tradition also evolved a hero Dan, from whom the Danes were supposed to have their name. Saxo Grammaticus has combined both pedigrees, making Skjold a descendant of Dan; but usually it was agreed that nothing came before Skjold, that he was the beginning of the Skjoldung line[[163]]. At first a mere name, we should expect that he would have no characteristic save that, like every respectable Germanic king, he took tribute from his foes and gave it to his friends. He differs therefore from those heroic figures like Hygelac or Guthhere (Gunnar) which, being derived from actual historic characters, have, from the beginning of their story, certain definite features attached to them. Scyld is, in the beginning, merely a name, the ancestor of the Scyldings. Tradition collects round him gradually.
Hence it will be rash to attach much weight to any feature which is found in one account of him only. Anything we are told of Scyld in English sources alone is not to be construed as evidence as to his original story, but only as to the form that story assumed in England. When, for example, Beowulf tells us that Scyld is Scefing, or that he is father of Beowulf, it will be very rash of us to assume that these relationships existed in the Danish, but have been forgotten. This is, I think, universally admitted[[164]]. Yet the very scholars who emphasize this, have assumed that the marvellous arrival as a child, in a boat, surrounded by weapons, is an essential feature of Scyld's story. Yet the evidence for this is no better and no worse than the evidence for his relationship to Sceaf or Beow—it rests solely on the English documents. Accordingly it only shows what was told about Scyld in England.
Of course the boat arrival might be an original part of the story of Scyld-Skjold, which has been forgotten in his native
country, but remembered in England. But I cannot see that we have any right to assert this, without proof.
What we can assert to have been the original feature of Scyld is this—that he was the eponymous hero king of the Danes. Both Beowulf and the Scandinavian authorities agree upon that. The fact that his name (in the form Sceldwa) appears in the genealogy of the kings of Wessex is not evidence against a Danish origin. The name appears in close connection with that of Heremod, another Danish king, and is merely evidence of a desire on the part of the genealogist of the Wessex kings to connect his royal house with the most distinguished family he knew: that of the Scyldingas, about whom so much is said in the prologue to Beowulf.
Neither do the instances of place-names in England, such as Scyldes treow, Scildes well, prove Scyld to have been an English hero. They merely prove him to have been a hero who was celebrated in England—which the Prologue to Beowulf alone is sufficient to show to have been the case. For place-names commemorating heroes of alien tribes are common enough[[165]] on English ground.
So much at least is gained. Whatever Müllenhoff[[166]] and his followers constructed upon the assumption that Scyld was an essentially Anglo-Saxon hero goes overboard. Scyld is the ancestor king of the Danish house—more than this we can hardly with safety assert.
Now let us turn to the figure of Sceaf. This was not necessarily connected with Scyld from the first.
The story of Sceaf first meets us in its completeness in the pages of William of Malmesbury. And William of Malmesbury is a twelfth century authority; by his time the Old English courtly epics had died out—for they could not have long survived the Norman Conquest and the overthrow of Old English court life. But the popular tradition[[167]] remained, and
a good many of the old stories, banished from the hall, must have lingered on at the cross-roads—tales of Wade and Weyland, of Offa and Sceaf. For songs, sung by minstrels at the cross roads, William of Malmesbury is good evidence, and he owns to having drawn information from similar popular sources[[168]]. William's story, then, is evidence that in his own day there was a tradition of a mythical king Sheaf who came as a child sleeping in a ship with a sheaf of corn at his head How old this tradition may be, we cannot say. Ethelwerd knew the story, though he has nothing to say of the sheaf. But we have seen that when we get back to the ninth century, and the formation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, at a court where we may be sure the old English heroic stories were still popular, it is Sceaf and not Sceldwa who is regarded as the beginning of things—the king whose origin is so remote that he is the oldest Germanic ancestor one can get back to[[169]]: "he was born in Noah's ark."