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  • Hrothulf:A Richard III, or an Alfred the Great?
  • William Cooke

For far too many students of Beowulf, the notion that Hrothulf usurped the Danish throne after his uncle Hrothgar's death and either killed Hrothgar's sons or drove them into exile seems to remain received dogma, while some still cling to the belief that Hrothulf killed Hrothgar to obtain the throne. But those reconstructions of the story underlying the poem have no good foundation in the text, contradict the Scandinavian traditions that give us our only recourse for elucidating it, and flow from ignorance of succession customs in Anglo-Saxon England and old Germanic kingdoms in general.1 The evidence actually leads to a very different conclusion, which in turn profoundly affects how we should read the court scenes in the first half of the poem.

To appreciate the situation at Hrothgar's court when Beowulf pays his visit, we must begin by understanding that kingship in the ancient Germanic world did not invariably pass from father to son. Kingship was dynastic, in the sense that the right to rule belonged to a particular family, but it was also elective, in that the late king's senior henchmen- his comitatus or gesiþas, who later developed into the magnates of the realm-had the right to choose the member or members of the royal house whom they judged fittest to succeed. If the late king's eldest son was full grown and capable, he had a particularly strong claim to their consideration. But the king had to be the real ruler of the nation in peace and its real leader in war, and accordingly, if he died leaving only sons who were underage, it was virtually certain that the magnates would [End Page 175] pass them over in favor of some older prince of the blood.2 Except for France, this ancient succession custom prevailed in every monarchy of northwestern Europe until the thirteenth or even the fourteenth century.

Examples are easy to find in both English and Scandinavian history. Egbert I of Kent died in 673 and left at least two sons, Eadric and Wihtred; both eventually came to the throne, but Egbert's immediate successor was his brother Hlothhere.3 When Æthelred of Wessex died in 871, the leading men of the realm chose his younger brother Alfred to succeed him, although Æthelred had left at least one legitimate son, Æthelwald, who later disputed the succession with Alfred's son Eadward. 4 Alfred was obviously chosen for the abilities as a war leader that he had already displayed as his brother's lieutenant,5 and it seems likely that Æthelwald was also rejected as underage. Again, when Alfred's grandson Eadmund died in 946, his brother Eadred succeeded in preference to Eadmund's elder son Eadwig, who, however, obtained the crown in 955 when Eadred died.6 King Eadgar, who died in 975, was indeed followed by his two sons Eadward "the Martyr" and Æthelred Unræd, who came to the throne as a youth and a child respectively, but like Heardred in Beowulf they seem to have been chosen only because there was no capable adult male who was closely related to the late king, and the misgivings about having underage kings that the contemporary chroniclers recorded proved to be amply justified.7 When Cnut's son [End Page 176] Harthacnut died in 1042, the magnates convoked some kind of representative assembly at London that awarded the kingship to Eadward the Confessor, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "swa him gecynde wæs."8 Those words most likely mean "as it was lawfully his by right of birth" (cf. Beowulf, 2197b), but the chronicler must have meant only that the birthright to the crown belonged to Eadward's family, the royal house of Wessex, for by primogeniture the true heir was not the Confessor but another Eadward, the son of the Confessor's elder brother Eadmund Ironside, who was then in exile in Hungary.

The crown of Denmark happened to pass from father to adult son in the line of Gorm the Old (d. ca. 950) until Cnut succeeded his brother Harald Sveinsson...

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