Now since the Danish tradition represents Hrothgar as enriching his royal town of Leire, whilst English tradition commemorates him as a builder king, constructing a royal hall "greater than the sons of men had ever heard speak of"—it becomes very probable that the two traditions are reflections of the same fact, and that the site of that hall was Leire. That Heorot, the picturesque name of the hall itself, should, in English tradition, have been remembered, whilst that of the town where it was built had been forgotten, is natural[[37]]. For
though the names of heroes survived in such numbers, after the settlement of the Angles in England, it was very rarely indeed, so far as we can judge, that the Angles and Saxons continued to have any clear idea concerning the places which had been familiar to their forefathers, but which they themselves had never seen.
Further, the names of both Hrothgar and Hrothulf are linked with Heorot in English tradition in the same way as those of Roe and Rolf are with Leire in Danish chronicles.
Yet there is some little doubt, though not such as need seriously trouble us, as to this identification of the site of Heorot with Leire. Two causes especially have led students to doubt the connection of Roe (Hrothgar) with Leire, and to place elsewhere the great hall Heorot which he built.
In the first place, Rolf Kraki came to be so intimately associated with Leire that his connection overshadowed that of Roe, and Saxo even goes so far in one place as to represent Leire as having been founded by Rolf[[38]]. In that case Leire clearly could not be the place where Rolf's predecessor built his royal hall. But that Saxo is in error here seems clear, for elsewhere he himself speaks of Leire as being a Danish stronghold when Rolf was a child[[39]].
In the second place, Roe is credited with having founded the neighbouring town of Roskilde (Roe's spring)[[40]] so that some have wished to locate Heorot there, rather than at Leire, five miles to the west. But against this identification of Heorot with Roskilde it must be noted that Roe is said to have built Roskilde, not as a capital for himself, but as a market-place for the merchants: there is no suggestion that it was his royal town, though in time it became the capital, and its cathedral is still the Westminster Abbey of Denmark.
What at first sight looks so much in favour of our equating
Roskilde with Heorot—the presence in its name of the element Ro (Hrothgar)—is in reality the most suspicious thing about the identification. There are other names in Denmark with the element Ro, in places where it is quite impossible to suppose that the king's name is commemorated. Some other explanation of the name has therefore to be sought, and it is very probable that Roskilde meant originally not "Hrothgar's spring," but "the horses' spring," and that the connection with King Ro is simply one of those inevitable pieces of popular etymology which take place so soon as the true origin of a name is forgotten[[41]].
Leire has, then, a much better claim than Roskilde to being the site of Heorot: and geographical considerations confirm this. For Heorot is clearly imagined by the poet of Beowulf as being some distance inland; and this, whilst it suits admirably the position of Leire, is quite inapplicable to Roskilde, which is situated on the sea at the head of the Roskilde fjord[[42]]. Of course we must not expect to find the poet of Beowulf, or indeed any epic poet, minutely exact in his geography. At the same time it is clear that at the time Beowulf was written there were traditions extant, dealing with the attack made upon Heorot by the ancestral foes of the Danes, a tribe called the Heathobeardan. These accounts of the fighting around Heorot must have preserved the general impression of its situation, precisely as from the Iliad we know that Troy is neither on the sea nor yet very remote from it. A poet would draw on his imagination for details, but would hardly alter a feature like this.
In these matters absolute certainty cannot be reached: but we may be fairly sure that the spot where Hrothgar built his "Hart-Hall" and where Hrothulf held that court to which the North ever after looked for its pattern of chivalry was