Post-classical history

Chapter 11. Heroic Legend: Sigmundr Fáfnisbani in the Court of King Cnut

Simon C. Thomson

It is widely recognized that Cnut’s reign in England saw a major increase in cultural, especially Church-centered, patronage, at the same time as it brought Scandinavian culture into the mainstream of southern English life. As Barbara Yorke makes clear in the chapter before this one, Winchester seems to have been one of the centres of such cultural activity: patronage and interest flowed into Winchester from multiple sources, if not often from Cnut himself, reflecting competing political and personal interests while simultaneously demonstrating the convergence of different cultural affiliations. Thanks to the archaeological excavations led by Martin Biddle, we can now see two focal points of this cultural activity in the great churches of Old and New Minsters, each of which managed and benefited from this interest in its own way. A large fragment of stone found in Winchester in 1965 epitomizes this flowering, this cultural convergence, and this focus: showing a key moment in the story of Sigmundr Vǫlsungsson, it must have been installed in the Old Minster during or after Cnut’s reign, perhaps initiated with his patronage. The sheer unlikeliness of such an idea – a non-Christian warrior with a strange and savage story decorating the inside of one of England’s oldest cathedrals – may have contributed to a dearth of discussion concerning this stone and its implications in eleventh-century English culture. But there is, this chapter argues, no reason to be afraid of this carving of a wolf and a man, for the relief merely lends a sharp focus to what we already know from other sources: Cnut’s court had a lively interest in mythic and heroic narrative – that is, in what we might call Germanic storytelling – at the same time as it invested heavily in the Church, in connections with Rome, and in the recent English past. Most people in early medieval England seem not to have seen the contradictions between the vaguely “pagan” and the broadly “Christian” that often preoccupy us, and it is usually best, I suggest below, to believe in the vibrant, productive, complicated mixture that the evidence shows, rather than to erect barriers against it in defiance of that evidence. The Sigmundr stone has much to tell us about how Cnut wanted to be perceived and indeed about the cultural tone of England in the eleventh century. It also has implications for our understanding of the stories of Sigmundr, of the Vǫlsungar, and of Beowulf. This chapter, then, aspires to wide horizons, some of which will no doubt remain hazy. But it begins with solid stone (see Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1: The Sigmundr stone: Photograph © Martin Biddle, “Excavations at Winchester 1965: Fourth Interim Report.” (Plate LXII).

Sigmundr on the Stone

In 1965, as part of their extensive excavation of Winchester, Martin Biddle and his team found an unusually large piece of carved stone. It had been discarded during the demolition of Old Minster in 1093; unlike most comparable pieces, it was not reused in the construction of the Norman cathedral which stands today. Now on display in Winchester City Museum, the rectangle of stone is approximately 69.5 cm high, 52 cm wide, and 27 cm deep.¹ Three figures are carved in deep relief on its surface. To the left, a mailed warrior walks away; separate pieces showing his head and the front of his body are lost. To the right, a man’s head faces upwards. His shoulder-length hair curves tightly around his head. A rope around his neck is attached to a tree-like object beneath him. Above, its face almost pressing against his, is the pointed face of an animal. The lower part of the face is clear, but the top is heavily weathered. A raised paw passes behind its snout; the other is against the man’s chin. The shape of the muzzle and the dew-claw on the lower paw clearly show that the animal is a dog or a wolf. Most crucially, although the stone is heavily weathered, it is clear that the animal’s tongue extends towards the man’s mouth. Oddly, the wolf’s tongue seems to be visible for the length of her mouth: the carver has apparently emphasized it. Figure 11.2 shows all lines carved on the stone equally, clarifying what has now been partially worn away.

Figure 11.2: Drawing showing all lines carved on the extant fragment.

Crisp grooves remain on both the right- and left-hand sides.² This grooving is contemporary with the image, unlike a plaster-filled lewis-hole which tells us that the stone had been used before its carving. Significantly, the difference in wear between side-grooves and face suggest that most of the wearing of the image took place when it was on display rather than after being discarded. The presence of rebates shows that there were interlocking pieces on either side. These would have continued the narrative to either side, explaining the incompleteness of the representation of both soldier and wolf. From this single piece, then, we can be sure that a frieze extended in both directions, telling a longer narrative: Figure 11.3 shows what form this may have taken and demonstrates, if this reconstruction can be accepted, how extensive the scene would have been.³ Multiple shards were found around this single piece. Those with discernible carving contain fragments “derived from figures similar to those on the present piece” and therefore probably once showed surrounding events.⁴ It is an extraordinary piece of luck that this segment survived intact, given the clarity and significance of the moment it depicts. That the soldier’s head and foot are missing makes it probable that additional pieces completed the image above and below. From this single stone, then, we can deduce an image up to 2.6 m long – and infer the existence of a much longer frieze, telling more than this isolated incident, with a length of about 24.4 m well within the range of possibility.⁵ This was an imposing piece of work.

Figure 11.3: Suggested completion of the scenes implied by the narrative frieze, showing the degree of extension necessitated by the extant image.

At its first publication, Biddle’s report proposed that the distinctive scene of a man tied to a tree-like object, while a wolf’s tongue goes into his mouth, corresponds with that now preserved in chapter 5 of Vǫlsunga saga, in which Sigmundr Vǫlsungsson and his nine brothers suffer slow death at the jaws of a she-wolf who eats one of them each night. Sigmundr, left to the end, kills the wolf by ripping out her tongue. With his hands tied, but with honey on his face, he waits for the wolf to lick his mouth and then bites on her tongue, rips it out and kills her. Biddle’s proposed reading has been broadly, if often reluctantly, accepted.⁶ And yet, despite the comparative clarity of the crucial elements (man tied to wood; wolf’s tongue coming to his face), a number of alternative possibilities for the incident depicted on the stone have been proposed. Perhaps it could be dogs licking blood from the floor, as in 1 Kings 21:19.⁷ Alternatively, it may show the king of the Garamantes and his faithful dog-soldiers; there is, after all, a similar disposition of man and dog in a thirteenth-century manuscript.⁸ It may even, somehow, show St. Dunstan, whose voice is said to have calmed dogs.⁹ The fact that so many solutions have been offered that do not work bespeaks the desperation of an attempt to reject the Sigmundr reading for its own sake.¹⁰ There is nothing in Kings, or in Dunstan’s story, that corresponds to the closeness between the faces, or to the man being tied down. More plausible is the indigenous North American folktale in which a young hero lies in wait for a wolf and defeats it by seizing its tongue.¹¹ The king of the Garamantes, of whom the manuscript illustration shows a prostrate man with his face eaten by a dog, is an interesting suggestion in the English context. This scene, however, takes place in battle, the man is not tied down and wears armor, and the beast (more naturally) has its jaws opened around the man’s face rather than some distance away with extended tongue. The discussion (and rejection) of all of these proposals could be pursued at some length, were it not enough to say more simply that the continuing resistance to Biddle’s explanation is absurd. It is time to accept that this piece of stone shows what it appears to show, however surprising that may seem.

The story of the Vǫlsungar is best known today through Wagner’s rendering of the complex and fatal love story of Siegfried and Brünhilde, loosely based on German sources such as the Nibelungenlied of ca. 1200 and the Old Icelandic Vǫlsunga saga of ca. 1275, which was itself based on the tenth- to twelfth-century heroic lays of the Poetic Edda. In the Icelandic sources this duo is named Sigurðr and Brynhildr, while Sigmundr, the father of Sigurðr, remains in the background. His episode with the she-wolf, preserved in Vǫlsunga saga probably on the basis of a poem now lost, precedes Sigurðr’s birth by a long way and has no equivalent in the Nibelungenlied. Aside from copies later made of it, the saga survives in one manuscript datable to ca. 1400, although it was probably composed earlier, between 1200 and 1270.¹² To go over the story, Sigmundr becomes an outlaw in Gautland, kingdom of Siggeirr, when Siggeirr marries Signý, who is Sigmundr’s beloved twin sister. Treacherously Siggeirr ambushes and kills their father Vǫlsungr, capturing all his ten sons. In a desperate attempt to save her brothers, Signý begs Siggeirr to give them a slower death by being kept in stocks in the forest. Each night a huge she-wolf, later revealed to be Siggeirr’s enchantress mother, eats one of the brothers. Signý saves Sigmundr by sending a trusted man to smear honey over his face and into his mouth. The wolf’s interest in the honey enables Sigmundr to destroy her, allowing her own strength to pull her tongue out before she flees to her death. The saga continues with Signý’s two sons and the failure of each of them to survive the first stage of training with their uncle Sigmundr, who now lives as an outlaw in the woods. Signý breaks the pattern by conceiving a third son by her own brother, unbeknownst to him. The boy, named Sinfjǫtli, grows up in the care of Sigmundr. Neither knows his kinship with the other, but he and Sinfjǫtli have a wild time as outlaws together, including a period as werewolves, before finally taking revenge on Siggeirr by murdering his and Signý’s children and setting fire to their hall. Signý, having accomplished vengeance for her father, stays behind to burn with her husband, while Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli leave Gautland for further adventures. As the saga tells it, this dark episode in Gautland is a prelude to Sigmundr’s marriage to Borghildr, with whom he begets Helgi, and then to Hjǫrdis, mother of his third son, Sigurðr, who is the hero the saga has been waiting for. Sigurðr goes on to slay the dragon Fáfnir and take his treasure, falling thereafter in love with Brynhildr, marrying Guðrún, and initiating some more famous, and equally appalling, storms of vengeance and cruelty.

A number of ninth- to tenth-century representations of incidents from the Vǫlsung cycle survive from northern England.¹³ These almost all show the defeat of the dragon Fáfnir and sometimes the following story in which Sigurðr acquires the language of birds from tasting the dragon’s blood. Had the Winchester stone shown Fáfnir rather than the wolf, there would have been no challenging its identification, for the dragon fight, also known in Saints’ Lives, was appropriate to Christian communities.¹⁴ Today, moreover, it is accepted that the Vǫlsungar as well as the dragon-slaying hero were regarded by Christians as historical figures, great heroes of the past who happened to have been pagan, rather than icons of pre-Christian religion.¹⁵ In the later Icelandic texts, Sigurðr is sometimes represented as a noble heathen: he is, like Beowulf, constructed as a halfway-house between fiercely pagan figures and true Christian heroes.¹⁶

Such applicability in Christian contexts is best shown by the Nunburnholme cross-shaft. This seems to have originally shown the Eucharist and later had a Sigurðr scene carved on top, mostly obliterating the explicitly religious moment and demonstrating that “the tradition of a real or fictitious past could be meaningfully yoked to Christian ideas.”¹⁷ There is no doubt that figures and narratives from pre-Christian mythology decorated Viking-Age churches in northern England, as they did in Scandinavian Christian contexts.¹⁸ All of these stone carvings are found in the Isle of Man and Northumbria, areas of Celtic or English Britain with strong Norse connections. Many are in the Scandinavian Ringerike style, and none show the rounded forms of the Winchester piece. Aside from the Winchester carving, all predate the Benedictine Reform of the later tenth century, which saw the English church move towards more regularity and orthodoxy. The northern stones are more closely related to Scandinavian carvings, which Birgit Sawyer suggests could have “answered religious and social needs in a period of transition” from one mythological system to another.¹⁹ They are, therefore, relatively easily explained as cultural interactions, part of the Viking Age realignment of Nordic tradition with Christian mythography.

The Winchester fragment – showing a different incident, in a different place, and carved in a different style – seems to come from another world entirely: both the story it suggests and the style in which the story is told require explanation.²⁰ The scene with the she-wolf does not seem to have been used in other extant stonework.²¹ That such an unusual scene has been found in one of England’s oldest cathedrals has subjected the material evidence to almost as much pressure as the narrative identification, making it necessary to restate briefly some of the main findings. The site and context of discovery show that the carving must have been produced before 1093, when the Old Minster was demolished and the construction of the current cathedral began. There is no good reason why it could have been produced after 1066, in some sort of abortive restoration of Old Minster, to be discarded less than thirty years later. Nor can this find have been produced before ca. 980, given its location in the eastern extremity of Old Minster, which was not begun until after that year.²² Weathering shows that it was on display for some time before being discarded, dating its creation closer to 1000 than to 1066. Despite older arguments against this (that the style of the carving means it cannot have been produced so early), the relative certainty of the archaeological evidence for its age has in turn moved the theoretical bounds of Romanesque, pushing the inception of proto-Romanesque style, with its “solid round forms,” back to an earlier time.²³ It appears in this way that the carving was made under either King Æthelred (978–1013 and 1014–1016) or King Cnut (1016–1035).

There are two records of work on Winchester minsters under Æthelred: improvements to Old Minster under Æthelwold, described in Cantor Wulfstan’s Vita Sancti Æthelwoldi (ca. 996–1005),²⁴ and improvements to the New Minster’s tower.²⁵ Neither record refers to this work, while there are few indications that Æthelred favored Old Minster.²⁶ Although there are fewer sources for the bulk of Cnut’s reign, it is clear that both he and Emma patronized Old Minster to at least some degree; their gifts to New Minster are all well known.²⁷ Cnut is known to have pursued a policy of ostentatious gift-giving to promote his regime.²⁸ His gift-giving also seems to have followed a pattern of imitating gifts given by earlier English kings; he consistently sought to show that he was part of the same tradition, effectively part of the same family.²⁹ However unlikely it may seem that this frieze could have been displayed in Old Minster, it demonstrably was; its content is more likely to have been appreciated under a new king from Denmark, with his followers invested in the stories of their past, than under King Æthelred.³⁰ As Yorke points out in this volume, such a dating does not tie it to Cnut personally, since both Emma and Godwine, who were active patrons of Winchester, had Scandinavian retinues.³¹ And yet the sheer ostentation of the carving as it would have been seen at its original size, together with the possibility that it was placed near the tombs of kings, makes a royal involvement rather more likely.³² While the moment and mindset of its origin cannot be established with the same degree of certainty as the story it represents, the strong balance of probability is that the stone was carved during Cnut’s reign and with his knowledge.

Sigmundr Fáfnisbani in the Eleventh Century

It is widely accepted that at some point Sigmundr occupied a more central position in the Vǫlsung narrative than he does in the extant saga version.³³ Vǫlsunga saga shows that by the thirteenth century Sigurðr had become the dominant hero at the expense of his (still heroic) father, Sigmundr, whose role was probably reduced. It is worth noting that Sigurðr’s status as the primary figure in the later sequence may also be a later feature: it is plausible that the relationship between Sigmundr’s son and Brynhildr was opportunistically deployed to connect an ancient Vǫlsung narrative with the Brynhildr cycle, which ultimately resulted in Sigurðr taking the central role in both, diminishing the prowess of his father and of his wife.³⁴ It is not clear when Sigmundr’s status started to fade. In Sigurðardrápa (Eulogy on Sigurðr), which was probably composed in tenth-century Norway, perhaps in ca. 960, for Earl Sigurðr Hákonarson of Hlaðir, the skald Kormákr Ǫgmundarson refers to the sword Gramr. The saga has Sigmundr using Gramr, a gift from Óðinn, before passing it on to Sigurðr. That Gramr is invoked in a text composed for a Sigurðr implies that tenth-century Norway had Sigurðr Sigmundsson at least wielding such a sword, and this makes it possible that he could have become the primary hero by that early date. A contrary implication comes from the flyting between Guðmundr and Sinfjǫtli in Helgakviða Hundingsbana I (first lay of Helgi the Slayer of Hundingr), in which Guðmundr, a coast watchman, taunts Sinfjǫtli, Helgi’s older half-brother and one of the invaders, with having been “brúðr Grana á Brávelli” (a mare for Grani on Brávǫllr plain).³⁵ In the extant saga narrative, the stallion Grani is given to Sigurðr, who is not born until after the death of Sinfjǫtli. Unless the poet lets Guðmundr refer to Grani as a generic stallion for a níð (slander) of this kind, it is plausible that he worked with an earlier version of the legend in which Grani was owned by Sigmundr or Sinfjǫtli rather than by Sigurðr.

Whenever the shift from father to son occurred, echoes of the earlier disposition are clearly visible. A stanza from Eiríksmál tells of the arrival of Eiríkr Blóðøx in Valhǫll:

Sigmundr ok Sinfjǫtli, rísið snarliga

ok gangið í gǫgn grami.

Inn þú bjóð, ef Eirekr séi;

hans es mér nú ván vituð.

[Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli, rise quickly and go to meet the prince. Invite (him) in, if it is Eiríkr; it is he I am expecting now.]³⁶

Whether or not this lay was commissioned in honor of Eiríkr Bloodaxe after his death in Stainmoor in 954, it may be dated to the tenth century. As a mighty warrior in this poem, Eiríkr is greeted by the greatest warriors Óðinn can send him: Sigmundr and his first son Sinfjǫtli, with Sigurðr not even mentioned.³⁷

Similar and more specific evidence is provided by Beowulf, lines 874b–902a.³⁸ Here, Sigemund (the Old English cognate of Sigmundr) is found worthy of comparison with Beowulf because he killed a dragon and was “wreccena wide mærost / ofer werþeode” (“the exile most widely famed throughout all peoples,” lines 898–99a). Again, no version of Sigurðr is mentioned, although – as in Eiríksmál – Fitela (the English counterpart of Sinfjǫtli), a well-known companion of Sigemund, does appear. Bertha Phillpotts, referring to a nineteenth-century discovery of tales from Telemark in which Sigmund fulfils the role of Sigurd, considers Sigmundr to have been the older dragon-slayer, as do the editors of Klaeber’s “Beowulf.”³⁹ Because in this poem it is Sigemund who kills a dragon, analogue to Fáfnir, I have taken the liberty of referring to his Norse namesake, Sigmundr, as “Fáfnisbani” in the title to this chapter. The poet’s allusion to Sigemund seems to put the dragon-slaying before the time in which he and Fitela share many adventures in the outlaw style of Sigmundr and Sinfjǫtli, who live as wolves in the forest. The werewolf episode is implicit in Sinfjǫtli’s name, which means “cinder-fetlock” – that is, “wrist of grey hair,” an allusion to wolfish looks;⁴⁰ the name “Fitela,” which appears to be of the same origin, may point to (a suppression of) lycanthropy in the Beowulfian tale. Beowulf’s evidence makes it likely that this was just one element in the adventures of “Wælses eafera” (“Wæls’ offspring,” line 897) – that is, the English version of a dragon-slaying Sigmundr and later Vǫlsungar, in the legendary world. Regardless of the date of Beowulf’s composition, the date of BL Cotton MS. Vitellius A.XV, the only extant manuscript to contain the poem, falls most probably in the early eleventh century, in the same period as the carving of Winchester’s narrative frieze.⁴¹

It is worth noting that if the eleventh-century Sigmundr was a dragon-slayer and the eleventh-century Sigurðr merely one of his sons who married a continental heroine, the proliferation of Viking Age carvings of the Vǫlsung story discussed above may have been misnamed. What the nineteenth century would call Siegfried-stones and the thirteenth Sigurðr-stones, the eleventh century may well have assumed to be Sigmundr-stones.⁴²

Sigmundr as an Ancestral Figure

By the twelfth century, the reason for Cnut wanting to have Sigmundr’s story decorating Old Minster would have been perfectly clear: he was a direct ancestor. The heroes of the Vǫlsung cycle and indeed many other figures with shadowy historical bases, such as Ragnarr loðbrók, had long been brought into the historiographical narrative to provide powerful ancestor figures for royal families. The Icelandic genealogical text Langfeðgatal has Cnut’s historical great-grandfather, Gormr inn gamli (“the Old”), also known as Hǫrðaknútr (Harthacnut), as the son of Sigurðr ormr-í-auga (“Snake-in-the-eye”).⁴³ As shown in Table 11.1, this is a potent connection: the latter Sigurðr was the son of Ragnarr loðbrók and Áslaug, herself the daughter of Sigurðr Sigmundsson and Brynhildr. In this way, Sigurðr ormr-í-auga provides Cnut’s line with descent from both Ragnarr and the Vǫlsungar.

Table 11.1:The twelfth-century connection between Cnut and Sigmundr.

It is clear that Cnut and his family were engaged with the process of establishing genealogical connections. Both Cnut’s father, Sveinn tjúguskegg (“Forkbeard”), and his grandfather, Haraldr blátǫnn (“Bluetooth”), marked their connection with Gormr / Harðaknútr, whom they regarded as the founder of their dynasty and after whom Cnut was probably named, on the great runestones erected at Jelling.⁴⁴ Cnut named his children Sveinn, Haraldr, and Harthacnut in turn,⁴⁵ and it appears that there was an effort to establish his connection, through “Skjǫldr,” with the Scyld whose place as the ancestor of West Saxon kings was long established in genealogy.⁴⁶

The connection with the sons of Ragnarr Loðbrók was certainly made in Cnut’s lifetime.⁴⁷ Sigvatr Þórðarson celebrates Cnut’s conquest of England by equating it with the execution in 867 of Ælle of Northumbria by Ragnarr’s sons, carried out in vengeance for Ælle’s cruel execution of their father in a snake-pit:

Ok Ellu bak, at, lét, hinns sat,

Ívarr ara, Jórvik skorit.

[And Ívarr, who resided at York,

had Ælla’s back cut with an eagle.]

Ok senn sonu sló, hvern ok þó,

Aðalráðs eða út flæmði Knútr.

[And Knútr soon defeated or drove out the sons of Æthelred, and indeed, each one.]⁴⁸

Similarly, Hallvarðr háreksblesi, in his Knútsdrápa, describes the England Cnut conquered as “ættleifð Ellu” (Ælle’s patrimony).⁴⁹ That is, with both skalds Cnut’s invasion is represented as equal to the historic defeat of Ælle by those Scandinavians who became known as Ragnarr’s sons.⁵⁰ The story of Ragnarr’s death at Ælle’s hands justified his sons’ invasion as a matter of family vengeance and, to some degree, the deposition of a tyrannical king. The verses cited above offer evidence of the use of this narrative in early eleventh-century England; it was probably an innovation of Cnut’s reign.⁵¹ This could have been intended to give Cnut’s subjects a parallel for his own activities: the portrayal of Æthelred as incompetent and unjust is well-known;⁵² so too is the St. Brice’s Day massacre of 1002, in which Cnut’s aunt, Gunnhild the sister of Sveinn, may have been murdered.⁵³ Clear in the skaldic eulogies is Cnut’s self-representation as an invader with just cause who brings peace and order to an unstable England.⁵⁴

Although Cnut, in this way, probably considered himself to be Ragnarr’s descendant, it is less certain that he took Sigmundr for his ancestor.⁵⁵ The key question lying beneath these tangled skeins is whether, in the eleventh century, Áslaug was believed to have been both Ragnarr’s wife and Sigurðr ormr-í-auga’s mother. Áslaug’s story seems to have developed and spread in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Her absence from Fagrskinna, a history of the kings of Norway dating from around 1225, suggests that she may have been unknown there, although it is possible that a story for her there was suppressed.⁵⁶ It is not absolutely clear, but she seems likely to have been known to Saxo Grammaticus in Denmark at around the same time.⁵⁷ At any rate, the tradition of Skjǫldunga saga shows that Áslaug was known in connection with Sigmundr in Iceland in around 1200, perhaps as a consequence of an older association between them in the English Danelaw, whence Páll Jónsson, the saga’s likely compiler, is believed to have gathered much of his information.⁵⁸ By 1230 she had become a key figure in Ragnars saga with a fairly complex narrative of her own.⁵⁹ The basis of this was probably a story about some of Ragnarr’s children having a magical mother: in the Gesta Normannorum ducum (Deeds of the Norman Dukes), initiated by William of Jumièges in ca. 1060, Bjǫrn Ragnarsson protects himself in battle using magic learned from his mother.⁶⁰ His nickname, “costae ferreae” (“ironsides”; ON járnsíða) is reminiscent of Edmund Ironside, son of Æthelred II, who earned his own soubriquet in a sequence of battles against Cnut in 1015–1016; William’s account may have followed a written Anglo-Scandinavian source.⁶¹ What matters here, however, is that there is nothing to make this anonymous woman into Áslaug, valkyrie daughter of Brynhildr, until rather later.⁶² Her absence from Langfeðgatal implies that she was not known to Pall Jónsson’s great-grandfather, Sæmundr Sigfússon, when he produced that text based on English sources in the twelfth century. It is plausible that the development of Áslaug, like that of Ælle’s story, took place during Cnut’s reign, but this cannot be demonstrated conclusively.⁶³ It is not generally safe to argue ex silentio, but the fact that Áslaug is mentioned neither in Sæmundr’s genealogy, nor in the skaldic verse produced as part of Cnut’s dynastic program, makes it, in my view, unlikely that her significance was recognized at Cnut’s court. This means that, although the connection was theoretically available in stories that circulated at the time and although Cnut’s court was actively developing his genealogical connections, it is not likely that he saw Sigmundr as a direct ancestor.⁶⁴

Heroic Narrative at Cnut’s Court

The lack of an ancestral connection does not, however, make the construction of the narrative frieze any less interesting. Indeed, it makes the choice to use this story in this place more surprising and intriguing. Rather than reflecting Cnut’s construction of his authority and royal heritage, the Sigmundr stone draws our attention to the cultural climate at his court in a more general way. Several different cultural productions actively celebrate Cnut’s behavior as analogous to the achievements of the heroes of the past, just as Beowulf’s monster-slaying is compared with Sigemund’s in the eponymous epic. Along with those discussed above are Hallvarðr háreksblesi’s verses that invoke numerous figures from pre-Christian myth, including a remarkable image of Cnut as Freyr, the old god who “hefr þrungit und sik Nóregi” (has forced Norway under him).⁶⁵ As Roberta Frank has shown, the same poet finds ways to use a “startling blend” of traditional skaldic forms as part of celebrating Cnut’s Christianity, such as describing God as “valdr munka” (master ruler of monks).⁶⁶ Taken together, the skaldic texts, the Winchester carving, the genealogical activity, and the revisions to the story of Ívarr Ragnarsson and his brothers all show an interest in reviving and renewing heroic and semi-historical narrative at Cnut’s court.⁶⁷

As far as may be established, this does not appear to have been the cultural climate in England before Cnut’s arrival. Leonard Neidorf has argued, primarily on the basis of onomastic data, that there was a decline in interest in pre-Christian narrative from the ninth century onwards.⁶⁸ It is, then, conceivable that Cnut’s reign saw a renaissance of sorts in northern culture. Bailey, indeed, sees the sculpture alone as offering evidence of a possible “temporary ascendance of ‘Scandinavian’ tastes in southern England at the time of Cnut.”⁶⁹ This even provides a conceivable context for the interest in reproducing Beowulf, a poem which Neidorf and others have sought to demonstrate as old and strange by the time of its only extant copy.⁷⁰ It would have been entirely logical for Cnut to have demonstrated an interest in legendary heroes as part of both his Danish and English lordship for propaganda purposes; the placing of the carving would have been close to the tombs intended for himself and his family.⁷¹ What are usually (probably anachronistically) called Sigurðr carvings are frequently associated with burials, and this frieze may have been deliberately located close to, or even around, the royal tombs at Old Minster; certainly it provides a heroic model fit for emulation by both former marauders and civilized noblemen.⁷²

We are indeed fortunate that the fragment which survived in Winchester is from this specific moment in Sigmundr’s story. Had it simply shown an interaction between humans, it could have been entirely opaque; had it shown a dragon fight, this would surely have been recorded as Sigurðr’s fight with Fáfnir. If the evidence of this single stone is treated with the circumspection it calls for, we must acknowledge that the narrative frieze around Winchester Old Minster probably depicted not only a she-wolf having her tongue torn out, but also a dragon fight, two werewolves, a hero gaining wisdom from birds, and scenes of incest, kin-slaying, and infanticide. Even if this frieze, in its original form, featured only some of the less disturbing elements, it is unlikely that these were absent from the minds of those who viewed it. The lack of any dynastic associations between the story and Cnut and his family makes the carving of the legend, and the stories around that, in such a site more, not less, extraordinary. It reminds us that pre-Christian narrative does not necessarily indicate un-Christian thought, and it suggests that a Romanesque narrative frieze probably prompted sophisticated readings, with multiple meanings simultaneously present but held in shape by a single narrative, as in the case of Viking Age cross shafts, or indeed Beowulf itself.⁷³ The Sigmundr stone offers us a rich, honey-sweet flavour of the complicatedly convergent, multimedial, and multicultural storytelling at the heart of Cnut’s empire.

Notes

The first report is in Biddle, “Excavations at Winchester 1965,” 325, with description in 329–32. Measurements here are taken from Biddle’s most recent description in Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbye-Biddle, Corpus IV, 314.ii–322.i (§88). See the earlier description in Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, Winchester: Saxon and Norman Art, 12–13 (§18); Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “Danish Royal Burials,” 216–17. A conclusive discussion is forthcoming in Kjølbye-Biddle and Biddle, Minsters of Winchester. The piece’s museum reference number is CG62-70 WS98. I am deeply indebted to Professor Biddle for permitting the use of images produced as part of his work and for his support and advice in the development of this discussion.

Biddle’s Faces B and D, images of which are §§642–45 in Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbye-Biddle, Corpus IV.

Figure 11.3 is used by kind permission from Kjølbye-Biddle and Biddle, Minsters of Winchester.

Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbye-Biddle, Corpus IV, 317.i. The shards form §§76–77, 79, 80, 81, and 84.

Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbye-Biddle, Corpus IV, 317.i and 321.i. Biddle also notes that this is far from the maximum length, because it could have run around several walls and thereby come closer to the Bayeux Tapestry’s 70.4 m. See the Biddles’ more recent discussion in “Danish Royal Burials,” 216–17.

A full bibliography up to 1995 is given in Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbye-Biddle, Corpus IV at 321.ii–322.i. For more recent discussions see Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 143; Lawson, Cnut: Danes in England, 122; Bailey, England’s Earliest Sculptors, 96; Thompson, Dying and Death, 165; Rowe, ‘“Quid Sigvardus cum Christo?,’” 168–69, n. 4; Townend, “Contextualising the Knútsdrápur,” 171; Kopár, Gods and Settlers, 47–51; Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, “Danish Royal Burials,” 216–17; Biddle, “Königshäuser”; Bardiès-Fronty and Dectot, Celtes et Scandinaves, 67 (§39).

The suggestion was made by Jolanta Zaluska and is published in Zarnecki, Holt, and Holland, English Romanesque Art, 25, n.7.

This suggestion is made rather tentatively in Alexander, “Sigmund or the King of the Garamantes?” The manuscript in question is London, British Library, Royal MS. 12 F. xiii, with the image fol. 30v.

Kopár, Gods and Settlers, 51. The scene from Dunstan’s vita is edited and translated in Lapidge and Winterbottom, Early Lives of Dunstan, 22–25 (§6.6).

Yorke notes how unlikely the scene would be, but tacitly accepts it in Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 143.

As recorded by Curtis, Salishan Tribes of the Coast, 159–61.

The manuscript is Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliothek, Ny kgl. Saml. MS. 1824 b 4o, briefly described in Vǫlsunga saga, ed. and trans. Grimstad, 68–69, with a fuller account (in Danish) in Völsunga saga, ed. Olsen. The Old Norse text is edited with a facing-page English translation by Finch, Saga of the Volsungs; a more recent translation is Byock, Saga of the Volsungs.

The so-called Sigurðr-stones are frequently discussed. Probably the most authoritative (and cynical) account of which carvings should be accepted as depicting the legend, and which should not be, is in Margeson, “Vǫlsung Legend”; a more recent consideration of the key elements is in Stern, “Sigurðr Fáfnisbani,” 899–900. The most recent full discussion is Kopár, Gods and Settlers, 23–56. See also Lang, “Sigurd and Weland”; Düwel, “Sigurd Representations”; Byock, “Sigurðr Fáfnisbani”; and Wilson, Vikings in the Isle of Man.

See, for instance, Bailey, England’s Earliest Sculptors, 93.

As Biddle notes, “it is the heroic and not the pagan which matters here” (“Danish Royal Burials,” 216).

As discussed in detail by Rowe, “‘Quid Sigvardus cum Christo?’,” esp. 172–85, with her findings summarized at 186–88.

See Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture, 125, followed by Thompson, Dying and Death, 167; see also Sawyer, Viking Age Rune-Stones, esp. 125–26. The Gosforth Cross and Gosforth Fishing Stone provide further examples of Eddic mythology being used in Christian contexts; the latter may even have been from a line of narrative sculpture like the Winchester carving (Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture, 128–32).

See, for instance, Stern, “Sigurðr Fáfnisbani,” 898.

Sawyer, Viking Age Rune-Stones, 124; see also 147 and 152.

Bailey emphasizes its Scandinavian attributes and finds the location in Winchester more surprising than its form, England’s Earliest Sculptors, 96. See Yorke’s discussion of the probable importing of Scandinavian style under Cnut, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 143.

There are, however, some difficult-to-explain four-legged animals on hogbacks; a tenth-century example from Heysham in Lancashire has been interpreted as alluding to Sigmundr and the wolf. Kopár dismisses this interpretation, without providing an alternative, in Gods and Settlers, 44–45, 48, 52. See Thompson, Dying and Death, 165.

The fullest review of the finding and the conclusions to be drawn from it are in Tweddle, Biddle, and Kjølbye-Biddle, Corpus IV, 319.i–ii. A wider discussion of the minsters at Winchester is in Biddle, “Winchester: Development,” 254–61; detailed comment on the carving and its relationship to Old Minster is in Biddle “Excavations at Winchester 1965,” 39–41, with specific notes on the general aspect of the Minster in “Excavations at Winchester 1965,” 51.

Zarnecki, Holt, and Holland, Romanesque Art, 151 (§97; see also §22); Biddle observes that this finding should influence our understanding of Romanesque art rather than defying the archaeological evidence, in Backhouse, Turner, and Webster, Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, 135 (§140); Kopár also points out the implications of the dating of the fragment as potentially changing our understanding of the development of Romanesque in England, and on that basis seeks to reject the archaeological evidence (Gods and Settlers, 50); Bailey accepts the archaeological dating and compromises by identifying the carving as an “anticipation, in its solid round forms, of Romanesque art” (England’s Earliest Sculptors, 96); see also his comments on the Rothbury Cross, “Anglo-Saxon Art,” 28. Biddle now sees “nothing Romanesque about it at all” (pers. corr. September 11, 2017).

Most recently edited by Lapidge and Winterbottom as Wulfstan of Winchester, Life of Æthelwold.

Discussed by Quirk, “Winchester New Minster.” See also Biddle, Winchester in the Early Middle Ages, 315; Biddle “Excavations at Winchester 1965,” 41; Cramp, “Tradition and Innovation,” 145; Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art, 122.

For example, S 889 and S 836 record gifts of land as a restoration and in return for a gold bracelet respectively, hardly indications of a close relationship. References to Anglo-Saxon charters are by Sawyer number as listed in Electronic Sawyer.

Gifts to Old Minster are recorded in S 970, S 972, S 976, in the Annals of Old Minster, and by Henry of Huntingdon. Compare, however, Yorke’s comments in “Cnut and Winchester,” in this volume, pp. 232–34, on the lack of certain evidence of Cnut’s personal engagement with Old Minster, and indeed with Winchester more broadly, beyond the creation of a site of burial. See also Lyon, Constitutional and Legal History, 92; Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 143; Bolton, Empire of Cnut, 95; Townend, “Contextualising the Knútsdrápur,” 168–72; Roffey and Lavelle, “West Saxons and Danes,” 25. The couple’s most famous gift to New Minster was a great golden cross, shown on the first side of the community’s Liber Vitae, now London, British Library, Stowe MS. 944.

The deliberately English identity of Cnut’s court is widely commented on. See for instance Loyn, Governance, 81; Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 144–45; Bolton, Empire of Cnut, 69, 202; for his reliance on the English, see Lund, “Cnut’s Danish Kingdom,” 30; Lawson comments on the necessity of such Englishness, in Cnut: Danes in England, 122.

The strongest instance is the construction of a relationship with Edmund, described by William of Malmesbury in chap. 184 of his Gesta Regum Anglorum, I, ed. Mynors, Thomson, and Winterbottom, and discussed in this volume by Yorke, pp. 224–25. See also Lawson, Cnut: Danes in England, 129, 135; Kennedy, “Cnut’s Law Code,” 70; Bolton, Empire of Cnut, 95; Thomson, “Configuring Stasis,” esp. 188. Biddle, in Backhouse, Turner, and Webster, Golden Age, 133 (§140), followed by Bardiès-Fronty, Celtes et Scandinaves, 67 (§39), has suggested that the carving may have commemorated the marriage of Cnut and Emma, marking the union of his family with that of Æthelred, Emma’s first husband.

On the influx of Scandinavians and the cultural and linguistic impact, see Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 144–45; Townend, Language and History, 193; Roffey and Lavelle, “West Saxons and Danes,” 18–23.

See Yorke in this volume, pp. 227–32.

See Yorke in this volume, pp. 225–26.

See, for example, Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture, 116; Byock, Saga of the Volsungs, 21.

Andersson, in Legend of Brynhild, 80, argues that Brynhildr seems more likely to have been the original central figure and that “we may more easily imagine that Sigurðr’s adventures were expanded because of a flattering association with such a powerful heroine.” See also Byock, Volsungs, 21–22; and North, “Metre and Meaning,” 44.

Cited as Helgakviða Hundingsbana hin fyrri, stanza 42, in Edda, ed. Neckel, 136. The Poetic Edda was perhaps compiled in the twelfth century, but it is impossible to know how early its elements were composed.

“Eiríksmál,” ed. Fulk, 1010 (stanza 5).

Noted and discussed in this context by Byock, Saga of the Volsungs, 22. See also Phillpotts, The Elder Edda, 90–91; Klaeber’s “Beowulf,” ed. Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, 168.

References to Beowulf are to Klaeber’s “Beowulf,” ed. Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, by line number.

Phillpotts, The Elder Edda, 49–50, 161; Klaeber’s “Beowulf,” ed. Fulk, Bjork and Niles, 167–68.

North, “Metre and Meaning,” 46–47. OE fitel-fōt (cognate with Old Saxon fitelfôt) glosses “petilus” (perhaps “white-footed”), for a horse’s fetlock, in MS. Plantin-Moretus and BL, MS. Add. 32246: see DOE: https://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/. The meaning here, as in the case of Sigemund’s (son and) sister’s son appears to indicate a wrist color at variance with the surrounding color.

There is an extensive literature on both poem and manuscript; for a full overview, and a discussion of the dating, see Thomson, Communal Creativity, 1–4, 30–32, 70–77; see also North’s discussion in this volume, pp. 279–281.

Thompson, Dying and Death, 163–64, notes this difficulty and decides to refer to all representations as Sigurðr “for the sake of simplicity.”

Later genealogies (such as that in Ragnarssona þáttr) separate these two figures, making Gormr the son of Harthacnut, while there is a probably more reliable twelfth-century version in Skjǫldunga saga. Langfeðgatal is in Scriptores rerum Danicarum ed. Langebek, Suhm, Engelstoft, and Werlauff, 1; it is more readily available and translated in Bruce, Scyld and Scef, 115–17.

See, for instance, Sawyer, Viking Age Rune-Stones, 147.

Noted by Lawson, Cnut: Danes in England, 109. See also Townend, “Contextualising the Knútsdrápur,” 177.

Frank, “King Cnut,” esp. 111–13; see also Thomson, “Configuring Stasis,” 186–88, and North in this volume, pp. 281, 290–93. On the performative and semi-official nature of skaldic verse, see also Carroll, “Concepts of Power,” 221.

Frank sees it as a fully established “official party line” by 1030, in “King Cnut,” 112.

“Sigvatr Þórðarson: Knútsdrápa,” ed. Townend, 651–52 (stanzas 1–2).

“Hallvarðr háreksblesi: Knútsdrápa,” ed. Townend, 233 (stanza 3).

Whaley, in Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1, 652, notes the “framing” of Cnut’s conquest with Ívarr’s defeat of Ælle in this verse. See North later in this volume, pp. 296–97.

McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga, 228–34; Rowe, Vikings in the West, 179–80. I follow both, particularly Rowe, closely here. The relevant parts of most texts noted are included and translated in Rowe, Vikings in the West.

Keynes, “Declining Reputation of Æthelred”; see, however, Dennis, “Image Making,” 46–48.

Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 54.

Thomson, “Configuring Stasis.”

Contrast with Rowe, in ‘“Quid Sigvardus cum Christo?’,” who finds that “Genealogies mentioning Sigurðr [Sigmundsson] … always had the option of including Ragnarr as well” (182) and dates an interest in such ancestry to the late tenth century (188).

Rowe, in Vikings in the West, 197, argues that she is suppressed in this history. See also Larrington, in whose view the connection between the Vǫlsungar and Ragnarr’s family was made “as early as a mid-thirteenth-century Norwegian context,” in “Völsunga saga, Ragnars saga and Romance,” 15.

McTurk in Studies in Ragnars saga loðbrókar, 146–47, notes her absence from Saxo’s account in the Gesta Danorum. Rowe shows that her story is echoed so frequently that Saxo must have known of and sought to suppress her, perhaps because of her pagan connotations, Vikings in the West, 103–5. Compare her suggestion, in Vikings in the West, 189–90, that Ragnarr is suppressed and Sigurðr promoted in Fóstbrœðra saga’s version of the genealogy, because Ragnarr was known as a monstrous pirate and Sigurðr the dragon-slayer had semi-Christian associations.

Páll Jónsson studied in England, probably in the school of Lincoln Cathedral, in 1175–1180: see Bjarni Guðnason, “Icelandic Sources of Saxo Grammaticus,” 89, and Danakonunga Sǫgur, ed. Bjarni Guðnason, xvi–xvii.

She is a disguised noble girl kept by peasant parents and known as Kráka, who goes on to impress Ragnarr’s men with her beauty and him with her intelligence. A mother to his best-known sons, she manages to stave off the threat of being replaced by a new wife. As stepmother to his first two sons, she leads the vengeance for their deaths. As valkyrie, she provides protection for her sons, advises Ragnarr against his fatal voyage, and makes him a magic shirt to protect him from snake venom. Larrington, in “Þóra and Áslaug,” 66, agrees with Bjarni Guðnason that she is the central figure in the narrative.

Rowe, Vikings in the West, 66–67; see also McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga, 40.

Van Houts, “Scandinavian Influences,” 114, 117–18.

Rowe dates her full role to the twelfth century, Vikings in the West, 67; van Houts assumes Áslaug to have been a part of the eleventh-century narrative, in “Scandinavian Influences,” 116.

For the similarities between the elaboration of the Ælle and Áslaug narratives, see McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga, 234–35; see also 175–82.

Contrast with Biddle, in “Danish Royal Burials,” 216, who makes the most recent restatement of the thesis that the stone was intended to invoke dynastic ties.

“Hallvarðr háreksblesi: Knútsdrápur,” ed. Townend, 237 (stanza 6, in prose word order).

“Hallvarðr háreksblesi: Knútsdrápur,” ed. Townend, 238 (stanza 7). On the use of Christian imagery see Frank, “King Cnut,” whom I follow closely here. Quotation is from 121; see also 116–17 and 124.

Bardiès-Fronty, in Celtes et Scandinaves, 67 (§39), notes that, if Biddle’s interpretation holds, it implies the existence of a “grand cycle poétique” on Sigmundr’s story circulating in England in this period.

Neidorf, “Germanic Legend,” 53–56. See also Chetwood, “Re-Evaluating English Personal Naming,” 544–46, who shows that the same evidence of a decrease in name variation, in an increasingly rigid system, is in line with contemporary shifts across Europe in naming patterns: a result of changing social conditions.

Bailey, England’s Earliest Sculptors, 96. On the presence of Scandinavian taste under Cnut and in Wessex more broadly, see also Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 143; Townend, Language and History, 193; Townend, “Contextualising the Knútsdrápur,” esp. 171–72 and 175; Roffey and Lavelle, “West Saxons and Danes,” 18–23.

Most comprehensively in Transmission of “Beowulf”.

Rowe thinks that “interest in Sigurðr as an ancestor may date from as early as the second half of the tenth century” (‘“Quid Sigvardus cum Christo?’,” 188). On the significance of Old Minster and Cnut’s use of burials see Yorke in this volume, p. 223; Marafioti, The King’s Body, 98, 112.

Biddle, “Danish Royal Burials,” 216–17; Kopár, Gods and Settlers, 49; Stern, “Sigurðr Fáfnisbani,” 904; Rowe, ‘“Quid Sigvardus cum Christo?’,” 169; Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture, 123; and 92–93 and 96 for the heroic ideals of Sigmundr and sons.