Article

The legend of Havelok the Dane and the historiography of East Anglia

My purpose here is to examine the nature of such fabrication by suggesting that many of the names associated with the Havelok legend in its various forms do in fact suggest if not a historical origin, then a historiographical one. I will trace the names of some of the characters in historiographical traditions about East Anglia and examine the context in which they appeared in Gaimar’s version of the Havelok tale. Next, I will examine the historiographical roots for the name changes that are found in Havelok the Dane and suggest that they imply a literary context for the transformation of the tale over time. I will argue that the names of the characters in the various versions of the tale, both early and late, are the result neither of a corrupted popular version of forgotten history nor of a crafted illusion of history by later poets. Rather, they grew out of the chronicle tradition of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries in which writers were engaged in a process of East Anglian historybuilding, a learned and literate enterprise that attempted to establish an identity for the region. In short, at least certain aspects of the legend that has come down to us have as much to do with historiography as with popular romance.

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