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I King Æthelstan in the English, Continental and Scandinavian i King Æthelstan in the English, Continental and Scandinavian Traditions Of the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries Angela Marion Smith Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds Institute for Medieval Studies June 2014 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Angela Marion Smith to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2014 The University of Leeds and Angela Marion Smith iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I wish to thank my supervisors, Dr Mary Swan, Dr Alaric Hall and Dr William Flynn for their unstinting professional support and encouragement. Their scholarship has enabled me to search and think more widely around the subject, opening up new ideas and providing further ideas for research. Without their guidance and support this thesis would never have been completed. I also wish to thank Professor Andrew Wawn, Professor Ian Wood and Professor Catherine Karkov for their encouragement and advice at the beginning of this journey which greatly helped me to have the confidence to proceed and to think positively about the future. I am grateful to Professor Birgit Sawyer for allowing me to have access to unpublished material on Saxo Grammaticus and to Professor Simon Keynes for use of his lecture material on Æthelstan‘s charters. My thanks also goes to Gareth Williams who made arrangements for me to spend a splendid day studying the Æthelstan coins in the British Museum and kindly dealt with all my queries. Finally I would like to thank family, friends and colleagues for their continuing encouragement and interest. There were times when they were a very lifeline and helped ensure I remained positive even when the going was tough! iv ABSTRACT Using close textual analysis, this thesis has identified similarities and differences in the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan, is depicted in narrative sources from England, the Continent and Scandinavia during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries; how historical, cultural, and literary contexts influenced their writers and their patrons and how literary analysis might contribute further to historical understandings of Æthelstan and his reign. Central to my analysis are the concepts of the sources as textual and visual narratives, deriving contemporary meaning from their intertextuality with other sources and fulfilling a function of recording and creating social memories for their own time and for the future. The thesis does not argue for the historical veracity of any one version over another but for the individual narrative ‗voices‘ to be heard and understood as part of their own historical, national and contemporary backgrounds. Based on my literary analysis of the texts I have questioned some generally held historical interpretations, suggested some alternative interpretations of my own and identified further areas for research. The thesis demonstrates that there are similarities but also significant differences in the way Æthelstan is depicted both between and within the English, Continental and Scandinavian traditions. It identifies a number of narratives within the sources that provide the basis for further research on Æthelstan: his Carolingian ambitions, his role as foster-father to Hákon of Norway, the possibility that he had a second coronation to confirm his claim to be King of all Britain and the depictions of him as a king-maker and a friend and ally of the Vikings. v CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………….. ..1 Chapter One: Æthelstan in the English Tradition: The Tenth Century……………. ….17 Chapter Two Æthelstan in the English Tradition: The Anglo-Norman Texts ………….92 Chapter Three Æthelstan in the Continental Tradition…………………………………..192 Chapter Four Æthelstan in the Scandinavian Tradition…………………………………245 Conclusion………………………………………………………………..329 Bibliography………………………………………………………………349 1 INTRODUCTION Athelstan deserves study. He was the opener of the door: he made much possible that he never lived to see. We must do our best to pick up such fragmentary notices of him as time has spared, and add them to the meagre chronicle of his victories in war.1 This quotation from Joseph Armitage Robinson identifies one of the key contributions Robinson made to historical research methodology. Through his work Robinson provided an example of how a study across sources can provide a more rounded picture of a person or event. His footnotes bear clear witness to the care he gave to researching and bringing together material from different sources. Robinson‘s analysis proved seminal both in its methodology and its content. His challenge to others to research Æthelstan more fully was taken up by other historians, Frank Stenton in his Anglo- Saxon England, David Dumville in his chapter on ‗Æthelstan, First King of England‘ in Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar and, most recently, Sarah Foot in her biography of Æthelstan. Each of these works provides an example of how a cohesive and scholarly analysis of Æthelstan and his reign can be constructed from a wide range of apparently disparate sources.2 In addition, the new interest in Æthelstan which Robinson helped establish resulted in a body of in-depth research into different aspects of his reign, his laws, charters, coins and books.3 Thesis Overview In this thesis I take up Robinson‘s challenge in a different way. I have not attempted a historical study of Æthelstan‘s life and times, nor have I concentrated on analysis of individual sources for one aspect of his reign. Instead I have opted for a literary analysis 1 Joseph Armitage Robinson, The Times of St Dunstan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 6. 2 Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 339-56. David Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992), pp. 141-71. Sarah Foot, Æthelstan the First King of England (London: Yale University Press, 2011). 3 This is admirably illustrated in Anglo-Saxon England: A Bibliographic Handbook, ed. by Simon Keynes (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 2005), pp. 116-19. 2 of how Æthelstan is depicted in sources from three different traditions, the English, the Continental and the Scandinavian. Historical research into Æthelstan has been very dependent on the tenth-century sources from Anglo-Saxon England and the twelfth- century Anglo-Norman texts, with some acknowledgement of, but little detailed comment on, the textual sources from the Continent and from Scandinavia.4 I have given equal weighting to the sources from all three geographical areas and I have extended the time-frame to include written sources from the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This has enabled me to include the later Anglo-Norman historians and the thirteenth-century written saga and history texts from Scandinavia. In this way I have been able to compare how Æthelstan was depicted across three different regions and take a longitudinal view of how he was depicted within each historiographical tradition. My analysis has identified that there were similarities in the ways in which the traditions depicted Æthelstan but also significant differences both between and within traditions. As a result, there is not one depiction of Æthelstan, but many. In my research I have queried some of the generally accepted scholarly interpretations of individual sources for Æthelstan‘s life and suggested alternative ways of understanding them based on codicology, linguistics and literary style. By comparing texts across centuries and across traditions I have identified links between sources which suggest areas for further historical and literary research into tenth-century and later interpretations of Æthelstan as a pro-Carolingian King of all Britain, a king-maker, a foster-father and a friend of Vikings. Review of Relevant Scholarship on Æthelstan The thesis draws on an interdisciplinary range of scholarship to help interpret the sources and their contexts. In particular I have drawn on the researches of Simon 4 On the difficulties of accessing material on Æthelstan, see Foot, Æthelstan, pp.1-9. 3 Keynes into Æthelstan‘s books;5 Catherine Karkov on portrayals of Æthelstan;6 Michael Lapidge7 on the Æthelstan poems; the charter analyses by Peter Sawyer8 and Simon Keynes;9 the work on Æthelstan‘s coins of Marion Archibald and Christopher Blunt,10 and David Rollason‘s11 research on Durham and St Cuthbert and Æthelstan‘s love of relics. In drawing together research from these different academic disciplines I have also identified interrelationships which were not immediately evident within the separate scholarly studies. For example, in Chapter 1 on the tenth-century English tradition, I demonstrate how the interrelationships between charter evidence, chronicle narratives and coin inscriptions suggest that Æthelstan underwent a second ceremony of coronation as King of all Britain. My study of the background to Æthelstan in the Continental and Scandinavian traditions was greatly helped by the work of Philip Grierson on Flanders,12 Karl Leyser13 on the Ottonians and Saxony, Rosamond McKitterick14 on the Carolingians 5 Simon Keynes, ‗King Athelstan‘s Books‘, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 143-201. 6 Catherine, E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 53-83. 7 Michael Lapidge, ‗Some Latin Poems as Evidence for the Reign of Athlestan‘, Anglo-Saxon England, 9 (1981), 61-98. 8 Peter Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal Historical Society, 8 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1968).
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