[In the following excerpt, Barron considers the relative popularity of King Horn and Havelok the Dane and contends that while the realism of Havelok has more appeal for today's readers, that was not necessarily true in the case of its original audience.]

… In the earliest of the English romances, King Horn (c. 1225), history is so throughly absorbed into folklore that, though the period of the Viking raids provides the violent social context of the action, specific historical events and characters cannot be identified. The Anglo-Norman version, which predates it by half a century, seems independently derived from a common original, perhaps a folk-tale told by people of Norwegian descent in the west of England.³ As a boy, Horn is set adrift with his companions by Saracen pirates (late substitutes for Viking originals?) who have killed his father, the King of Sudene; he lands in Westernesse where Rymenild, the King's daughter, falls in love with him. When his false companion Fikenild betrays them to King Aylmer, Horn is banished, sails to Ireland, and serves King Thurston, killing the Saracen giant who had killed his own father but refusing the King's daughter in marriage. Hearing that Rymenild is being forced into marriage with King Mody, he returns in disguise to Westernesse, kills the bridegroom, denounces Fikenild's treachery, and sets out with his faithful companion Athulf to regain his father's kingdom. Meanwhile Fikenild tries to force Rymenild into marrying him, but Horn again returns in disguise, kills him, rewards the faithful with kingdoms and brides, and reigns in his own land with Rymenild.

Horn is immediately recognizable as a folk-tale of the exile-and-return type involving the familiar motifs of revenge, recovery of the patrimony, and the winning of a bride. Its form is that of the multimove story which several times repeats the same basic pattern of incidents: the victim hero suffers a misfortune or experiences a lack of something essential to him, leaves home, is tested by adventures involving a villain, emerges victorious to return home in disguise and be recognized by some token or test, only to recommence the pattern of events as the result of some new misfortune, villany, or continuing lack. The repeated pattern stands out clearly in Horn, though it involves the usual improbabilities and irrationalities of folk-tale. Horn conceals his royal birth in both the courts he visits for no apparent reason; by pretending to be a thrall he makes himself an unsuitable suitor for Rymenild, yet her father seems to feel his kingdom threatened by this humble stranger; the readiness with which the King lets Fikenild cow him into giving Rymenild to him is equally unexplained. The logic of folk-tale, however, is not that of reason but of feeling; it is a fantasy on which the rational mind has imposed sufficient order to allow the working out of the conflict between the hero's wishes and inhibitions.

Like someone engaged in a ritual, Horn goes through six moves, crossing water between each of them and in each enacting variations on the same theme. In Sudene he is a prince deprived of the protection and freed from the restraint of a father by circumstances for which he has no responsibility. In Westernesse he is a thrall whose love for Rymenild would threaten the kingdom; when she dreams that a fish has broken her net, Horn predicts that an ill-wisher will destroy their happiness, as if willing his own banishment. In Ireland, under the name Godmod (Goodmind), he avenges his father by killing the Saracen giant who slew him and, though he refuses the Princess offered him, serves her father for seven years. Back in Westernesse, he throws off his beggar's disguise to declare his true identity, joking with Rymenild about a net which has been set for seven years, shows no awe of her father the King, and kills the rival suitor, King Mody. Crossing to Sudene with his true friend Athulf, he claims his own throne. Returning to Westernesse, Horn overthrows Fikenild, his rival for Rymenild who once suggested that his love for her threatened her father's kingdom, and finally overcomes, now that he is king in his own right, his persistent feeling that to marry a princess and become a king is a disloyal act against a reigning monarch. The underlying theme is clearly that of the maturation of an individual: the various kings are representatives of the father-figure from whose control he struggles to free himself; the good and bad companions are aspects of his personality which further or inhibit his half-realized desire to rival his father and grow to full adult power and independence.⁴

It is impossible to tell how far the original audience, with its greater familiarity with folk-tale, would be consciously aware of this level of meaning where the modern reader sees only the shadowy outline of a male-Cinderella story. But just as today a fairy-tale can be the medium of pantomime or of political allegory, so in Horn a familiar folk-tale pattern contributes its underlying meaning to an exemplary poem on the making of a good king. The plethora of kings in the poem are not just the gilt gingerbread figures of fairy-tale; they exemplify, positively or negatively, the condition to which Horn was born and for which circumstances require him to demonstrate his fitness, reflecting, perhaps, the original shaping of the folk-tale in the Viking age when royal birth could not secure the succession without outstanding personal qualities. From the beginning, Horn's beauty (a useful adjunct to royal charisma) is stressed; he has courtly talents of manner, speech, skill in harping which earn him golden opinions at Aylmer's court; these qualities win him the love of a princess, which discretion and loyalty to her father as his overlord will not allow him to accept until he has achieved knighthood and proved his valour in battle; though it was Rymenild who made all the advances, he limits his claim on her fidelity to seven years, remains faithful to her through seven years of exile, but still refuses to demand her in marriage until he has regained his patrimony and can claim her as an equal.

The folk-tale pattern of repetition with variation serves this theme also. Of the three fights against pagans in which Horn proves his fitness for his father's role of defender of faith and nation, details of the first echo the King's last battle when Fortune overwhelms him with unfair odds only to favour his son when he is similarly overmatched; the second, a David and Goliath encounter in which he kills the giant who slew his father, shows him as the champion of a Christian society whose own leaders have failed to stem the pagan influx; the third, when he reconquers his own kingdom, demonstrates the fruits of valour in the rescue of his mother, the founding of churches, and revitalization of a Christian society. His valour is rooted in faith but also in love: the ring which Rymenild gave him serves as a talisman strengthening him in battle. His initial seduction by her makes him seem a puppet without will, but the inversion of that incident when he refuses a princess freely offered by her father shows him making a free choice in deference to prior obligations of duty to his deserted people and fidelity to Rymenild. Horn's changing status in the love relationship is indicated by the symbolism of Rymenild's dream, when he still fails to ask for her hand after being knighted, that a fish has escaped her net; when he returns in disguise to rescue her from King Mody, he identifies himself as a fisher come to fish! Horn in turn dreams of the drowning Rymenild thrust under by Fikenild and returns again to kill the false friend whose earlier treachery had found him still naive and vulnerable. The fatherless castaway, with the aid of Fortune and his own physical and spiritual powers, has assumed the authority of a Christian king, scourge of pagans and protector of other kingdoms.⁵

The English version of Horn in some 1550 three-stress couplets, about a quarter of the French counterpart, has the spare and sinewy directness of saga. An omniscient narrator outlines action, introduces actors, switches locations but, apart from the occasional ominous phrase warning of dangers ahead, gives no insights into character or motivation. The terse couplets carry the action forward with the absolute minimum of detail needed to establish situation and imply motive:

A morewe tho the day gan springe,    when
The King him rod an huntinge.
At hom lefte Fikenhild,

That was the wurste moder child.
Horn ferde into bure                    went
To sen aventure.
(ll. 649-54)⁶

The individual scenes, each a moment of intense dramatic action, follow one another without explicit connection, their frequently ironic relationship being implicit in the pattern of repetition and inversion. Each is self-contained, carrying forward Horn's feud against the Saracens and his winning of Rymenild alternately but largely independently, the episodes achieving their internal climax and resolution without affecting each other except at the causal level, separate phases in the development of the public and the private man. The public sphere provides the greatest variety of adventure and the long time-span which tests the constancy of the lovers, but their relationship remains the central focus kept continually in mind by Horn's desire to make himself worthy of Rymenild, by her ring which inspires his valour, by the dreams which betray their concern for each other even when apart, and by Horn's various disguises which stress the continuing threat to their union. The narrative procedure is formulaic, moving from episode to episode in a dozen words, scarcely varied, which sketch the repeated sea voyages:

The whyght him gan stonde        breeze
                                 arose
And drof till Irelonde.
To lond he him sette       disembarked
And fot on stirop sette.
(ll. 761-64)

They function like blackouts between the scenes of some experimental drama whose coherence depends upon the emotional interplay between episodes and the ability of the audience to interpret the conventions of parallelism and contrast in situations, themes, and characters.⁷

It is a production without décor; the schematic procedure has no place for description and even the repeated references to the hero's good looks have narrative function, moving his Saracen captors to spare the boy's life and causing Rymenild to distinguish him from his companions. Only Horn has any degree of individuality; the other characters are the formulaic stereotypes of folk-tale—father, faithful and unfaithful friend, foreign king, his marriageable daughter—and even Rymenild is presented only in terms of her passionate love for Horn and the passionate anger she turns on those who come between them. He responds with an undemonstrative fidelity, acting to remove the barriers between them with a simple, manly directness so devoid of courtly address that one might think him motivated more by need to avenge his father and advance his own career than deserve her love. When he expresses emotion, throwing off one of his many disguises, it is with the same directness with which he acts:

He wiped that blake of his swere         dirt,
                                         neck
And sede, 'Quen so swete and dere,
Ich am Horn thin owe.                      own
Ne canstu me noght knowe?
Ich am Horn of Westernesse.
In armes thu me kusse!'
(ll. 1213-18)

The highly dramatized action constantly breaks into speech, statements rather than dialogue, in which the characters declare their feelings and intentions where their French counterparts explain theirs. With characteristic economy, they convey the import of past action or prepare for events to come, the unemotional content made vivid by the sparse context, like speeches in a ballad.⁸

Failure to appreciate how the structural pattern of folk-tale serves the epic theme of a good king's survival as champion of Christian values in the face of paganism without and treachery within has, until recently, caused Horn to be undervalued in relation to Havelok where the popular appeal of a folk hero dominates the social theme.⁹ His tale of exile and return, vaguel coloured by memories of the union of England and Denmark under Canute, was given undeserved authenticity by inclusion in Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis from which, about 1200, it was adapted as a brief Anglo-Norman poem in imitation of Marie's lais. Towards the end of the century, an English poet working, most probably, in Lincolnshire, made a much fuller adaptation from a related Anglo-Norman source.¹⁰" It tells how, on the deaths of their parents, Goldborough, heiress to the throne of England, is entrusted as ward to Earl Godrich and Havelok, Prince of Denmark, to Earl Godard who usurps his throne and hands him over to the fisherman Grim to. be killed. Recognizing his royal birth by a miraculous light shining from Havelok's mouth, Grim flees with him to England and founds Grimsby; the boy becomes a scullion in Godrich's castle at Lincoln, attracts attention by his great strength, and is married to Goldborough whom the Earl had promised her father to give to the strongest man in the kingdom. Havelok dreams that he will become a great king, returns to Denmarl% where his king-light wins him knighthood, defeats Godard, returns to England, defeats Godrich, and, after doing exemplary justice on the two traitors, rules in both kingdoms.

The similarity of the basic folk-tale pattern of the deprived boy winning back his heritage to that in Horn is evident. But this male Cinderella accepts the ashes as his element: growing up in Grim's cottage, his hearty appetite makes him ashamed to eat without working and he sells fish for him until, in a time of famine, he costs more to feed than he can eam, when his foster-father sends him to seek his fortune in Lincoln, barefoot and dressed in an old sail. He wins his first job carrying supplies for the Earl's cook by shoving the other porters into the mud and he labours in the castle kitchen, breaking firewood and carrying water like a beast of burden but 'Als he was strong, so was he softe' (l. 991):

It ne was non so litel knave,          child
For to leiken ne forto plawe,          sport
That he ne wolde with him pleye;
The children that yeden in the weye
                              ran
Of him, he deden all here wille,
And with him leikeden here fille.
Him loveden alle, still and bolde,      shy
Knightes, children, yunge and olde.
(ll. 949-56)¹¹

In the new clothes with which the cook provides him, he is the handsomest man in England, a novice yet champion stone-putter—but only because he is too 'sore adrad' to disobey the cook's order to compete. When, still a virgin, he is forced to marry Goldborough, to prevent her being shamed at court he takes her away to Grimsby where Grim's children, whose father is now dead, serve them as lord and lady. Only when his wife, alerted by the king-light which an angel explains to her in a dream, interprets his own prophetic dream of possessing Denmark and England does Havelok remember his childhood and pray for divine aid against Godard. On landing in Denmark with Grim's three sons to reconquer his heritage, his ignorance of arms is demonstrated by an incident in which he does great slaughter among the thieves who attack his lodging by flailing them with the bar of the door, impressing Earl Ubbe so that, recognizing him as Denmark's heir, he knights him and has him crowned king. Thereafter the blood royal begins to show as Havelok knights Grim's sons, captures and condemns Godard, invades England, defeats Godrich in single combat, makes the English do fealty to their true queen, and rewards all the friends of his youth, giving noble husbands to Grim's daughters and Godrich's earldom to his former cook, while his own union with Goldborough provides rulers for many kingdoms:

He geten children hem bitwene          begot
Sones and doughtres right fivetene,
Wharof the sones were kinges alle,
So wolde God it sholde bifalle,
And the doughtres alle quenes:
Him stondes well that good child strenes.
                                        begets
(ll. 2978-83)

The fairy-tale ending and the proverbial truism represent the dominant tone of Havelok with its naive hero become a leader of men by force of circumstances, motivated by good sense rather than any awareness of natural superiority, its acknowledgement of harsh necessity in the famine which causes Grim to send his foster-son away to the city, and practical piety in Havelok's foundation of a priory in Grim's memory. But instead of the generalized never-never-land of fairy-tale it is set in a polity which mirrors contemporary concepts of good and bad government. The England of King Athelwold in which it begins is an idealized medieval state in which equity and good order are maintained by a stern but just monarch who enforces his laws with impartial rigour, earning the respect and love of all classes. England under the usurper Godrich and Denmark under Godard suffer all the ill effects of tyrannical rule: both demand oaths of loyalty from all subjects but allow them no part in the government; Godrich creates an oppressive bureaucracy to enforce his personal will and coerces his barons to support him in fighting Havelok by threatening to reduce them to thralls, a flagrant violation of law; the inherent weakness of Godard's tyranny is demonstrated by the attack on Havelok's lodging and the rapidity with which his barons desert the Earl to join their rightful prince. The view of kingship which emerges reflects contemporary English theory: the absolute power of a king ruling by divine right needs to be modified by the willing consent of the governed if it is not to degenerate into tyranny.

Against the record of contemporary failure in practice, Havelok's career reads like the idealized biography of an Athelwold: pious, selfless, just and generous. It is not the king-mark but his personal characteristics of courage, loyalty, strength, good sense, and amiability which distinguish him as he rises from the lowest social class to be doubly conqueror and king. In each he displays the virtues appropriate to his social position: slaving uncomplainingly as a porter, and as king rewarding loyal adherents however humble and punishing his opponents, after due legal process, with drastic penalties—Godard is flayed alive and Godrich burnt—which satisfy both the rigorous justice of folk-tale and contemporary precedent.¹² His development from the gentle giant who goes in fear of his master the cook to an imperious monarch may not be psychologically convincing, but it expresses the ideal of the virtues of the good king as rooted in the best qualities of the ordinary man which is at the heart of the poem. The English poet has fused the individual and social-roles of his hero much more successfully than the author of the Anglo-Norman lai who, in putting a courtly gloss on the folk-tale, sets it in the age of Arthur, makes Grim a baron unaccountably given to fishing, and Havelok a rather passive figure carried along by events rather than one who, initially ignorant of his royal birth, earns the right to rule by his own efforts.¹³

The English redactor has not only taken much greater space, some three thousand four-stress lines, than either French version, but has structured the narrative to underline his dual theme of personal and regal virtues. Though Goldborough is inevitably passive, her role as victim parallels that of Havelok, allowing reduplication of the situation in which a land initially well ruled falls into the power of a man who breaks his feudal troth, usurps the right of the legitimate heir, and rules with the viciousness to be expected from one who lacks divine ordination. Their forced union, intended by Godrich as a degradation of the Princess, has the opposite effect, uniting her with 'the best man' physically and morally and preparing the eventual triumph of right over wrong. Havelok's actions when he comes to power parallel those of Athelwold in a way which promises that under him England will be as well ruled as in the past. There, as in Denmark, the people admit their fault in submitting to usurpers, acknowledging that they have a part to play in government, just as the fidelity of Grim and his sons is contrasted with the treachery of their betters. The two countries, repeatedly evoked as 'al Denemark' and 'al Engelond', are made active participants, most vividly in the prophetic dream which the English redactor transferred from Goldborough to Havelok who sees himself embracing his future kingdoms in his arms.¹⁴

The emotional as well as the thematic significance of the action is heightened by the recapitulation of key episodes: repeated recollection of the scene in which Havelok saw his sisters killed on Godard's orders keeps the usurper's crimes in mind until retribution overtakes him; periodic appearances of his king-mark declare the hero's royal birth throughout his humble youth; frequent comparison of the two usurpers with Judas and the devil and references to the oaths of loyalty they have broken maintain animosity against them during their long absences from the action. Frequent interventions by the narrator, displaying his personal bias, direct the audience's reactions: he repeatedly curses the two traitors, calls down maledictions upon them or prays for a blessing or divine aid for hero and heroine; he draws attention to changes of scene and the progress of the action, allowing the minstrel who assumed his voice in performance to make direct contact with the listeners. The minstrel would also have been able to make effective use of the many passages of direct speech, not only dramatic dialogue but the monologues of Godard and Godrich meditating the fate of their wards, the dying speeches of their royal fathers, the speech of Ubbe exhorting the Danes to rally to their true prince, recapitulating his wrongs just when they are about to be revenged. The patterned structure and pointed narration achieve a clarity of outline which allows the poet to indulge in incidental detail, developing the minor characters, in particular Grim, beyond the folk-tale stereotypes on which they are based.¹⁵ His delight in description gives the often brief scenes, particularly those of humble life, a vividness which has, perhaps, unduly influenced opinions on the popular character of the poem. But whoever designed the dual theme subtly interrelated, the clear-cut narrative, the economic style in which the swift-running couplets carry a mass of detail without falling back on line-filling formulae, rising to rhetorical tirades or crystallizing into popular proverbs which underscore meaning, he was more probably a trained cleric than a wayside entertainer.¹⁶

Both Horn and Havelok are manifestly in the romance mode, fantasies of wish-fulfilment which express a dual idealism of personal maturation and social stability while acknowledging the realities of life for a fatherless boy and the limitations of good government in a troubled age. Both show the structural pattern of repetition and variation familiar from the Chanson de Roland and the works of Chrétien, perhaps a legacy of their common folklore inheritance, but none the less with full appreciation of the value of such narrative procedures for thematic emphasis. In other respects their relationship to the romance genre is more various: Horn, with its stress on personal qualities of leadership employed in defence of faith and fatherland, inspired by a love which is served rather than indulged and whose goal is marriage for dynastic ends, shares the social values of the epic, the limited scale of the lai and the dramatic narrative elisions of the ballad; Havelok fills out a similar structure with a wealth of naturalistic detail and vividness of narration reminiscent of the popular tale rather than the distanced, atmospheric romance. Modern critics, attracted by Havelok's realism, assume that their preference reflects that of a popular English audience to whom the style and conventions of roman courtois would have been alien but whose pious and sentimental tastes approved the moral rectitude of the hard-working hero, a model apprentice-boy, and the idealized picture of monarchic rule. But Havelok is essentially a Perceval-figure whose inherent qualities display themselves in a disparate context; the contrast between royal birth and humble circumstances can be appreciated from above as well as below and Havelok may not so much reflect what the lower classes thought of their rulers as what the ruling classes liked to think humbler people thought of them.¹⁷ The effect of the human detail, the touches of comedy, the vivid style is to modify the dangers of piety, bathos, and exaggeration arising from the attempt to span social and moral spheres so widely separated. The same dangers exist in Horn but are avoided there by a strictly schematic presentation of all spheres, both humble and regal, in terms of familiar plot situations, a self-consistent version of reality which does not challenge comparison with the real world.¹⁸

However attractive to us, contemporary audiences do not seem to have found the realism of Havelok a more satisfactory solution. Though his association with Grimsby kept the hero's reputation alive in folk tradition and won him mention in later chronicles, the Anglo-Norman lai fathered no Continental adaptations and the English version did not live on in the chapbooks. The Anglo-Norman Horn story, on the other hand, was transformed into a pedagogic French prose romance which, though it smothered the primitive power of the original in using it to exemplify proper gentlemanly behaviour, found its way into English, German, Dutch, and Icelandic versions by the end of the sixteenth century. The English story reappears in Horn Child (c. 1320) stylistically distorted by a particularly inept tail-rhyme stanza, while its true nature was recognized by the ballad-makers of whose work nine examples stretching back to the fourteenth century remained current until the nineteenth. The fact that none of the surviving versions seems to derive directly from another, and that the three texts of King Horn vary so much in verbal detail that scarcely a line is exactly the same in all three implies a lively, widely dispersed tradition acceptable at many social levels.¹⁹ The occurrence of Horn and Havelok in the Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 108 in association with one of many texts of the South English Legendary, a vastly popular compilation of saints' lives, folklore, natural science, and recent history, has suggested that they too would appeal to an audience of limited sophistication anxious for instruction and moral edification. Such a context may indicate one aspect of their appeal, but all that can be certainly known of the audiences for which they were originally written is that they were not French-speaking; the quality of the Anglo-Norman versions does not suggest that the interests, tastes, and literary discrimination of those for whom the English texts were composed were in any way inferior.…

Notes

…³ See H. G. Leach, Angevin Britain and Scandinavia (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1921), pp. 328-31, and M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford, 1963), pp. 96-104.

⁴ See Anne Wilson, Traditional Romance and Tale (Ipswich, 1976), pp. 59-62, and Derek Brewer, Symbolic Stories (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 64-65.

⁵ See Georgianna Ziegler, 'Structural Repetition in King Horn', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 81 (1980), 403-08.

⁶ Text from Cambridge University MS Gg. 4.27 (II), normalized and modernized by D. B. Sands, Middle English Verse Romances (New York, 1966), pp. 15-54.

⁷ See Mary Hynes-Berry, 'Cohesion in King Horn and Sir Orfeo', Speculum, 50 (1975), 652-70.

⁸ H. L. Creek, 'Character in the Matter of England Romances', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 10 (1911), 429-52, 585-609.

⁹ See, for example, George Kane, Middle English Literature (London, 1951), pp. 48-49: 'This story is loosely episodic, distorted by gratuitous duplication, inartistically expressed …'; 'absurdities … arise in it out of disregard for narrative structure and out of inadequate motivation.…'

¹⁰ On the historical background see Leach, pp. 324-28. Characteristic of Havelok's vague Norse associations are various attributes of Grim which connect him with Odin, notably the name of one of his sons, Hugh Raven, reminiscent of Huginn, one of the two ravens who are the god's familiars, suggesting that the story may have originated as a hero-myth in which the protagonist was aided by Odin in one of his many disguises (see Edmond Reiss, 'Havelok the Dane and Norse Mythology', Modern Language Quarterly, 27 (1966), 115-24).

¹¹ Text from Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, normalized and modernized by Sands, pp. 55-129.

¹² See W. R. J. Barron, 'The Penalties for Treason in Medieval Life and Literature', Journal of Medieval History, 7 (1981), 187-202.

¹³ See Sheila Delany and V. Ishkanian, 'Theocratic and Contractual Kingship in Havelok the Dane', Zeitschrift fur Anglistick und Amerikanistik, 22 (1974), 290-302; John Halverson, 'Havelok the Dane and Society', Chaucer Review, 6 (1971), 142-51; David Staines, 'Havelok the Dane: A Thirteenth-century Handbook for Princes', Speculum, 51 (1976), 602-23.

¹⁴ See Judith Weiss, 'Structure and Characterisation in Havelok the Dane', Speculum, 44 (1969), 247-57.

¹⁵ Comparison with cognate versions of the Helpful Fisherman story suggests that the English poet deliberately retained that part of the tradition which showed Grim as initially cruel and venial, providing narrative tension and a dramatic change in behaviour after he has seen the kingmark which are lacking in the more consistent characterization of the French version (see Maldwyn Mills, 'Havelok and the Brutal Fisherman', Medium Aevum, 36 (1967), 219-30).

¹⁶ The stylistic aspects of Havelok are particularly well treated in Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London, 1968), pp. 161-72.

¹⁷ See J. C. Hirsh, 'Havelok 2933: A Problem in Medieval Literary History', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 78 (1977), 339-47 (p. 343).

¹⁸ See J. M. Ganim, 'History and Consciousness in Middle English Romance', The Literary Review, 23 (1980), 481-96 (pp. 484-87).

¹⁹ See J. R. Hurt, 'The Texts of King Horn', Journal of the Folklore Institut, 7 (1970), 47-59 (p. 49).…