Chapter 10 - Poetry in Scandinavia

Summary

THERE IS AN element of catch-22 to the argument that Beowulf cannot have been created in Scandinavia because there is no comparable contemporary Scandinavian work of poetry. In Scandinavia, the literate culture needed to preserve oral poetry was established more than half a millennium later than in England. The question that needs to be asked, rather, is whether the conditions existed for epic poetry in Scandinavia during the Migration Period and whether there are indirect traces of a poetic culture from that time.

Basic Preconditions

In the late Roman Iron Age and the Migration Period, the landscape of southern and central Scandinavia was, by the agrarian standards of the time, almost fully exploited. There is also much to suggest that the population was easily on a par with that of rural areas at any time prior to the Industrial Revolution. The level of artistic expression was high, the network of international contacts well developed, and the social hierarchy complex.

In the case of eastern Zealand, an area central to Beowulf, it has been suggested, on the basis of a uniquely rich burial record, that six or seven different social strata can be made out, from the king at the top to slaves at the bottom (Ethelberg 2011). Settlement remains from the Middle Iron Age across Scandinavia generally also point to a qualitative and quantitative socio-economic stratification of society. From the third century ad onwards, many villages had a special building associated with one of the larger farms, one half of which served as a hall for entertaining and ritual activity, although these functions were soon transferred to an entirely separate hall structure (Herschend 1993; 1998, 15–31; 2009, 251–60). In the poem, it is suggested that King Hrothgar and his wife do not spend the night in the hall, but in another dwelling house nearby or another part of the building.

A further example of social stratification is the weapons sacrifice discovered at Illerup Ådal in eastern Jutland from around ad 200, in which virtually the entire equipment of a defeated army of around a thousand men, probably of Norwegian or Norwegian–western Swedish origin, was ritually destroyed and scattered across the peat bog. From this material, the picture emerges of a well-organised military hierarchy of three strata, consisting of roughly 2 percent senior commanders, 20 percent other officers, and 78 percent common soldiers (Ilkjær 2002, 124, 134)