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Havelok the Dane
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| Text name: | Havelok the Dane |
| Alternative names: | Harkeneth to me good man; The Lay of Havelok the Dane |
| Content: | The narrator welcomes his audience and asks for a glass of ale (ll. 1-16). The tale commences. King Athelwold of England, a just and virtuous king who is about to die, decrees that his daughter Goldborow should be raised by Earl Godric until she is old enough to marry and rule England (ll. 17-239). However, after Athelwold's death, Earl Godric breaks his oath, imprisons Goldborow and rules England alone (ll. 240-337). At the same time, a parallel situation unfolds in Denmark. Moribund King Birkabein has three adolescent children, two daughters and a son, Havelok. The king entrusts his kingdom to Earl Godard until the children become old enough to rule Denmark. But like Godric, Godard betrays the king's trust after his death. He brutally slaughters the two daughters, charges fisherman Grim with murdering Havelok, and rules Denmark alone. Grim eventually recognizes Havelok as the rightful heir of Denmark, lies to Earl Godard about having killed him, and flees with his family to England (ll. 338-732). Havelok grows up as part of Grim's family, learns the delivery trade selling Grim's fish for silver, and becomes extraordinarily tall and strong. During a drought, Grim sends Havelok away because he can better fend for himself than be fed by him. In Lincoln, Havelok gets hired by a cook as a delivery boy (ll. 733-908). All of England's nobility come to Lincoln for a parliament. Havelok takes part in a stone-throwing game, beats all the other competitors, and gets a reputation as a strong and powerful man. Godric notices Havelok and decides to arrange a marriage between him and Goldborow, intending to deprive her of her claim to the throne by associating her with a peasant. Despite Goldborow's protests and Havelok's reservations, the two are forced to marry (ll. 909-1180). At night, Goldborow recognizes Havelok as the rightful heir of Denmark. Havelok has a dream in which he presents the kingdom of Denmark at Goldborow's feet. In the morning, Havelok, Goldborow and Grim's three sons make arrangements to reclaim the kingdom of Denmark for Havelok (ll. 1181-1444). There is a gap of 180 lines. A Danish nobleman, Ubbe, shelters Havelok. Ubbe recognizes Havelok as the rightful king of Denmark and pledges his allegiance. Havelok receives the support of many Danish lords. He then defeats Godard, who is condemned as a usurper to be flayed and hanged (ll. 1625-2487). Havelok now invades England. After a long battle, Godric is vanquished. The English accept Havelok and Goldborow as their rulers and sentence Godric to death (ll. 2488-2855). Havelok rewards all of his friends. He remains happily married with Goldborow and has fifteen children with her, who all become kings and queens. Havelok is now king of both England and Denmark, and rules honorably for sixty years (ll. 2856-3001). |
| Genre/subjects: | romance, tale, Matter of England |
| Dialect of original composition: | Northern "As the poem is full of local interest as regards the city of Lincoln, it is generally agreed that the dialect in which it was originally written was that of Lincolnshire" (Skeat 1902: xxv). There is "solid evidence for the original version having been composed in Lincolnshire" (McIntosh 1976: 36). "The language of Hav. is English of Lincolnshire, quite possibly of a man of Lincoln itself" (Smithers 1987: lxxxix). |
| Date of original composition: | 1170-1310 Opinions regarding the date of the archetype of The Lay of Havelok the Dane differ widely. Liszka (2011: 48-9) provides a useful graphical summary of the dates of composition that different scholars have proposed. The different views can be put into one of the following three groups: (i) early composition, c. 1170-1230 Meyer-Lindenberg (1968) makes the most elaborate case for an early origin of Havelok. He argues that Havelok's misfortune represents the suffering of King Henry II's son Arthur under King John. Thus the poem may have been composed between 1203, when Arthur died, and 1216, the year of King John's death. The poem makes references to Scottish Roxburgh as an English town in two places (ll. 139 and 265). ... hise baruns, riche and poure, Fro Rokesburw al into Dovere, '... his barons, rich and poor // from Roxburgh to Dover', l.139 Al Engelond to faren thorw Fro Dovere into Rokesborw. 'to go through all England // from Dover to Roxburgh', l. 265 The text mentions a parlament at Lincoln in l. 1006/7 and l. 1180. There was an actual parliament in Lincoln in 1226 (van der Gaaf 1903: 319), which may point to the original date of composition. An early date of composition has not found wide acceptance. The pieces of evidence seem weak individually and incompatible with each other. (ii) late composition, c. 1270-1290 Skeat's (1868) edition indicates in its title his belief that Havelok was "composed in the reign of Edward I [1272-1307], about A.D. 1280." Perhaps his date is the average of 1270 to 1290, suggested by Madden (1828), the first editor of the poem. There is an Anglo-Norman Chronicle called The Oldest Version of the Prose Brut. The text includes a summary of the story of Havelok, which according to Brie (1903, cited in Smithers 1987: lxv) shares features with the Middle English version. The earliest manuscript of the prose Brut ends with the annal for 1272. From this, Jack (1977) concludes that Havelok must have been composed by 1272 or soon thereafter. The language of Havelok accords well with the late thirteenth century. A comparison with Handlyng Synne, which was written in a dialect comparable to that of Havelok in the early fourteenth century, shows that the former text is linguistically more innovative than the latter. "The difference in grammatical usage [between the Lay of Havelok and that of the Handlyng Synne] is very clearly marked. I think it follows that, if the two poems were written in the same dialect, the Lay must have been originally written at a considerably earlier date [than c. 1300]" (Skeat 1902: xxvi). There are many signs of language mixture and copying traces in the early fourteenth century manuscript witness. "It is likely that our copy is, at least, the fourth in descent from its original" (Skeat 1902: xxvi). A date of c. 1270-1290 would allow for a sufficiently long time of manuscript transmission for these features to arise. The conjecture of a mid-thirteenth century point of origin of the Havelok tale is defensible and a fair number of scholars believe it to be accurate. However, it would require that the mention of a parlament at Lincoln merely refers to a fictional event elaborating on the story's requirement to assemble England's nobility in Havelok's place of residence. It also makes it difficult to account for the reference to Roxburgh as an English town. Turville-Petre (1994: 127) offers an explanation for this writing that "there is no reason to assume that Roxburgh was (or had recently been) in English hands at the time of writing. The poet is indeed saying that it was a part of the England of are dawes ['earlier days', l. 27], and therefore perhaps implying that it should still be." (iii) very late composition, c. 1290-1310 Smithers (1987: lxiv-lxxiii, "VI. The Date of Composition") makes one of the strongest cases for a very late composition of Havelok. He suggests that the references to Roxburgh as an English town points to an "anterior limit of 1295 or 1296" (ibid.: lxiv) for the poem's composition, when the town fell into English hands during the Great Cause, a tumultuous period that saw fierce competition for the Scottish throne. It is not implausible that the parliament at Lincoln mentioned in the text in l. 1007 and l. 1180 refers to the actual parliament held at that city in 1301 (ibid.: 125, note for line 1179-80). If true, this would push the terminus post quem for the text's original even further back to 1301. There exists an Anglo-Norman prose chronicle called Le Petit Bruit by Rauf de Bohun, which according to its author was composed in 1310. It contains a passage (folio 6v) that shows striking similarities to the Middle English Havelok tale, including identical names of the main characters (the relevant passage is printed ibid: xxvii-xxviii). Therefore, the Anglo-Norman scribe is very likely to have been familiar with the English version of Havelok and 1310 may function as the terminus ante quem for its composition. A date of composition between c. 1295-1310 is also a reasonable estimate for the composition of the poem and many scholars believe it to be correct. It combines the evidence from both the references to Roxburgh as an English city as well as to a parliament at Lincoln as historical facts. However, it does not account for the relative linguistic conservativeness of the text and it leaves "an uncomfortably narrow range of years within which to place it, given the fairly substantial textual history implied by the copy in MS. Laud Misc. 108." (Smithers 1981: 201). Based on its linguistic conservativeness and the fact that most estimates do at least allow for a mid to late thirteenth century origin, the text was grouped into PCMEP period 2a (1250-1300). |
| Suggested date: | 1290 |
| PCMEP period: | 2a (1250-1300) |
| Versification: | couplets, two-line, aa for some comments on the metre, see Skeat (1868: xliv), "§28. On the Metre of Havelok." |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1114 (IMEV), 1114 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 1795 |
| Wells: | 1.5 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | Havelok |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Skeat, Walter W. 1868. The lay of Havelok the Dane: composed in the reign of Edward I. about A.D. 1280. EETS e.s. 4. London: N. Trübner & Co. 1-86. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108 (SC 1486), ff. 204r-219v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME Manuscripts of the West Midlands 1300-1475 (Part 2, item 1) Digitization of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108 |
| Manuscript dialect: | (Northern) East Midlands "A [=Bodl. Laud Misc. 108] is written in a kind of Middle English which in all main essentials is characteristic of Norfolk." The scribe of A may have been "a Norfolk man; [or] he may simply have perpetuated in his copy Norfolk features already present in some version of the poem underlying his own"(McIntosh 1976: 36). "The relatively advanced accidence of Hav. is of an E.Midl. type, in a Northerly variety. It has things in common with that of the Peterborough Chronicle, Orm, and Chaucer – notably the virtually uniform -es as the pl. ending of nouns" (Smithers 1987: lxxxix). |
| Manuscript date: | s. xiv-in The relevant part of the manuscript was written by a "hand of the early fourteenth century" (Smithers 1987: xii). The manuscript is from "c. 1300-1320" (Wells 1916: 13). |
About the file:
| File name: | M2a.Havelok |
| ID: | Havelok,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 17,394 |
| Token count: | 1,345 |
| Line count: | 2,823 (3,001 lines in edition, plus 1 extra line in l. 547, plus 1 extra line for the final "amen", minus 180 lines for a one-folio lacuna between ll. 1,444 and 1,625. The additional line inserted in l. 547 reads He thriste in his muth wel faste and is taken from the fragment manuscript Cambridge Add. 4407. The ID line count does not include this line.) |
Other:
| General notes: | See Smithers, for some comments on phonology (1987: lxxv-lxxix), accidence / morphology (ibid.: lxxix-lxxxiii), vocabulary and spelling (ibid.: lxxxiii-lxxxix). |
| Remarks on parses: | The parse profited greatly from the glossaries provided in Madden (1828), Singer's remarks on this glossary (Singer 1829), Skeat (1868) and Smithers (1987). The line breaks follow the two-line rhyming scheme as in Skeat's (1868) edition. ll. 27-30 ... a king [...], // That in his time were gode lawes // He dede maken The syntactic relations are unclear. Glossed literally, this means "... a king [...] // who in his time were good laws // He did make." The parse assumes a token boundary between were and gode. The meaning of the first token is now odd and the second token crosses a line boundary. Nevertheless, this seems to be the best way to resolve the syntactic complexitive. "a king [...] who lived in his time (?). Good laws, he did make." l. 118, 693 wat shal me to rede? The syntax of the idiom to rede is not entirely clear. An empty verb, (BE *), as well as an empty expletive subject *exp* has been introduced into the structure. The sentence could be paraphrased as "What exists there for me as a remedy?" l. 123 Of me self is me rith nowt This is an idiomatic expression (Visser 1963-73, §365), meaning roughly "I don't care about myself." It is parsed with nowt as a quantifier subject and the initial PP as its preposed complement. l. 129-30 And Engelond sho couthe welde, // And don hem of thar hire were queme The second lines is very obscure. It has been suggested that þar is a noun, meaning 'courage, heart, daring' (Singer 1829: 13). Madden (cited ibid.: 29) believes that "for of thar, we should read thar of, thereof or thereby [...]. 'And cause them thereof to be pleased or satisfied with her,'" It is hard to see how were could be the head of a non-finite clause. Skeat (1868: 146) glosses, "adv where (?)". The parse deletes of, which is perhaps a misspelling for ok 'also, as well' and, following Skeat, includes a locative free relative, with an empty expletive subject. The two lines are supposed to mean something like, "And she could rule England, and do so [=rule] them [=her subjects?] as well, where it was pleasing for her." Comment CODEs point out the relevant difficulties. ll. 218-219 make better sense if they are inverted. The ID shows the original as well as the inverted line number in squared brackets. l. 257 Liuen and deyen til that him moucte The syntax of this line seems to be very obscure. The parse corrects him to he "they" and indicates the change as a comment CODE. The meaning of the line is supposed to be "as long as they might live and die." ll. 901-902 þan men haveden holpen him doun // With þe birþene of his croun The participle holpen is assumed to take a non-finite complement clause. It has an empty non-finite marer and an empty verb, (IP-INF (TO *) (VB *) ... ). The intended meaning is roughly, "When men had helped him [to] [take] down the load of his head." |
References
Deutschbein, Max. 1906. Studien zur Sagengeschichte Englands: Die Wikingersagen, Hornsage, Haveloksage, Tristansage, Boevesage, Guy of Warwicksage. Cöthen: O. Schulze.
Jack, George B. 1977. 'That Date of Havelok.' Anglia 95. 20-33.
Liszka, Thomas R. 2011. 'Talk in the Camps: On the Dating of the South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108.' In: Bell, Kimberly & Nelson Couch, Julie (eds.) The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative. Leiden: Brill. 31-50.
Madden, Frederick. 1828. The Ancient English Romance 'Havelok the Dane:' Accompanied by the French Text with an introduction, notes and a glossary. London: Shakespeare Press. (available online)
McIntosh, Angus. 1976. 'The Language of the Extant Versions of Havelok the Dane.' Medium Aevum 45. 36-49. (available online)
Meyer-Lindenberg, Herlint. 1968. 'Zur Datierung des Havelok.' Anglia 68. 89–112.
Singer, Samuel W. 1829. Remarks on the glossary by Sir F. Madden to the antient metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. London: S & R Beatley. (available online)
Skeat, Walter W. 1868. The lay of Havelok the Dane: composed in the reign of Edward I. about A.D. 1280. EETS e.s. 4. London: N. Trübner & Co. (available online)
Skeat, Walter W. 1902. The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (available online)
Smithers, Geoffrey V. 1981. 'Four Notes on Havelok. In: Benskin, Michael & Samuels, Michael L. (eds.) So meny people longages and tonges. Festschrift for Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. 191-201, 203-6.
Smithers, Geoffrey V. 1987. Havelok. Oxford: Clarendon.
Turville-Petre, Thorlac. 1994. 'Havelok and the History of the Nation.' In: Meale, Carol M. (ed.) Readings in Medieval English Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
Van der Gaaf, Wilhelm. 1903. 'Parliaments Held at Lincoln (Havelok l. 1006).' Englische Studien 32. 319-320. (available online)
Visser, Frederick Th. 1963-73. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: Brill.