ss heirs to the
guardianship of ambitious and wicked nobles were not rare in the early
days of Britain, Wales, or Denmark; the murder of the heir and the
usurpation of the kingdom by the cruel regent were no unusual
occurrences. The opportunity of localising the early legend seems to
have come with the growing fame of Anlaf, or Olaf, Sihtricson, who was
known to the Welsh as Abloec or Habloc. His adventurous life included
a threefold expulsion from his inheritance of Northumbria, a marriage
with the daughter of King Constantine III. of Scotland, and a family
kinship with King Athelstan of England. In Anlaf Curan (as he was
called) we have an historical hero on whom various romantic stories
were gradually fathered, because of his adventurous life and his
strong personality. These stories finally crystallized in a form which
shows the English and Danish love of physical prowess (Havelok is the
strongest man in the kingdom), as well as a certain cruelty of
revenge which is more peculiarly Danish. There is resentment of the
Norman predominance to be found in the popularity of a story which
shows the kitchen-boy excelling all the nobles in manly exercises, and
the heiress to the kingdom wedded in scorn, as so many Saxon heiresses
were after the Conquest, to a mere scullion. There can be no doubt,
however, that Havelok stood to mediaeval England as a hero of the
strong arm, a champion of the populace against the ruling race, and
that his royal birth and dignity were a concession to historic facts
and probabilities, not much regarded by the common people. The story,
again, showed another truly humble hero, Grim the fisher, whose
loyalty was supposed to account for the special trading privileges of
his town, Grimsby. In Grim the story found a character who was in
reality a hero of the poor and lowly, with the characteristic devotion
of the tribesman to his chief, of the vassal to his lord, a devotion
which was handed on from father to son, so that a second generation
continued the services, and received the rewards, of the father who
risked life and all for the sake of his king's heir.

The reader will not fail to notice the characteristic anachronisms
which give to life in Saxon England in the tenth century the colour of
the Norman chivalry of the thirteenth.

Havelok and Godard

In Denmark, long ago, lived a good king named Birkabeyn, rich and
powerful, a great warrior and a man of mighty prowess, whose rule was
undispu