In Defence of Böðvarr bjarki

Abstract

For almost two centuries, Böðvarr bjarki has been a household name in Beowulf studies. The exploits of this monster-slaying champion of the Danish king match those of the epic hero at many points, and this has made Bjarki the subject of critical fascination. Many scholars have viewed the correspondences between Beowulf and Bjarki as evidence that certain aspects of Beowulf’s career may have been modelled on existing Scandinavian legend — a view with clear implications for our understanding of the originality of Beowulf. The value of the Bjarki story has also been challenged, largely on the basis that Scandinavian evidence is inconsistent in its presentation of this tradition. This article defends the usefulness of the Bjarki analogue by returning to the Scandinavian source material. It demonstrates that the various versions of the Bjarki story across Old Norse and Latin sources are structurally consistent and point to the existence of a coherent underlying tradition. This reopens the possibility that Beowulf and Bjarki may independently derive from the same legendary archetype.

Beowulf makes no secret of its rich inheritance. The poem sprang from a stock of figures and legends that were current across the Germanic world at the time of its composition. Most of the poem’s main characters, and many of its minor ones, appear in a range of Anglo-Saxon, Continental and especially Scandinavian records. Alcuin’s oft-quoted question ‘quid Hinieldus cum Christo?’ (‘what has Ingeld to do with Christ?’), posed in the context of certain carmina gentilium (‘songs of pagans’) apparently in vogue among certain episcopal circles, indicates that stories surrounding Ingeld, and probably his wider involvement in Scylding legend, were being told in England by the end of the eighth century (Malone, 1959: 2; Wallace-Hadrill, 1971: 121; Bullough, 1993: 93; Garrison, 2005: 238). This picture is corroborated by the appearance of Ingeld alongside Hroðgar, Hroðulf and Heorot in Widsið, a poem which has been recently (re)assigned to the seventh century (Neidorf, 2013a, esp. 178–180). The existence of archaic name-forms such as Scyldwa and Sceldwea in Anglo-Saxon genealogical material would seem to indicate that knowledge of the Scylding dynasty’s famous founder may also have stretched back to the earliest stages of Old English literary production (Fulk, 2007: 128; Neidorf, 2014b: 52), although it is impossible to say what the traditions surrounding Scyld and his dynasty would have looked like in this murky period.

Most of the evidence that Beowulf’s characters had a life outside of the of the epic is furnished by medieval Scandinavian sources concerning the Skjöldungar, or Scyldings. The main players in the epic are to be found here: Healfdene, Hroðgar and Hroðulf appear as Hálfdan, Hróarr and Hrólfr, and Hygelac is present as Hugleikr. Many of the poem’s lesser characters are also represented in Scandinavian sources. The Swedish kings Eadgils, Onela and his father Ohthere bear the names Aðils, Áli and Óttarr. The Beowulf-poet’s allusions to heroes of wider Germanic legend, such as Weland, Sigemund and Eormenric, are also matched in Scandinavian evidence as elsewhere.

The glaring omission in these lists is of course Beowulf himself, the saviour of the Danes, the intermediary between Hreðling, Scylding and Scylfing, and the hero of England’s epic. Of him there are scant few traces outside of the poem. Neidorf (2013b) has convincingly shown on the basis of a certain ‘Biuuulf’ named in the seventh-century core of the Durham Liber Vitae that Beowulf was probably among the stock of heroes known to the early Anglo-Saxons. Before his elevation in the epic poem bearing his name, Beowulf may have been an elite swimmer, renowned for his struggle against the neatly alliterating Breca of the Brondings (Benson, 1970: 20–22; Leneghan, 2020: 120). These tantalising findings aside, few clues about Beowulf’s origins have been recovered from Anglo-Saxon evidence.

We would be in the dark as to the legendary prehistory of Beowulf’s career were it not for the existence of the tradition of Böðvarr, often known simply by his cognomen bjarki ‘little bear’.¹ Accounts of Bjarki’s life are preserved, with certain variations, across medieval Scandinavian sources, both Latin and vernacular. The most well-known material is found in Hrólfs saga kraka (‘the saga of Hrólfr kraki’), a fornaldarsaga (‘saga of ancient time’) attested in a seventeenth-century copy of a manuscript originally dating from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century (Slay, 1960b: 4). Other sources which mention Bjarki’s career include Saxo Grammaticus’ early thirteenth-century Latin history Gesta Danorum (Friis-Jensen & Fisher, 2015: xxxiii–xxxv); an epic cycle of eight rímur or fitts known as Bjarkarímur (‘Bjarki’s rímur) dating from around 1400 (Jónsson, 1904: xxx) and Skjöldunga saga (‘the saga of the Scyldings’), an Old Norse text roughly contemporary with Saxo but now only extant in sixteenth-century Latin paraphrase (North, 1992: 179; Acker, 2007: 4). The parallels between the career of Böðvarr and that of Beowulf are arresting. Like Beowulf, Böðvarr delivers Denmark’s Scylding king from the nocturnal ravages of a pillaging monster. Böðvarr is Norwegian, but he, like Beowulf, arrives in Denmark from among the Gautar, Beowulf’s Geatas. In both Latin and Old Norse accounts, Böðvarr aids Áli, Beowulf’s Onela, in his defeat of Aðils, or Eadgils.

How does one account for the independent existence in Scandinavian tradition of a monster-slayer who comes from Gautland to the succour of a Scylding king, and who aids Aðils in the defeat of Áli? As Beowulf predates the relevant Scandinavian evidence by some centuries, it was once considered natural to explain such similarities as partly or wholly the result of the direct influence of the poem on the story of Bjarki.² The prospect of a poem as difficult and obscure as Beowulf influencing Scandinavian narrative tradition when it vanished from view so quickly in England is hard to envision and has not been seriously entertained for over a century.³ The parallels between Beowulf and Bjarki might then be chalked up to coincidence. However, it is difficult to imagine that the same set of specific accolades accrued to these two heroes by chance. Assuming that the parallels between Beowulf and Bjarki are neither the result of coincidence nor of the arrival of Beowulfian tradition in Scandinavia, the presence in both Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Scylding tradition of a monster-slayer who visits Denmark and fights in Swedish wars would seem to suggest shared derivation from a common tradition — a ‘proto-Bjarki’ — which came to England from its Scandinavian point of origin at some stage antecedent to the composition of Beowulf. This is a view which has been advanced in these same basic terms before (e.g. Sarazzin, 1888: 47; Panzer, 1910: 390, 394–395; Chambers, 1959: 57; North, 1992: 182; Shippey, 2007: 476–477; Fulk et al., 2008: xliii; Niles, 2011: 54–62; Leneghan, 2020: 117; Grant, 2022a: 17–18) and is one which is not difficult to envision considering the deep kinship between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Scylding tradition.

In spite of its Beowulfian resonances, the Bjarki tradition has historically received a ‘checkered reception’ in the critical history of Beowulf (Andersson, 1997: 131). The analogue was gratefully accepted after its discovery by Gísli Brynjúlfsson (1852: 130)⁴ and continued to be endorsed by many into the following century.⁵ However, the value and relevance of the Bjarki material to Beowulf studies has also long been called into question. Its three most vehement opponents to date are Axel Olrik, Oscar Ludvig Olson and Larry D. Benson. So influential were Benson’s criticisms in his 1970 article ‘The Originality of Beowulf’ that the debate has been uncharacteristically quiet for several decades.⁶ These scholars’ arguments for rejecting the usefulness of the Bjarki tradition turn on the same essential point: that the picture of the Geatish warrior who delivers the Scylding hall is only present in a late and derivative witness to the Bjarki tradition, Hrólfs saga kraka, and is not reflected in the other main sources, Saxo’s Gesta Danorum or Bjarkarímur. Benson adds the additional point that Bjarki’s helping Aðils fight against Áli is not present in Hrólfs saga. The Bjarki analogue as traditionally framed represents, in his words, a ‘scholarly reconstruction based on a highly selective use of the later developments of the story’; accordingly ‘only in its latest developments does the Bjarki story look anything like the story of Beowulf’ (Benson, 1970: 17, 19). The echoes of Olrik’s classic observation here are clear: ‘hverken Beovulfs brydekamp i hallen, eller i kæret, eller striden mod ilddragen har nogen væsenlig identitet; men når man tager lidt af dem alle, kan man få en slags lighed med den yngste og sletteste form af Bjarkesagnene’ (Olrik, 1903: 135–6; ‘neither Beowulf’s wrestling match in the hall, nor in the mere, nor the battle with the dragon has any substantial similarity [to Bjarki]; but when one takes a little of them all, one gets a kind of resemblance to the latest and worst form of the Bjarki story’).⁷

Recent scholarship has taken a more favourable view of the Bjarki analogue (Shippey, 2007, 2022; North, 2007: 45–57; Niles, 2011; Grant, 2019; Leneghan, 2020: 114–118; Neidorf, 2023:110–111), but the above arguments still loom large in the debate. Neither of Andy Orchard’s landmark works on Beowulf (1995; 2003) discuss the saga (Leneghan, 2020: 116), even though both contain extensive commentary on the poem’s Scandinavian analogues. A point-by-point assessment of the criticisms of Benson and his predecessors is therefore much needed and long overdue. The present paper responds to this need by evaluating the viability of the arguments fielded by Bjarki’s critics, first regarding the value of the hero’s monster-fights and subsequently his participation in Aðils’ conflict with Áli. It offers a fresh reappraisal of the accounts of Bjarki’s career and considers the shape of the underlying tradition which these sources reflect. Conclusions are then offered regarding the importance of the Bjarki story to our understanding of the origins and development of Beowulf.

Bjarki, Savior of the Scyldings

In considering the central contention of Bjarki’s critics — that the hero’s monster-fight only resembles Beowulf’s own in its latest forms — it will be necessary to revisit the accounts of Bjarki’s slayings at the Scylding hall across Hrólfs saga kraka, Bjarkarímur and Gesta Danorum. The version of the story preserved in the saga is most familiar to Beowulf critics:

Böðvarr, a princeling from Hálogaland in Norway, sets out from Gautland to Hleiðargarðr, the Skjöldungr court, to seek his fame.⁸ In Denmark he meets the parents of a certain man, Höttr, who is being ill-treated at the court, and they implore him to help. Böðvarr arrives at Hleiðargarðr and seats Höttr next to him. He catches a bone cast at Höttr and returns it to its sender, killing him. Hrólfr’s men petition to have Böðvarr put to death, but the king refuses. Hrólfr asks Böðvarr to compensate him for his misdeed by becoming his retainer, which he does. Tension persists between Böðvarr and Hrólfr’s men. As Yule draws near the king’s troops grow dejected. Böðvarr is informed that this is because a winged beast has ravaged the king’s hall for the past two autumns. Böðvarr berates the king’s men for failing to slay it. On the eve of Yule when the monster arrives, the king bids his men make no noise and refrain from attacking the beast. Böðvarr steals away into the night with Höttr and fights the monster. He is hampered by his sword, which will not shift from its scabbard. When he draws it, he manages to slay the beast. Böðvarr forces Höttr to drink some of the beast’s blood. In the scene which follows, Böðvarr stages an elaborate ruse in which he props up the dead beast. Höttr takes the king’s sword, Gullinhjalti, and makes as if to slay it. Convinced of Höttr’s newfound might, the king renames him Hjalti after the sword and accepts him as part of his retinue.

The fourth and fifth rímur of Bjarkarímur present another account of Bjarki’s monster-slayings at Hleiðargarðr. In its circumstantial details this account mirrors Hrólfs saga closely, with the greatest departure being in the nature of the central monster-fight itself:

Bjarki, a prince from Hálogaland, departs from an undisclosed eastern location for Hleiðargarðr to seek his fame. Bjarki meets the mother of Höttr, and she implores him to help her son. As he approaches the hall he kills two guard-dogs. Bjarki is approached by Hrólfr’s men and kills two of them. He manages to push his way into the hall and asks Hrólfr where he might sit. He is allotted a seat next to Höttr. Bjarki catches two ox-bones thrown at Höttr and returns them, killing the senders. Bjarki and Höttr leave the hall without the notice of the king’s retinue. Höttr informs Bjarki of a man-eating she-wolf in the vicinity. It attacks them and Bjarki slays it. He forces Höttr to drink some of its blood, and he swells in might. A roaming bear in the habit of ravaging Hleiðargarðr makes a visitation from its lair. Höttr, newly emboldened, fights the bear with the king’s sword and slays it. Hrólfr grants him the name Hjalti hinn hjartaprúði (‘the Great-Hearted’) and invites him to join his retinue.

Gesta Danorum

Mention is made of Bjarki’s (or Biarco’s) killings at Hleiðargarðr in the second book of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. Saxo’s account diverges significantly from those furnished by Hrólfs saga and Bjarkarímur:

The scene opens at the Scylding hall during the wedding of Agnerus, the son of Ingellus (Ingeld) to Ruta, the daughter of Rolvo (Hrólfr). During the feast, men throw bones at a man known as Hialto (Hjalti). Biarco, who is by his side, is struck by a bone. He casts it back at its sender, maiming him and causing the champions to quit the hall. Agnerus, angered by the disruption to his wedding, challenges Biarco to a sword-duel. The combat is fierce, but Biarco prevails. Agnerus’ champions attempt to avenge him, but Biarco slays them. As he is celebrating his victory, a gigantic bear emerges from the woods. Biarco slays it and enjoins Hialto to drink its blood to increase his might. Through his deeds, Biarco wins the affection of Rolvo and is given his daughter in marriage.

The assumption which is key to the criticism of Olrik (1903: 135), Olson (1916: 49, 59) and Benson (1970: 17) is the primacy of Saxo’s work. According to their assessment it is the earliest extant witness to the Bjarki tradition, and therefore contains the purest and most essential narrative which was augmented by unoriginal features in later versions. As Benson suggests, Saxo’s ‘is the earliest form of the Bjarki story’, which ‘picked up other details as it was transmitted from one poet to the other in the later Middle Ages’ (1970: 17). This view assumes the existence of a single, authoritative version of the Bjarki tradition preserved reliably and in its entirety by Saxo, and which experienced a series of conscious changes or corruptions in the two centuries prior to the emergence of the Icelandic versions. This position has not gone unquestioned (Jónsson, 1904: xxvii; Lawrence, 1909: 232–233; Panzer, 1910: 384–385; Chambers, 1959: 58–59; Niles, 2011: 54–55, n. 37) and is complicated by two chief factors. Firstly, accounts which are contemporary or near-contemporary with Gesta Danorum, namely Skjöldunga saga and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, preserve details which are not in agreement with Saxo’s account. This suggests either that there were varying traditions surrounding Bjarki and/or that Saxo’s account did not contain the full tradition.⁹ Secondly, it is likely that Saxo’s account does not accurately reflect his sources.¹⁰ One may look to his account of the death of Agnerus from the present episode for an illustrative example. Saxo’s chief source for Bjarki’s life is Bjarkamál, a now-fragmentary Old Norse poem which he augments and renders into Latin. Saxo’s Latin rendering of Bjarkamál has Agnerus’ sword break upon Biarco, whereupon Biarco slays him, takes the title of belliger (‘warlike’) and brings a trophy away from the conflict. That Saxo’s source here preserves the earlier and more widespread version of events is corroborated by Skjöldunga saga and Bjarkarímur, which both agree with Bjarkamál in having Bjarki slay Agnarr on a battlefield on behalf of the king. Saxo therefore deviates from his own source material in having Agnerus slain at his wedding feast (Malone, 1959: 25). This case provides pause for readers hoping to find in Gesta Danorum a ‘best text’ version of the Bjarki tradition.

In a related vein, it is unlikely that Bjarkarímur was known to the author of Hrólfs saga (Olrik, 1903: 135–6; Lawrence, 1909: 229–241; von Sydow, 1923: 9) or, conversely, that the rímur-poet had the saga to hand (Jónsson, 1904: xxii; Olson, 1916: 49–60; Caldwell, 1940: 235; Benson, 1970: 18, 19).¹¹ Cases of direct borrowing between sagas and rímur are now known to be signalled by concrete narrative, stylistic and phrasal parallels such as are not found across Hrólfs saga and Bjarkarímur.¹² These texts instead present significantly different stories and contain a divergent inventory of characters. It is probable instead that both works represent separate adaptations of related oral and literary source material, with Bjarkarímur drawing on parts of Skjöldunga saga not contained within Hrólfs saga (Jónsson, 1904: xxix; Grant, 2019: 112). Importantly, neither the saga author nor the rímur-poet can have made use of the work of Saxo Grammaticus, which was not known in medieval Iceland and did not influence Icelandic literary culture until the seventeenth century (Power, 1984: 242). It is apparent, then, that Gesta Danorum, Bjarkarímur and Hrólfs saga offer independent and therefore discretely valuable renderings of a dynamic Bjarki tradition rather than successively remote distortions of an imagined original.

With these caveats in mind, it is worth considering Benson’s reservations in greater detail. He suggests that Bjarki is regarded in Gesta Danorum as ‘not a stranger’, but ‘one of one of Hrolf’s champions.’ Bjarki’s ‘coming from a foreign land to a great court’ — traditionally considered a point of special correspondence between his career and that of the Geatish Beowulf — is apparently only reflected in the saga account (Benson, 1970: 17). This important aspect of Bjarki’s character is in fact stressed in every major source for his life besides Gesta Danorum. In Bjarkarímur, he departs from the homestead of his brother Elg-Fróði, which is located austr á merkr (‘east in the forests’) on an unidentifiable heathland, Úrarheiðr. It is possible that this easterly location is to be understood as Gautland, but this is not confirmed in the text. It is in any case not Danish soil: as Bjarki sets out, the poet relates ‘ferr hann nú sem leiðin lá, | leitar út í Danmǫrk þá (IV.28, Jónsson, 1904: 135; ‘he then went where the road lead, and then headed out for Denmark’). It might be contended, as Benson does (1970: 17), that this is a later accretion to the tale, but this seems unlikely for two reasons. Firstly, as Chambers pointed out long ago (1959: 59–60), Saxo’s account begins in medias res with Biarco defending Hialto in the Danish hall, and there is presumably some context for this which Saxo does not provide. One wonders, as Chambers did, why Rolvo’s men would throw bones at Biarco were he a veteran member of the king’s retinue. Secondly, and more arrestingly, Bjarki’s status as a foreign visitor is confirmed in the contemporary Skjöldunga saga, which in its surviving form mentions a ‘Bodvarus Norwegus’ in the service of Rolfo. It seems reasonable to assume that Saxo’s account is simply incomplete here, and that he either omits or was unaware of Biarco’s arriving at the Scylding court from abroad.

A feature common to all full versions of the Bjarki narrative is the newcomer’s hostile reception at the Scylding court. In Beowulf, the hero is subjected to the suspicion of the coastguard and the interrogation of Hroðgar’s counsellor Unferð. In the Bjarki tradition the newcomer is detested upon arrival: Bjarkarímur and Hrólfs saga have the king’s men calling for his death (Berendsohn, 1935: 218), and in Gesta Danorum Biarco is subject to the ludibrium (‘derision’) of the retainers. This shared element is an important point of correspondence between Beowulf and the Bjarki tradition, but is not acknowledged by Benson or his predecessors.

The majority of the criticism of these analogues pivots around the fact that the monster-fights themselves vary significantly across the three accounts. Olrik (1903: 135–6) and Benson (1970: 17) are correct in pointing out that the version of the monster-fight related in Hrólfs saga kraka has no special claim to primacy, and that the accounts in both Gesta Danorum and Bjarkarímur differ from it substantially. However, this does not invalidate the similarities between these different versions as sketched by earlier scholars (e.g. Sarazzin, 1888: 13–18; Panzer, 1910: 364–373; von Sydow, 1923: 9–10; Berendsohn, 1935: 217–221; Chambers, 1959: 54–57). In fact, the structural connections between these three accounts run deeper than previously acknowledged and point to shared derivation from a consistent tradition. It is worth considering the links between the accounts of Bjarki’s monster-fights in Saxo’s Gesta, Bjarkarímur and Hrólfs saga in greater detail.

Bjarkarímur and Hrólfs saga have Bjarki and Höttr slip out of the hall alone after the bone-throwing contest, whereupon a beast approaches them. In the saga this is a flying monster roused by noise which iron does not bite — ‘á þat bíta ekki vápn’ (Slay, 1960a: 78; ‘no weapons harm it’)¹³ — and in the rímur the beast is an ‘ylgr sem etr upp menn’ (IV.59, Jónsson, 1904: 139; ‘she-wolf that eats up men’). The initial fight in Gesta Danorum is with Agnerus, who is described in Skjöldunga saga as a pirata — probably a translation of an original víkingr — and in Hrólfs saga and Bjarkarímur as a berserkr. As in the hall-fights of Beowulf and Hrólfs saga, Agnerus is provoked by commotion: he fights Biarco because of the uproar caused during his wedding feast. This fight is in some ways closer to Beowulf’s combat with Grendel than the hall-fights in Hrólfs saga and Bjarkarímur. Biarco’s fight with Agnerus is described as a duellum; it takes place within the Scylding hall; the king’s other champions are not involved; and the death of Agnerus precipitates vengeance. These three fights are identical in structural terms, occurring after the hero’s icy reception and participation in the fatal bone-throwing.

In all versions of the Bjarki narrative, the first fight is followed by a second. In Saxo the second fight is expressly connected to the first: as Biarco is celebrating his victory over the first foe, ‘novam de se silvestris fera victoriam praebuit’ (Friis-Jensen & Fisher, 2015: 118; ‘a wild beast from the forest provided him another victory’). This is described as an ursus eximiae magnitudinis, ‘a bear of exceptional size’. In Bjarkarímur, likewise, a monstrous bear emerges from the forest after the slaying of the she-wolf and is specifically said to be in the habit of raiding the Scylding hall:

V.5 Í grindur vandist grábjǫrn einn

í garðinn Hleiðar,

var sá mǫrgum vargrinn beinn

og víða sveiðar (Jónsson, 1904: 141).¹⁴

(A grey bear was accustomed to enter the folds at Hleiðargarðr. To many that was a great monster, and it roamed widely.)

In Hrólfs saga the second adversary is no new animal but the body of the slain monster. The motif of the propped-up corpse of the dead foe appears in other fantastical saga material and is unlikely to be of any antiquity.¹⁵ In Hrólfs saga it seems to thinly disguise an earlier pattern wherein two separate creatures are encountered, much as in Beowulf and the other versions of the Bjarki tradition.¹⁶ In Hrólfs saga the king entreats his men to have courage in facing the beast: ‘konungr bað hirðmenn vera hrausta ok duga nú hvern eptir því sem hann hefði hug til’ (Slay, 1960a: 80; ‘the king bade his retainers be bold and that each man perform as his courage allowed’). Bjarkarímur has Hrólfr promise acclaim to the warrior who confronts the marauding bear: ‘“sá skal mestr í minni hǫll | er mætir dýri”’ (V:7, Jónsson, 1904: 142; ‘“he who goes against the beast shall be the greatest in my hall”’). Hrólfs saga and Bjarkarímur agree closely at this point: in both texts Höttr requests the Scylding king’s sword and slays the beast upon receiving it. In Gesta Danorum the second fight is more elliptical: Biarco slays the beast with a spear, and Hialto’s blood-drinking occurs at this point as it naturally could not follow the death of Agnerus. The heroes are lauded for their victories. In Gesta Danorum, Biarco regi percarus evasit, ‘became beloved of the king’. The Icelandic versions have the king bestow a new title upon Höttr, and in Hrólfs saga Böðvarr is also honoured for his deeds.

These three independent accounts of Bjarki’s deeds at the Scylding hall share a bipartite structure: the hero and his companion engage in two consecutive and closely linked monster-killings in which the first foe is slain in or around the hall, and the second arrives later and from further afield. This basic structure is broadly characteristic of the ‘Two-Troll’ complex — an oikotype or local variant of the ‘Bear’s Son’ folktale which is common to Beowulf and some of its closest Scandinavian analogues, including Grettir Ásmundarson’s two-part conflict with the trolls at Sandhaugar.¹⁷ The adherence of the different accounts of Bjarki’s monster-fights to the ‘Two-Troll’ pattern, and therefore with Beowulf, is also signalled by a number of important narrative elements. These include the hostile reception of the foreign hero;¹⁸ the first beast’s being roused by men’s clamour;¹⁹ the monstrous quality of both foes, captured most clearly in Hrólfs saga’s invincible tröll and Bjarkarímur’s man-eating wolf; and the gift-sword being used in the second fight, which is paralleled across the Icelandic analogue corpus and by Beowulf’s taking Hrunting into the fight with Grendel’s mother.²⁰

Overshadowing these structural and narrative similarities are the substantial differences between the monsters themselves. Gesta Danorum has the protagonist(s) fight a warrior and a bear; Bjarkarímur a wolf and a bear and Hrólfs saga a living and later dead winged creature. These variations might be seen to preclude the notion that these three accounts represent the same traditional material. In fact, such variation is highly typical of ‘Two-Troll’ tales, where the foes faced may be living or dead berserkir or víkingar; wild animals including bears, bulls, wolves or dragons; or trolls. The configuration of motifs and characters within the ‘Two-Troll’ pattern varied frequently and was more fluid than the geographical and personal particulars of legendary narrative. This is nowhere better illustrated than in Grettis saga, which contains ‘Two-Troll’-style fights with a mound-dwelling warrior; a hall-raiding revenant; a bear; a pair of trolls and Grettir himself (Orchard, 1995: 140–168). It seems apparent that while the ‘Two-Troll’ narrative pattern was central to the Bjarki tradition, the specific configuration of this pattern across the different versions — including the identity of the foes — remained flexible.²¹ In this connection it is telling that Saxo consciously departs from his source, Bjarkamál, in relocating Bjarki’s slaying of the berserkr Agnerus to this specific point in the narrative. Saxo’s placing Agnerus’ death in single combat before the slaying of the gigantic bear may indicate that the story of the monster-slaying at the Scylding hall which he inherited was a ‘Two-Troll’ tale. The significance of these findings will be considered below.

Bjarki, Aðils and Áli

Key to the value of the Bjarki tradition, as Chambers recognised (1959: 60–61), was the fact that Bjarki, like Beowulf, not only delivers the Scylding hall from the ravages of monsters, but also aids Aðils against Áli. Olrik and Olson do not treat this second important parallel between the two heroes, but Benson includes it in his consideration of the viability of the Bjarki tradition. For him, Bjarki’s aiding Aðils against Áli belongs to the same ‘scholarly reconstruction’ as the picture of the foreign hero ridding the Scylding hall of a ravaging foe. Quite apart from being his saviour, Gesta Danorum has Biarco slay Athislus, and Hrólfs saga also has Bjarki aid Hrólfr in defeating Aðils in war. Much like Beowulf Bjarki does aid Aðils in his war against Áli in Bjarkarímur, but Benson considers this a later rationalisation (1970: 18–19). He points out that in Gesta Danorum and Hrólfs saga, the incestuous relationship of Yrsa, the mother of Hrólfr and wife of Aðils, was a key reason for the war between the Danish and Swedish kings. Since this incestuous relationship had fallen out of the rímur, so had the motivation behind the conflict between Hrólfr and Aðils. The rímur-poet, composing at the start of the fifteenth century, thus sought to (re)motivate this rivalry by inventing an earlier war between Aðils and Áli in which Hrólfr and Bjarki intervene. Aðils’ resultant ingratitude could then provide Hrólfr with an acceptable casus belli.

Taken at face value, these points bring the importance of the Bjarki tradition into question. However, Benson’s account of the late emergence of the Aðils-Áli conflict in Scandinavian legend cannot be credited, not least because this fight is reported in numerous sources which he appears to have overlooked. The earliest such source is Þjóðólfr ór Hvini’s Ynglingatal (‘tally of the Ynglingar’), usually dated to the late ninth century (Marold, 2012: 5–6). In the sixteenth stanza of this poem, Aðils is called dáðsæll Ála dólgr ‘the deed-blessed foe of Áli’. The poet does not expand on the nature of the enmity between the two kings, but one imagines that this kenning is based on pre-existing stories about these figures which may have intersected with those about Beowulf’s Eadgils and Onela. The first stanza of the Old Norse Bjarkamál, preserved in Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga helga and probably of the tenth century (Olrik, 1903: 109–114; Clunies Ross, 2017: 495), suggests that Bjarki’s alliance with Aðils existed in the earliest layers of Scandinavian Scylding tradition. Here, the champions called to action by Bjarki are described as inir œztu Aðils sinnar ‘the most excellent companions of Aðils’ (North, 2007: 46).

The next source to mention the two kings is Kálfsvísa (‘Kálfr’s verse’), an anonymous poem preserved in Snorra Edda probably dating from the twelfth century. This short work is a versified list of horses and their riders which contains the earliest snippet of narrative material relating to Aðils and Áli:

Vésteinn Vali         en Vifill Stúfi,

Meinþjófr Mói         en Morginn Vakri,

Áli Hrafni,         — til íss riðu —

en annarr austr         und Aðilsi

grár hvarfaði         geiri undaðr. (Gade, 2017: 666–667)²²

Vésteinn [rode] Vali and Vifill Stúfi, Meinþjófr Mói and Morginn Vakr, Áli Hrafn — they rode to the ice — and another, grey, wandered in the east under Aðils, wounded by a spear.

These stanzas allusively refer to a conflict on the ice in which Aðils and Áli are both engaged. Aðils’ horse is pierced by a spear, which is a premonition of the king’s demise. That this material may share links with Beowulf’s account of Eadgils’ conflict with Onela is indicated by the presence of Vésteinn, who may be identical with the Weohstan in Onela’s service (North, 2007: 58–60; Grant, 2019: 117).

Skjöldunga saga is the earliest extant source to provide a fuller account of the circumstances surrounding this battle, although in its surviving form this picture is still oblique:

…ortis inter Adillum illum Sveciæ Regem et Alonem, Opplandorum Regem in Norvegia, inimicitiis, prælium utrinqve indicitur; loco pugnæ statuo in stagno Wæner, glacie jam obducto. Adillus igitur se viribus inferiorem agnoscens Rolphonis privigni sui opem implorat…Rolpho domi ipse reses pugiles suos duodecim Adillo in subsidium mittit, qvorum etiam operâ is alioqvi vincendus victoriam obtinuit (Guðnason, 2012: 29).

…enmity arose between Adillus, the king of Sweden, and Alo, the king of the Upplands in Norway; war was declared by both sides. The place decided on for the battle was Lake Waener, already covered with ice. And so Adillus, recognizing that his forces were inferior, asked for the help of his stepson Rolfo… Rolfo himself stayed home but sent his twelve warriors to help Adillus; through their efforts, he won the battle, which he would otherwise have lost (Miller, 2007: 18).

The Norwegian Bodvarus is mentioned several sentences earlier as having slain Agnerus in Rolfo’s service, and so his presence among the king’s twelve retainers here can be assumed (North, 1992: 180).

Snorri’s Edda contains a very similar passage. It is likely that this closely reflects the text of the original Skjöldunga saga, which Snorri gives as one of his sources. Böðvarr is listed here as the foremost champion aiding Aðils:

…sá konungr réð fyrir Uppsǫlum er Aðils hét. Hann átti Yrsu, móður Hrólfs kraka. Hann hafði ósætt við þann konung er réð fyrir Nóregi er Áli hét. Þeir stefndu orrostu milli sín á ísi vatns þess er Væni heitir. Aðils konungr sendi boð Hrólfi kraka, mági sínum, at hann kvæmi til liðveizlu við hann…Hrólfr konungr mátti eigi fara fyrir ófriði þeim er hann átti við Saxa, en þó sendi hann Aðilsi berserki sína tólf. Þar var einn Bǫðvarr bjarki ok Hjalti hugprúði… (Faulkes, 1998: 58).

A king called Aðils reigned over Uppsala. He married Yrsa, the mother of Hrólfr kraki. He was an enemy of the king called Áli who reigned over Norway. They arranged a battle between them on the ice of the lake called Vænir. King Aðils sent a request to Hrólfr kraki, his kinsman, that he might come to his aid…King Hrólfr could not go because of his strife with the Saxons, but he nevertheless sent his twelve berserkir to Aðils. One was Böðvarr bjarki and [a second] Hjalti the Great-Hearted….

Bjarkarímur provide a poetic rendition of these events which largely agrees with Skjöldunga saga and Snorra Edda. Bjarki’s involvement is here made explicit:

VIII.23 Aðals var glaðr afreksmaðr.

Austur þangað kómu.

Fyrðar þeir með fránan geir

flengja þegar til rómu.

(Aðals was a glad, valiant man. They travelled eastwards. Those men with keen spear leapt at once to battle.)

VIII.24 Ýtar býta engum frið;

unnu vel til mála.

Þar fell Áli og alt hans lið

ungr í leiki stála.

(The men dealt out peace to none; they performed well at the task. There Áli fell, and all his force, young, in the play of steel [battle]).

VIII.25 Hestrinn beztur Hrafn er kendr;

hafa þeir tekið af Ála.

Hildisvín er hjálmrinn vendr;

hann kaus Bjarki í mála (Jónsson, 1904: 163).

(The best horse was known as Hrafn; they took it from Áli. Hildisvín was a fine helm; Bjarki selected that in the deliberations.)

Benson’s point that Bjarki departs from Beowulf in his hostility towards Aðils in Saxo’s Gesta and Hrólfs saga is also problematic. This enmity in fact reflects a separate and later episode of the same legend in which the Scylding king, offended by Aðils’ miserliness, personally travels to Uppsala with his champions to wreak vengeance. This is followed by a scene famous in Scandinavian legend in which Hrólfr scatters the fields of Fyrisvellir with gold, whereupon the greedy Aðils stoops to retrieve it. In Skjöldunga saga and Snorri’s Ynglinga saga, Hrólfr’s expedition is prompted by Aðils refusing to make good on his promise to compensate the Scylding king for his assistance against Áli. Hrólfs saga and Gesta Danorum depart from all other sources in omitting mention of Áli and provide alternative motivations for this later conflict with Aðils: the saga has Hrólfr seek to reclaim his father’s inheritance, and Saxo suggests that Rolvo is goaded to attack Athislus by his mother Yrsa. In other words, Bjarki’s aiding Aðils occupies an important place in most versions of the Bjarki tradition and is nowhere contradicted, as Benson suggests. No other surviving source corroborates Saxo’s passing remark that Bjarki was the slayer of Aðils. In fact, the poet of Ynglingatal suggested some three centuries prior to Saxo that the king met his death falling from his horse.²³

Conclusion

Benson’s influential claim that ‘only in its latest developments does the Bjarki story look anything like the story of Beowulf’ (1970: 19) is not borne out by the evidence. It is entirely proper that features preserved in most witnesses to the Bjarki tradition, such as Bjarki’s aiding Aðils and his coming from abroad, should be omitted by other versions, especially if these versions are tersely narrated. Benson arrives at his version of the original tradition (1970: 17) by assuming that all features absent or differing from Saxo’s allusive account, including those present in the contemporary Skjöldunga saga, are the result of iterative corruption. The present discussion has attempted to isolate the fundamental features of the Bjarki tradition in a more even-handed fashion by taking full account of the independent witness of Gesta Danorum, Bjarkarímur and Hrólfs saga kraka.

For the sake of clarity, it is worth outlining precisely which features appear to have been essential to the Bjarki tradition. In each extant version Bjarki is, like Beowulf, an outsider who meets hostility at the hall of the Scylding king. From the twelfth century onwards, Scandinavian sources outside of Saxo’s Gesta are unanimous in assigning Bjarki a Norwegian identity. This foreign hero and his companion prove themselves by slaying two consecutive foes in and around the Danish hall — Agnerus and the bear in Saxo; the she-wolf and the bear in Bjarkarímur and the living and slain tröll in Hrólfs saga — for which they win the acclaim of the Scylding king. This structural consistency and the presence of narrative elements such as the first foe’s being roused by noise and the presence of the gift-sword in the second fight encourages the view that the story of Bjarki’s bipartite monster-slayings at the Scylding hall belongs to the ‘Two-Troll’ narrative pattern. Bjarki’s monster-fights therefore resemble those of Beowulf in both legendary and folkloric terms. Scandinavian records also refute Benson’s claim that Bjarki’s participation in the Aðils-Áli conflict is a rationalisation of the Bjarkarímur-poet and is ‘confirmed by none of the earlier sources’ (1970: 18). The war between the two Swedish kings is plainly evidenced as a key event in the earliest layers of Scandinavian legend. Bjarki’s aiding Aðils is signalled in a variety of sources from Bjarkamál to Bjarkarímur and is one of the hero’s great achievements, as is Beowulf’s in assisting Eadgils.

It cannot be escaped that the resemblance between Beowulf and the Bjarki tradition as revealed by Saxo’s Gesta, Bjarkarímur and Hrólfs saga is in places much faded. The bone-throwing contest, though comparable in structural and motific terms to Beowulf’s verbal sparring with Unferð, is configured in much different terms. Beowulf comes from among the Geatas, not Norway, and serves a different patron.²⁴ He aids Eadgils as a ruler in his own right, not as a retainer of the Scylding king. Hjalti’s blood-drinking, which has become such a central episode within the Bjarki tradition, finds no parallel in Beowulf and may be a later accretion to the Scandinavian tale entirely.²⁵ However, variation in the configuration of certain motifs and circumstantial details is not unexpected after many centuries of independent transmission, and is consistent with other discrepancies between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian legend.²⁶ ‘It is quite intelligible,’ writes Chambers, ‘that the story should have developed on different lines in Scandinavia from those which it followed in England, till the new growths overshadowed the original resemblance, without obliterating it’ (1959: 57). For the purposes of this discussion, it is the concrete survival of this original resemblance which is of the greatest significance.

This defence of Bjarki has attempted to redeem the important position which this figure has historically occupied in Beowulf studies. The co-occurrence of two chief accolades in the careers of Beowulf and Bjarki — the double monster-slaying at the Scylding hall and the heroes’ aiding Eadgils/Aðils in defeating Onela/Áli — admits, or rather readmits the real possibility that both figures developed from the same traditional archetype. What the deeds and traditions surrounding this hypothetical figure looked like in the dark waters of pre-Beowulfian Germanic legend is impossible to say. So too is it a matter of speculation precisely when this archetype became available to Anglo-Saxon tradition and the Beowulf-poet. The crucial point here is that several central aspects of Beowulf’s career — his twofold monster-killing, his service in Denmark, his kingmaking in Sweden — appear to have been inspired by existing legends and were therefore not the invention of the poet.

It is no exaggeration to call Beowulf a work of masterful synthesis. The poet brought together a vast store of Germanic legend, history, myth and folktale, as well as Christian tradition and learning, to create a sweeping verse epic blending monster-fights with the affairs of mighty Scandinavian dynasties (Leneghan, 2020). If the Scylding legends available to the Beowulf-poet featured a ‘proto-Bjarki’ — a minor princeling from an obscure land who delivered the Scylding king from the ravages of two monsters and went on to play a decisive role in the Swedish wars — such a figure would have eminently recommended himself as the protagonist of such a wide-ranging and ambitious dynastic drama. This view does not reduce the poet’s originality. It is still readily conceivable that the poet merged the accolades of this ‘proto-Bjarki’ with those of a native Beowulf who was famed for his feats of swimming (Benson, 1970: 20–22; Leneghan, 2020: 120), or that he sourced the hero’s Geatish connections from elsewhere (Grant, 2022a). In fact, this discussion attests to the poet’s skill in handling the expansive and highly complex body of traditions with which he was so intimately familiar. It reaffirms the profound potential of Scandinavian sources to shed light on the creative genius underlying Beowulf when so much else is obscure. Above all, it provides a dark glimpse of the legendary prehistory of the poem’s best known and least understood character.