Middle-earth Journeys

My nephew is a junior at Saint Louis U., where Shippey teaches, and I've done everything but offer to pay his tuition to move him to take one of his classes, but he won't. I could wring the kid's neck!

I'd love to sit in on some of Shippey's lectures - not just because he's so insightful but also because I like his voice, his charm and his easy-going humour, and the capacity he has to make everything he talks about interesting.

I just heard that Prof. Shippey will be retiring from teaching at the end of the academic year: bad news for the students, but perhaps that means that he will be devoting more of his time to writing?

I really hope so! I love reading everything he writes - he presents his ideas so clearly and easily, no matter how complex. Not many academics can analyse a work the way he does and still make it a 'good read'.

The connection to Tolkien is very tenuous in this post but as a couple of our members have been to Lejre, in Denmark, including me I thought this might be interesting! Plus, it's all come from reading Shippey’s Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien by Tom Shippey, Walking Tree Books 2007 so I guess this post can sit happily here.

We all know of Tolkien’s intense love of Beowulf and his groundbreaking scholarship. We also know that King Theoden’s Golden Hall in The Two Towers – Meduseld – was based on Heorot, the Royal Hall in Beowulf where Beowulf comes to rid the King and his people of Grendel. What I didn’t know was that the ancient site of the Danish Kings at Lejre, in Denmark has been thought for some time to be a leading contender for the location of the historical Heorot and the setting for the story’s events. In fact – thanks to recent excavations by Tom Christensen and a new book by John Niles – it has now become even more likely that it is the historical Heorot and the setting for the story’s events. If I’d known all this before we visited Lejre I’d have paid even more attention!

I was reading the Shippey book I mentioned above and came upon this reference to Lejre in his chapter on Tolkien and the Beowulf poet which made me do a double take. Lejre…. Haven’t Chrissiejane, Chrissie and I just been there when we went to Viggo’s exhibition in nearby Roskilde?

There are no slaves in Beowulf. Though recent excavations have a revealed clear and gruesome case of human sacrifice at Lejre itself, the traditional site of the poem’s great hall Heorot….

So I started googling like mad to see what it was all about. Here’s a little bit of Background from Wikipedia:

Lejre was the capital of an Iron Age kingdom, the Lejre Kingdom, which was, according to legend, ruled by kings of the Skjöldung dynasty; it is assumed to be the predecessor of medieval Denmark. Lejre is assumed to have been the location of Heorot, the royal hall mentioned in Beowulf and other myths that are set around the year 500. Archeological remains of large halls from this period have been found. The legends of the kings of Lejre were written down in the 12th century Chronicon Lethrense.

© Wikipedia

John Niles has been pulling all the information from recent excavations together and speculating on this fascinating connection. He has written an article for History Today which sums up his findings:

Beowulf's Great Hall

“The Viking Age hall-complex at Lejre ought therefore to be of considerable interest to Anglo-Saxonists and Beowulf enthusiasts, even though it is of too late a date to be enlisted into ’the search for the historical Heorot’. This great hall was not the first one to be built at Lejre, however. Posthole evidence now confirms that an earlier hall of the same dimensions had stood on almost exactly the same spot. The foundations of this earlier hall have been radiocarbon-dated to c. AD 680, close to the time when the great mound of Grydehøj was erected. But even this is not the end of the story, for in a new round of excavations undertaken by Christensen during the summers of 2004-05, the remains of a third hall have been discovered on a small hill about 500 metres north of the first site. This hall, equal to the other two in length though somewhat less in width, appears to have been built during the mid-sixth century. It therefore pertains to the very time when the Beowulf poet imagines Hrothgar to have ruled from Heorot.

This sixth-century hall at Lejre was built on a prominence that put it in directline of sight with some of the more ancient mounds of this area. Taken as an ensemble, these structures must have been suggestive of the glory of the past and present rulers of Zealand. As a remarkable gesture affirming a connection to an earlier era, the north side of the sixth-century hall was built directly against the base of a Bronze Age tumulus.

These dramatic discoveries confirm that the Beowulf poet’s Fictions about a hall named ’Heorot’ are based upon a core of historical fact. During a period of almost five hundred years, one or another of these halls did tower high at Lejre.”

From the description of the location, on a rise and overlooking the nearby ancient mounds and ship burial, and from looking at Google satellite maps this last, earlier hall must be the excavation CJ, Chrissie and I tried to look at. But as it seemed to be up a private road we chickened out walking up there to have a look at it! I don’t expect there was much to see anyway but it’s tantalising that we were so close to it!
If you read on in the article you get to a description of the surrounding landscape:

“Looking west from either of the two hall sites at Lejre, one faces a curious hummocky region, where no traces of ancient monuments are to be found. This area seems always to have been a hinterland. At the end of the last Ice Age, retreating sheets of ice deposited vast quantities of rubble here in a kind of devil’s garden. The resulting area, known to geologists as a dead-ice landscape, consists of nothing but lakes or tarns (or kettle holes) interspersed among hillocks. In ancient times, much of this land is likely to have been wooded……Now and again, though, you may be caught up short by half-lit pools infiltrated by alders, whose weird reflections shimmer in the water. You may recall with a shiver the images you have seen of the notorious bog people of Denmark, the apparent victims of sacrificial rites practised during the early Iron Age. The practice seems to have been discontinued only around AD 500, though pagan sacrifice surely continued in other forms.”

CJ and Chrissie: Remember the pool with the dead trees in it? This is the unique and interesting landscape we walked past on our left on our way towards the old village.

“Here, in the immediate neighborhood of Lejre, can be found all the essential visual ingredients of the Beowulf story. There is the hall, with its marvellously crafted tokens of civilization. There are enough ancient barrows in this region to satisfy any treasure-seeker.There are also some prominent stone ship-settings at Lejre (or there once were only one remains), if one wishes to connect the scene of the ship burial of Scyld Scefing with which the narrative action of Beowulf begins. Most important, at Lejre there has long existed a bipolar topography suggestive of an ’axis of good and evil’, for directly facing the hall, almost like its natural adversary, is the hinterland, with the potentially horrid secrets of its bogs. For a long time, what appear to have been the greatest halls of their era in southern Scandinavia faced a wasteland that could have seemed haunted by the kind of weird creatures that peopled that medieval book of bad dreams, the Marvels of the East.“

Remember the creepy pool with the crows circling around it that I said had a bad atmosphere? It must be a flood pool as it’s not there all the year round, but here’s a photo anyway as it gives a flavour of what things were like there.

“Why did Lejre come to occupy so large a place in the pages of medieval chroniclers and saga-writers, as well as of modern antiquarians, poets, and Danish patriots, while other ’central places’ known to have existed during this same epoch (such as Gudme in Funen, Himlingøje or Tissø in Zealand, and Uppråka in Scania) had no such fame? Since this question involves many gaps in the historical record, it cannot easily be answered. A reasonable short answer, however, might be that Lejre was not only a centre of material power, it also had the stories of the Skjöldung kings, while none of the others did.

The upshot of these remarks is that there are now two fixed points between which the making of the poem that we call Beowulf must be understood. One is the unique manuscript text of that poem as written down in about AD 1000. The other is the physical ground at Lejre where the legendary Skjöldung kings are said to have had their hall, and where some unknown rulers of Zealand actually did.”

Taken from:
REPORTS BY John D. Niles
John D. Niles is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
USA

© Copyright of History Today

So…. we were at ‘Meduseld’ – or at least the inspiration for it – and following a rather lengthy Tolkien trail from Heorot to The Golden Hall without even knowing it!

There is a book all about Lejre and Beowulf edited by Niles and with a forward by Shippey himself:

Beowulf and Lejre

© All images Iolanthe

What interesting findings, Iolanthe!!

I can vividly recall the strong "energy" that is almost palpable when you stand at the stone ship burial and survey that rolling landscape all around. I wondered at the time why it was that this particular place was chosen, amongst all the other potential sites on Zealand. The Vikings must have felt that this was the place to honour the ancient power and wisdom that had been accruing for eons before their time, and that seemed to me to pervade the whole area.

Wonderful!

I felt that energy too - it really is a very special place and I'm kicking myself now for not realising exactly how interesting (to us especially) it was. None of the guide books and leaflets I looked at mentioned the Beowulf theories and the idea, at least, has been around for some time. But the discovery of the earlier, smaller hall has really added credence to it!

I can imagine that boggy, rolling landscape we walked past covered with looming trees, hidden pools, and the possibility of Grendel's mother sitting in the murky depths. If you look to the West of old Lejre on Google satellite you can see just how pocked and dark that landscape is!

Because I'm so interested in this and WE WERE THERE (Yay) I wanted to post a map of the site. I can't find one so I've made my own using Google Maps (satellite) and some jiggery pokery in Photoshop :

© Google Maps

On our guide map only the newly discovered oldest hall was marked so that's the one we went looking for up the side road at the top. But you can clearly see the markings of the two later halls (which were built on one site) by the side of the road going up to the oldest mound. That wasn't marked on our map and we never went up there . The earliest hall is the most interesting from the Beowulf point of view but I expect there was really nothing to show people which makes it strange that it was the only one on the map..

If you can find it on Google maps you can take a closer look. You can see the markings of the later halls clearly.

Here is a diagram of the site of the two later bigger halls which have been associated with Beowulf up until recently (although they are too late a time period):
Great Hall at Lejre

Thanks for this great report, Iolanthe--how exciting! The interaction of archeology, history, and literature here is so rich.

I've only just found this report and dialog. Very interesting and I'm glad you didn't hesitate to post it here. I love how history is a mystery and puzzle pieces are from stories. Thank you Iolanthe.

Middle-earth lives!!!

Yes, indeed! Did I read correctly above that this is now privately owned land?

It must be, Merry - the road up to where the hall was marked on my map looked as thought it was a road up to someone's farm and as the hall has recently been discovered it's bound to be on someone's private land. I don't think there is anything to see as such so there is nothing directing tourists there. Most visitors go to the stone ship burial and the mounds which are famous and where there is a proper visitors centre and road (at the bottom of my photo). The visitors centre was, unfortunately, shut while we were there. CJ and Chrissie know how unfortunately it was for me .

I would have thought that the location of the two later halls would have been signposted though, but it wasn't. Maybe the visitor's center has better maps and directions!

I've finally had a chance to pick up my copy of Root and Branch and I'm in love with Shippey all over again! I wonder if anyone would be interested in choosing an article and discussing it together.

I thought Root and Branch was fascinating - I found it very useful in learning the background Tolkien was writing from and it led to discovering all the information above about Lejre.

It's a while now since I read it - which chapters were you most interested in, Merry?