Beowulf and Lejre (review)

This is a strange book. It contains a bewildering range of materials—from archaeological reports to critical essays to medieval texts (with translations) to geographical descriptions to accounts of museums and modern reenactment—so the first challenge in reading it lies in determining what the book is about. In some ways there is a simple answer to this question: it is simply a collection of everything that we can currently know about a place called Lejre. As the place itself is of so much interest, there may be little need to rationalize the making of such a collection. Yet the title of the book reveals that some need was felt to rationalize the production of such a lavishly illustrated and lengthy book, and the rationale behind bringing the fraught history of Lejre to the attention of the English-speaking world (as opposed to the Danish-speaking world, which has had the benefit of some of the included publications before) is the argument that Lejre is the real, historical site of Heorot, the hall attacked by the monster Grendel in the Old English poem, Beowulf.

This is not a new argument, as the essays by Niles and Osborn reveal. Many scholars from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Thorkelin, Grundtvig, Chambers, Clark Hall, and Klaeber, among other illustrious names) "have been willing, if pressed, to locate Heorot at Lejre even if with caution" (p. 290). Lately, however, this apparent consensus has not often been acknowledged. Since Tolkien in 1936 famously transformed Beowulf from a source of historical facts to a literary artefact, there has been much less interest in the poem's connections to sixth-century Denmark and much more in its connections to eighth-, ninth, tenth-, and eleventh-century England. Parts I and II of this book provide a corrective for that lack of interest and supply as much evidence for a physical reality behind the poem as modern archaeology can provide: plans of two great halls and their surrounding buildings and monuments, remains of weapons, jewelry, and other artefacts, and descriptions and photos of the surrounding landscape. The technical detail in the six separate contributions (most of which have been published previously) may prove a challenge for literary scholars, but there is no question that the information here is exciting and suggestive for the world of the poem. Much of this evidence is new, based on excavations that concluded in 2005, and thus it is worth considering the old theory again in the light of new information.

For the benefit of those who had not previously considered the bases on which the old theory rested, Part IV of the book contains texts and translations of the texts that mention Lejre and the adventures of the Skjöldung kings that correspond with characters in the Old English poem. These include: Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon, Grottasöngr, The Lejre Chronicle, Sven Aggesen's A Short History of the Kings of Denmark, Skjölfunga saga (in Arngrímur Jónsson's Latin paraphrase), Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes, Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga saga and "Hrolf Kraki and Vögg," and The Saga of Hrolf Kraki. The essays by Marijane Osborn and John D. Niles in Part III not only discuss these texts and their possible connections with Beowulf but also trace the history of previous scholarly (and less scholarly) examinations of them.

Although the writers in this book are careful to acknowledge the absence of direct proof that Lejre is the site of Heorot, the amount of material amassed here seems in itself to form part of the argument for the connection. The problem with accepting an argument based on mass, of course, is that new accounts of the legendary past draw upon old accounts of the legendary past, and, once the idea of Lejre...