic stage they are nothing but extras, and this exactly proclaims their situation. The connection accepted by Müllenhoff of Hroðwulf, who according to Widsith 45 must be an Anglian king, with Rolf kraki has no support at all apart from the chance agreement of the very common name (Rudolf), and it should not be overlooked that Hroðwulf is never designated as a son of the Halga after all only blackened later on as a result of Danish legend. If one now however equates Hroðgar with the Danish Roe, the so-called founder of Roeskilde, then even the shadow of a proof for this is missing, as the names themselves do not correspond. If anyone asks for an analogue of the shift between Angles and Danes, he can be referred to the Latin Waltharius. There the Franks have only entered in place of the

[Kögel goes on to consider other problems in similar style, including the long-vexed issue of the poem’s mention of Offa.]