Dane saga: Imagining a viking Past in the Late Medieval Low Countries

 

Tucked away in a southern corner of the modern-day Netherlands, in the historic region of Brabant, the town of Breda is marked by its picturesque cobblestone streets, churches, and courtyards.

Once a strategic centre of dynastic and economic power, it enjoys a storied past of political upheaval, religious pilgrimage, and artistic heritage. It is here, among the collections of the local municipal archives, that a particular late medieval manuscript contains a unique but largely overlooked tradition of epic vernacular poetry: one of kings, dukes, and magnates; of royal weddings and holy relics; of crisis and subterfuge; and of exile and entitlement. Known colloquially as the Dane saga (‘Denensage’), it is also, for all intents and purposes, a text about a group of Scandinavian vikings finding their way to Breda, only to settle and sow chaos there over the span of several decades.

In equal parts eclectic and erratic, the Dane saga is a testament to the acumen with which late medieval authors were able to approach history, literature, and legend, and reconcile them into new, anachronistic narratives for their own local communities and institutions.

The Dane saga survives to us only in the manuscript from Breda, which was produced during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The codex is small and slender, age-worn and austere, lacking the lavish embellishments and illumination found in many of its contemporaries. Even though just a single, anonymous hand is responsible for the 750-odd lines of Middle Dutch rhyming verse that make up the Dane saga proper, the presence of various later notes and corrections – both medieval and modern – confirm that the manuscript was regularly read and reflected on over the course of its lifetime.

 

 

 

A Wandering Tale

The tale of the Dane saga opens at the court of King Magnus of Denmark, where one day, envoys from Scottish ruler David Bruce arrive, carrying his proposal to wed Magnus’ daughter. Consenting to the union, Magnus agrees to send the princess off to Scotland, and a feast is held in Ribe to celebrate. As a great ship is built and supplied for the voyage, the king entrusts his brothers, Godfrid and Everard, with the safety of the bride and her dowry.

Soon after setting off, however, the princess is struck with an unknown illness, succumbing to her malady within a matter of hours. Her body is dressed in linen, wrapped in a blanket, and buried at sea. Faced with shame and the prospect of persecution, the Danes decide not to continue their journey to Scotland, but nor do they return home to Denmark. Instead, a third option is settled on, as Godfrid proclaims that:

[…] to me, it seems best
That we should sail to the southwest,
To a remote corner of Brabant,
By a forest and along a stream,
Where we would find animals and bees;
No harm will come to us there.
I will build a manor there,
Which will long be spoken of.
There we will lead our lives
And not forsake one another.

And so, the Danes make their way south, to the Low Countries, where their scouts inform them of a suitable site to build a stronghold: an idyllic, verdant hill with a beautiful tree on it, just outside Breda, on the bank of the river Mark. Having reached the town, the brothers find themselves welcomed as honoured guests by its local lord, Henry of Breda, who offers to help them obtain their desired estate.

When its landowner refuses to sell up, however, Godfrid lays claim to it all the same, directing his Danes to build their new home. As supplies are brought in from far and wide, the woodland on the hill is cut down, including the exceptional tree that first caught their attention. Its timber, however, turns out to be unsuitable for building work, and Godfrid orders it to be turned into a cross and placed in the stronghold’s chapel. At this particular point, the narrative takes a brief detour to highlight the history and miraculous nature of the cross.

But when the story meanders back to the Scandinavians, it finds them haphazardly attacking and plundering the surrounding region from their stronghold:

The Danes were of a cruel nature:
Grain, hogs, sheep, and horses
They stole from their neighbours,
Along with other goods, at all hours,
Whatever they could snatch.

 

[…]

 

They brought people harm
To their animals and their grain.
Clothes, beds, blankets, towels,
They took it away without recompense.

Their pillaging continues for no less than thirty years, until a new duke of Brabant appears on the scene, eager to root out the Danes once and for all. Using a decoy merchant cart, his Brabantine army is able to ambush and kill a small group of vikings south of Breda. Donning the outfits and arms of the dead, they then manage to trick the remaining Danes into granting them access to the stronghold – the rest of their force in tow. As the Danes are massacred, the fortress is torn down, its treasures taken, and the sculpture of the cross granted to the town of Breda.

 

 

Mix and Match

As is apparent from the above summary, the Dane saga is a work of wide-ranging narrative influences, transcending – or transgressing – the customary boundaries of time, space, and action. Far from being a historical record in its own right, it is a kaleidoscopic collection of anachronistic characters, places, and scenarios – both foreign and familiar, both mundane and miraculous. As well as drawing on deep-rooted motifs of viking hostility from across the wider Low Countries, the text exhibits a much wider familiarity with established traditions of epic poetry, chivalric romance, and devotional storytelling.

Distilled down to its essence, however, the Dane saga reveals itself to be the combined product of two central narrative traditions – one being an account of a group of Danes coming to Breda, the other being an origin legend of a local cross relic. Awkwardly sewn together, the two tales are tied up by only the thinnest of threads, their stitches easily undone. For example, even though the Danes are ultimately responsible for fashioning the cross, the text makes no serious effort to foreshadow or build up to the event.

Similarly, once the cross has been raised, the Danes are no longer seen to associate or concern themselves with it in any meaningful way. All things considered, there is nothing to suggest that they had to be the ones to construct the cross. It is simply another thing they also happened to do during their time in Breda.

 

 

 

Fun at Parties

For almost two-hundred years, the potential age, authorship, and audience of the Dane saga have been subject to speculation, with little in the way of a consensus having been reached.

Various crucial details can nevertheless be gleaned from the text itself. First of all, its reliance on rhyme, alliteration, figures of speech, and dialogue scenes suggest that the work was meant to be read aloud – or performed – to an audience, which it at one point directly addresses as ‘all who are present here’. In the same way, the text’s local character is evident in its repeated references to Breda as being ‘here’, as well as the fact that most of its alleged viking attacks occur no more than a day’s travel away – in other words, in places that local people would have been familiar with. After all, it would have been one thing to hear about distant Ribe, Bremen, and Aberdeen, but to imagine your own communities being beset by vikings would have made for a much more vivid and memorable tale.

Recognising the Dane saga as a local text for a local audience offers some initial clues as to who composed the work, and for what reason.

First of all, its intermittent concern for the Danish-built wooden cross suggests that the text may been conceived by a member of Breda’s own parish clergy to promote a local cult of veneration. According to the Dane saga itself, the cruciform sculpture survived the destruction of the viking stronghold and was transferred to the local parish church, where it would perform its miracles for ‘a hundred years or even longer’.

Although these events are historically dubious, a number of altar and chapel dedications to the cross are nevertheless known to have existed in Breda’s pre-Reformation parish church, with the sculpture itself on display during feast days. By 1500, a distinct local procession of the cross was also well-established, comprising numerous pageant wagons, musicians, and dancers, and with Breda’s town council, militia, and craft guilds all in attendance.

 

 

Even though a direct motivation for the Dane saga could be sought with the Church and its celebrations, it is worth pointing out that the cross legend takes up only a small part of the overall narrative – the majority of which instead deals with the Danes and their assorted exploits.

With that in mind, a different authorship might be proposed in the context of the so-called chambers of rhetoric. First emerging in the southern Low Countries during the fifteenth century, these were local societies of amateur authors and actors that composed and performed vernacular plays and poetry, often taking part in public contests and pageantry. Although made up predominantly of middle-class townsfolk, the rederijkers (‘rhetoricians’) were hardly secular organisations, as they often originated and closely associated themselves with local religious institutions. In Breda itself, the oldest known chamber of rhetoric is thought to have been founded around 1470, and it is in this literary melting-pot that the Dane saga could have been conceived before the end of the century.

The Dane saga provided its audience(s) with an approachable and imaginative lens through which to consider the cult of the cross, playing fast and loose with notions of chronology, geography, and genre. As a publicly performed work, the poem may have been specifically commissioned or composed for a procession or festival, acting as a narrative instrument of devotion in a competitive landscape of local relic cults. Alternatively, the work may have been entered into a local literary competition to be performed alongside other renditions of the existing cross tradition, as is known to have happened elsewhere in Brabant.

Lacking conclusive evidence either way, however, both options are set to remain on the table for the time being.

 

Viking afterlives

The Dane saga of Breda is a capricious, clumsy, and utterly charming work of premodern imagination. An offbeat pastiche of historical and literary influences, it showcases how regional authors actively sought to recollect and reconceive their local pasts and their associated peoples, places, and possibilities.

In doing so, it not only offers invaluable insights into the development of urban social memory in late medieval Breda (and Brabant more widely), but demonstrates how accounts and memories of the bygone viking phenomenon, real or fabricated, continued to captivate audiences in subsequent centuries.

In its imagined depiction of inbound Scandinavians, the Dane saga is part of a much broader regional corpus of late medieval literature harking back to the Viking Age. In fact, as a recurrent historical motif, the figure of the viking loomed large in numerous regional foundation myths and saints’ lives, most often as a threat to be either evangelised, expelled, or escaped from. As stories like these were continuously passed down and reshaped over the centuries, their associated vikings are seen to have taken on increasingly anachronistic roles, as demonstrated by the Dane saga itself.

Hence, it should hardly be surprising that no evidence for a genuine viking presence in Breda has ever been unearthed, nor should we hold our breath for it. And yet, even though actual historical vikings never set foot here, their imagined counterparts would manage to become part of Breda’s collective consciousness all the same.

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‘The Dane saga of Breda: A late medieval account of viking endeavour and vernacular devotion’ is now freely available from The Medieval Low Countries, along with the first full English translation of the text (CC BY-NC 4.0).

 

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About the Author

 

Christian Cooijmans is a historian of the Viking Age and researcher at the University of Oslo. He is a recent British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool, and is the author of Monarchs and Hydrarchs: The Conceptual Development of Viking Activity across the Frankish Realm (c. 750–940) (Routledge, 2020).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and his research into the Dane saga has been supported in part by an RHS Open Research Support Grant.