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.
This episode does not occur in the English version; but here an attack on Havelok on his return home to Denmark is made by men led by one Griffin, and this otherwise unexplainable survival of a Welsh name seems to connect the two accounts in some way that recalls the ancient legend at the back of both.
I have therefore treated the Welsh element in the story as deserving a more prominent place, at least in subsidiary incidents, than it has in the two old metrical versions. It has been possible to follow neither of these exactly, as in names and details they are widely apart; but to one who knows both, the sequence of events will, I think, be clear enough.
I have, for the same reason of the British origin of the legend, preferred the simple and apposite derivation of the name of "Curan," taken by the hero during his servitude, from the Welsh Cwran, "a wonder," to the Norman explanation of the name as meaning a "scullion," which seems to be rather a guess, based on the menial position of the prince, than a translation.
For the long existence of a Welsh servile population in the lowlands of Lincolnshire there is evidence enough in the story of Guthlac of Crowland, and the type may still be found there. There need be little excuse for claiming some remains of their old Christianity among them, and the "hermit" who reads the dream for the princess may well have been a half-forgotten Welsh priest. But the mediaeval poems have Christianized the ancient legend, until it would seem to stand in somewhat the same relationship to what it was as the German "Niebelungen Lied" does to the "Volsunga Saga."
