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Anglo-Saxon Queenship in Havelok the Dane

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Anglo-Saxon Queenship in Havelok the Dane _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_articletitle_deel (kopregel rechts, vul hierna in): Peace Weaving and Gold Giving _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 168 Tracy Chapter 6 Peace Weaving and Gold Giving: Anglo-Saxon Queenship in Havelok the Dane Larissa Tracy The late-thirteenth-century Middle English romance Havelok the Dane re- works earlier Anglo-Norman versions of a male-Cinderella tale of exile and re- turn that unites the kingdoms of Denmark and Anglo-Saxon England.* Several critics, namely Robert Allen Rouse,1 have remarked on the elevation of the idea of Anglo-Saxon England in the poem as a model of sound justice enacted by good kings. Matter of England romances, including Guy of Warwick, King Horn, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, and Havelok are particularly concerned with the pre-Conquest English past—the Anglo-Saxon past—the construction of which is an ongoing process of cultural appropriation in these texts.2 Accord- ing to Rouse, this process began from the first moment that William I “stood among the slain Anglo-Saxon nobles after the Battle of Hastings.”3 Despite the Anglo-Saxon setting of these romances, the world of these English heroes is essentially that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with traces of the twelfth-century milieu of their Anglo-Norman sources.4 Thus, the construc- tion of gendered roles in these romances reflects later medieval sensibilities, especially those regarding women, who are generally expected to be passive or subordinate within the action of the poem. Havelok is different. As a hero, Havelok embodies many of the traits associated with his wife’s father, the An- glo-Saxon king Athelwold, an exemplary king, to whom the poem returns time * I am grateful to Asa Simon Mittman for his feedback on aspects of this article and to Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb for their insightful editing and suggestions that make this a stronger piece overall. 1 Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge, 2005) and “English Identity and the Law in Havelok the Dane, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild and Beues of Hamtoun,” Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. C. Saunders (Cambridge, 2005), 69–84. In the same volume see: Rosalind Field, “The King Over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited,” 41–54 and Tony Davenport, “Chronicle and Romance: The Story of Ine and Æthelburgh,” 27–40. See also: Diane Speed, “The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance,” Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. C. Meale (Cambridge, 1994), 135–57. 2 Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 54. 3 Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 1. 4 Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 55. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004408333_008 _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_articletitle_deel (kopregel rechts, vul hierna in): Peace Weaving and Gold Giving _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 Peace Weaving and Gold Giving 169 and again, and the values he represents—justice and “gode lawes” (28). How- ever, Havelok’s wife Goldeboru—Athelwold’s dispossessed heir—is not merely a prop nor a passage to uniting these two kingdoms, unlike many contempo- rary romance heroines. In the poem, Goldeboru is active, intelligent, and re- sourceful. Her body is the locus of legitimate rule in England,5 but her wit and her willingness to both wage war and weave peace make Havelok’s conquest possible. In her concern for the process of law and the restoration of justice to England, Goldeboru echoes the qualities of queenship exhibited by histori- cal women and female figures in Old English poetry who provide a model of female rule unique in Middle English romance that is grounded in a reverence for the Anglo-Saxon past. Havelok the Dane, composed between 1295 and 1310,6 reflects a sense of Eng- lish justice in its portrayal of the hero and heroine and the punishment meted out to the usurping tyrants who interfere in the lives and happiness of Havelok and Goldeboru. It is a product of the twelfth-century historiographic tradition that created heroes and heroines out of historical (or at least legendary) fig- ures. National histories could take several forms—chronicles, romances, gestes, and hagiography—and were variously produced in vernaculars and Latin. The Middle English Havelok survives only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108, fols. 204r–219v, but there are earlier incarnations of Havelok’s story.7 At least two Anglo-Norman texts record the deeds of this Dane: Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (ca. 1135–40) and the Anglo-French Lai d’Haveloc (ca. 1190–1220).8 Gaimar’s Estoire is a legendary history largely adapted from 5 Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 154. 6 This range derives from specific events in the poem: Roxburgh (l. 139) was not in English hands until 1295, a reference to the 1301 parliament at Lincoln (l. 1178), a writ from Edward I dated 1295 about the availability for military service of men in Huntingdonshire (l. 2559). Stephen H. A. Shepherd, ed., Middle English Romances (New York, 1995), 7 n. 7, 34 n. 7, and 64 n. 2. G. V. Smithers suggested the range in “Four Notes on Hauelok,” So meny people lon- gages and tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. M. Benskin and M. Samuels (Edinburgh, 1981), 191–209. He ended it at 1310, the date of Rauf de Bohun’s version of the Brut, but paleographical evidence from the surviving manuscript has proven difficult to pin down beyond the late-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries. See: Thomas Liszka, “Talk in the Camps: On the Dating of the South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108,” The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. K. Bell and J. Couch (Leiden, 2011), 31–50. 7 Fragments of another variation do survive in Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 4407 suggesting that this romance circulated in other forms, and potentially other locations. All quotations from Havelok are from The Lay of Havelok the Dane, ed. W. Skeat, EETS e.s. 4 (London, 1868; repr. Woodbridge, 2008). Line numbers are given in parentheses. 8 Speed, “The Construction of the Nation,” 150. Thorlac Turville-Petre also gives a thorough account of the earlier versions of the Havelok story and its transmission in England the .
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