From legend to literature: The journey of "Havelok the Dane"

The Havelok story appears in thirteen works written prior to the end of the fourteenth century, of which only three--the earliest known version contained in Geoffrey Gaimar's Anglo-Norman chronicle, the Old French Lai d'Haveloc, and the anonymous Middle English romance Havelok the Dane--are longer than one hundred lines. A key to understanding the main interest the Havelok story would have had in the Middle Ages is the fact that besides the Old French Lai and the Middle English romance, all the other versions are contained in chronicles. Thus, it is necessary to look not only at the existing texts of the story but also at the tradition of chronicle writing from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. Historians of the Anglo-Norman rulers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were influenced by the rhetorical tradition of history writing going back to Suetonius, Lucan, Vergil, and Sallust. The Havelok tale, which began and ended as a chronicle episode, makes strikingly clear the debt that the romance as a genre owes to the tradition of the Anglo-Norman rhetorical histories. The generic markers that distinguish romances written in England are direct inheritances from the twelfth-century Brut chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gaimar, Wace, and Benoit who artfully and artificially "aged" their genre in order to flatter their Norman patrons. By the fourteenth century, however, there is a clear sense of genre specificity separating history from romance that inheres in subject matter and style. Chronicles entertain a dialectic relationship with romance, defining themselves comparatively and specularly by referring continually to the genre markers that distinguish them. The first two chapters examine the background of history writing in the twelfth century and the significance of Gaimar's chronicle. Chapters three through six consider in detail each of the three major versions of the Havelok story, as well as possible analogues in Scandinavian and classical tradition. Chapter seven looks at the ways in which the reemergence of the Havelok story in chronicles of the fourteenth century reflects awareness of generic differences between history and fiction.