It is scarcely to be wondered at, then, that most critics have seen in Bjarki a Scandinavian parallel to Beowulf. But serious difficulties remain. There is in the Scandinavian story a mass of detail quite unparallelled in Beowulf, which overshadows the resemblances. Bjarki's friendship, for example, with the coward Hott or Hjalti has no counterpart in Beowulf. And Bjarki becomes a retainer of King Rolf and dies in his service, whilst Beowulf never comes into direct contact with Hrothulf at all; the poet seems to avoid naming them together. Still, it is quite intelligible that the story should have developed on different lines in Scandinavia from those which it followed in England, till the new growths overshadowed the original resemblance, without obliterating it. After nearly a thousand years of independent development discrepancies must be expected. It would not be a reasonable objection to the identity of Gullinhjalti with Gyldenhilt, that the word hilt had grown to have a rather different meaning in Norse and in English; subsequent developments do not invalidate an original resemblance if the points of contact are really there.
But, allowing for this independent growth in Scandinavia, we should naturally expect that the further back we traced the story the greater the resemblance would become.
This brings us to the second, serious difficulty: that, when we turn from the Saga of Rolf Kraki—belonging in its present form perhaps to the early fifteenth century—to the pages of Saxo Grammaticus, who tells the same tale more than two centuries earlier, the resemblance, instead of becoming stronger, almost vanishes. Nothing is said of Bjarki coming from Gautland, or indeed of his being a stranger at the Danish court: nothing is said of the monster having paid previous visits, visits repeated till king Rolf, like Hrothgar, has to give up all attempt at resistance, and submit to its depredations. The monster, instead of being a troll, like Grendel, becomes a commonplace bear. All Saxo tells us is that "He [Biarco, i.e. Bjarki] met a great bear in a thicket and slew it with a spear, and bade his
comrade Ialto [i.e. Hjalti] place his lips to the beast and drink its blood as it flowed, that he might become stronger."
Hence the Danish scholar, Axel Olrik, in the best and most elaborate discussion of Bjarki and all about him, has roundly denied any connection between his hero and Beowulf. He is astonished at the slenderness of the evidence upon which previous students have argued for relationship. "Neither Beowulf's wrestling match in the hall, nor in the fen, nor his struggle with the firedrake has any real identity, but when we take a little of them all we can get a kind of similarity with the latest and worst form of the Bjarki saga[[124]]." The development of Saxo's bear into a winged monster, "the worst of trolls," Olrik regards as simply in accordance with the usual heightening, in later Icelandic, of these early stories of struggles with beasts, and of this he gives a parallel instance.
Some Icelandic ballads on Bjarki (the Bjarka rímur), which were first printed in 1904, were claimed by Olrik as supporting his contention. These ballads belong to about the year 1400. Yet, though they are thus in date and dialect closely allied to the Saga of Rolf Kraki and remote from Saxo Grammaticus, they are so far from supporting the tradition of the Saga with regard to the monster slain, that they represent the foe first as a man-eating she-wolf, which is slain by Bjarki, then as a grey bear [as in Saxo], which is slain by Hjalti after he has been compelled to drink the blood of the she-wolf. We must therefore give up the winged beast as mere later elaboration; for if the Bjarki ballads in a point like this support Saxo, as against the Saga which is so closely connected with them by its date and Icelandic tongue, we must admit Saxo's version here to represent, beyond dispute, the genuine tradition.
Accordingly the attempt which has been made to connect Bjarki's winged monster with Beowulf's winged dragon goes overboard at once. But such an attempt ought never to have been made at all. The parallel is between Bjarki and the Beowulf-Grendel episode, not between Bjarki and the Beowulf-dragon episode, which ought to be left out of consideration. And the monstrous bear and the wolf of the Rímur are not so
dissimilar from Grendel, with his bear-like hug, and Grendel's mother, the 'sea-wolf[[125]].'
The likeness between Beowulf and Bjarki lies, not in the wingedness or otherwise of the monsters they overthrow, but in the similarity of the position—in the situation which places the most famous court of the North, and its illustrious king, at the mercy of a ravaging foe, till a chance stranger from Gautland brings deliverance. And here the Rímur support, not Saxo, but the Saga, though in an outworn and faded way. In the Rímur Bjarki is a stranger come from abroad: the bear has made previous attacks upon the king's folds.
Thus, whilst we grant the wings of the beast to be a later elaboration, it does not in the least follow that other features in which the Saga differs from Saxo—the advent of Bjarki from Gautland, for instance—are also later elaboration.