Saxo Grammaticus's Account of the Viking Age Site on the Danish Island of Hjarnø in Gesta Danorum

Abstract

The Kalvestene (calf stones) are a collection of ship settings,1 dated by cremated grave goods to the seventh to tenth century (Broholm 1937, 16–22), on the southern coast of the small island of Hjarnø, off the eastern coast of Jutland (fig. 1). This site is associated with a legend, first recorded in the twelfth century by Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, concerning a legendary king, Hiarni, his rise and fall, and how he came to be buried on the island and the monuments built to commemorate him. From an archaeological point of view, the legend has been problematic. As Jörn Staecker notes, sites associated with legends are especially vulnerable to misinterpretation, since the story tends to frame archaeological perceptions (2005, 3–28).2 Certainly, the account of the site by the antiquarian Ole Worm in 1650 shows clear signs of being influenced by the legend, and the same is true of all extant popular descriptions of the Kalvestene produced up until the twentieth century (Marryat 1860, 12–3). Despite this popular interest—or perhaps, in part, because of it—the site has attracted virtually no modern scholarly interest.3 However, although the legend has generally acted to obscure the nature of the site, it does contain useful historical information. Indeed, if such textual and narrative evidence is subjected to linguistic and literary analysis, it can prove valuable and should not be excluded. Moreover, although Saxo's passages on Hiarni in Gesta are not a reliable source for the events surrounding the construction of the Kalvestene, they do reveal a range of other historical information, in particular, that the Kalvestene were well-known, at least in some parts of medieval Scandinavia. This makes the site unusual, not only because few references to ship settings survive in medieval texts, but also because Kalvestene is a small and apparently unimportant site, dwarfed by the impressive ship settings at the royal complexes at Jelling or Lejre or the sheer number of ship settings in the vast grave field at Lindholm Høje (Vestergaard 2007; Høilund Nielsen 1996). In this article, we compare Saxo's account to the archaeological record and then argue that there are three related influences on Saxo's account of the legend: stories circulating in Danish Scania (now southern Sweden), intertextual borrowings, and experience of other similar sites. In so doing, we use linguistic, onomastic, and source analysis to establish what Saxo is likely to have known about the site and its implications.Gesta Danorum is one of the most important works of history to derive from medieval Scandinavia, rivaled only by Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla. However, unlike Snorri, whose life is detailed in Íslendinga saga and other texts, Saxo attracted no such biographical treatment. Instead, almost everything that is known of his life comes from his own account in Gesta (Friis-Jensen 1989; Muceniecks 2017, 33–5). Saxo was almost certainly an aristocrat (Hermanson 2005, 264–5), and his mastery of Latin, awareness of political discourse, and knowledge of classical Roman authors suggests that he was educated in a clerical school abroad, most likely in Northern France (Gesta 2015, xxii–xxiii; Hermanson 2005, 265; Muceniecks 2017, 35). This makes particular sense if Saxo is understood to be a member of the ecclesiastic establishment, and there is some, admittedly tenuous, evidence that he was a canon in Lund in Scania, an idea championed by Friis-Jensen (1989; see also Muceniecks 2017, 34–5). Whatever his exact relationship to the Church, there is little doubt that Saxo was in the direct employ of the Archbishops of Lund, as he states in his prologue: Danorum maximus pontifex Absalon patriam nostrum, cuius illustrande maxima semper cupiditate flagrabat, eo claritatis et monumenti genere fraudari non passus mihi comitum suorum extremo ceteris operam abnuentibus res Danicas in hisotriam conferendi negocium intorsit, inopemque sensum maius uiribus opus ingredi crebre exhortationis imperio compulit. (Gesta Pr.1.1)4(Absalon, archbishop of Denmark, had always been fired with a passionate zeal to glorify our fatherland; he would not allow it to go without some noble document of this kind and, since everyone else refused the task, the work of compiling a history of the Danes was thrown upon me, the least of his entourage.)Though he died before the Gesta's completion—Saxo dedicates it to Absalon's successor Anders—Absalon was the driving influence behind Saxo's monumental work of history. As Friis-Jensen states, “Saxo's personality as a writer also corresponds very well with what we know about his employer Archbishop Absalon's interests” (1989, 351). Central to this was what Friis-Jensen somewhat anachronistically calls “patriotism” (Gesta 2015, xl–xli), a concern for the integrity and ancestry of a Danish “state” supported by the Church (Niblaeus 2019, 232–3). This idea, found throughout Gesta, reflects Absalon's aristocratic roots, his role as advisor to King Valdemar I (1154–1182), and their apparent close personal ties (Hermanson 2005, 270–4).Significantly, the chapters of Gesta that concern Hiarni were most likely written during the lordships of Absalon and Valdemar I's successors, namely, Anders and Valdemar II (1202–1241) (Muceniecks 2017, 42–3). This new political climate is reflected in a stylistic shift and an intensification of Saxo's earlier “patriotism” (Muceniecks 2017, 42–3). In the light of the encroaching influence of, and increasing conflict with, the Holy Roman Empire in the early thirteenth century, an insistence on Denmark's legitimacy as an independent state seems to have gathered in urgency. Correspondingly, Saxo's language and classical allusions are designed to position the Danes, just as much as their German neighbors, as the heirs of the classical Roman Empire (Hermanson 2005, 265–6), and Saxo emphasizes both the antiquity of the Danish state and of Valdemar II's family in his dedicatory preface (Pr.1.6). Saxo's patrons, both ecclesiastical and royal, were invested in a legitimating mythos of an ancient Denmark and its kings, a theme that underlies the story of the rise and fall of King Hiarni in Gesta.The story of how the island of Hjarnø was named and mortuary monuments built there appears at the beginning of Book 6 of Gesta. According to Saxo, a peasant named Hiarni, adept in vernacular poetry, is made king of the Danes after the old king, Frothi, dies, apparently without an heir. (His son, Frithlef, is thought to have predeceased him.) Hiarni wins this singular honor by composing a verse to commemorate the death of Frothi. However, when Frothi's son, Frithlef—who, it transpires, has not died—returns, Hiarni refuses to abdicate, throwing the region into civil war. Eventually, Hiarni is defeated and buried in a barrow (tumulus) on Hjarnø, which, Saxo claims, was named after the erstwhile king: “Quam insula uocabulum ex eius nuncupatione sortita testator” (Gesta vi.3.3) [An island named after him testifies to the event].The term tumulus is rather odd in this context since there is no other recorded instance of it being applied to a ship setting. It is usually understood to mean “a hillock, mound, or a barrow tomb,” and Saxo often uses the word to refer to barrow graves, for example, those at Uppsala (Gesta i.7.1). Certainly, there is no sign now of any mound, either as part of the ship settings or anywhere else on the island. Consequently, tumulus has been taken as a reference to the ship settings, despite the fact that the site is made up of several ship settings, rather than a single barrow. Although Danish ship settings are often associated with high status or royal sites,5 the Hjarnø site is not one of them. Kalvestene is one of around twenty-five Viking Age ship setting sites in Denmark, but while most (approximately 70 percent) are large single settings designed to honor powerful individuals (Larssen 2007, 263–4; Christensen 2008, 121–2), Kalvestene belongs to the remaining 30 percent, which is made up of grave fields (Sebo et al. 2021). Grave fields typically contain monuments for a wide range of individuals, including men, women, and children, and seem to reflect a flatter social structure (Bradley, Skoglund, and Wehlin 2010, 94–8; Price 2008, 259–62, 270). This is particularly true of sites like the Kalvestene, in which the monuments are uniform in size and shape, a feature associated with strong community identity (Hansson 1998, 58–9).Saxo's reference to a tumulus, then, is not a very accurate description of the Kalvestene ship settings. Instead, he describes a monument that will suit the story he is telling and the supposedly royal occupant of the grave, perhaps based on his knowledge of other royal sites, such as Jelling. It seems, then, that Saxo was aware there were grave monuments on Hjarnø, but he had never seen them. This suggests that Saxo knew the site by reputation—perhaps even that he had heard descriptions of it. This would fit with other evidence. The island is small (just over 3 square kilometers—about 1.16 square miles) and was apparently not very rich. (The placement of the grave field on the least arable land suggests that the site was chosen to conserve the best farming land.) It is not an obvious place for Saxo to have visited. However, the island guards the entrance to Horsens Fjord and the port connected with the medieval trading center at Horsens (Kelmelis and Pedersen 2019). In order to sail to this port, ships typically pass the southern side of the island on which the Kalvestene are visible (fig. 2). This proximity to Horsens locates Hjarnø within important regional economic infrastructure and maritime trade networks. Saxo surely knew of Horsens and the trade that emanated from it, and there is even some suggestion that he provides the town with its own semi-legendary place-name origin story in Book 3 of Gesta (iii.3.2; see also Saxo Grammaticus 1894, 91n1, cf. Saxo Grammaticus 2015, 156n.7). Moreover, the recent discovery on Hjarnø of a significant hoard of deposited high-status sixth-century artifacts from the farthest reaches of the Viking trade routes (Ravn 2019) suggests a community that, far from being isolated, was part of broader networks of communication. These would presumably have also included the important ecclesiastical center of Lund, in modern Scania, where Saxo is thought to have lived, and it is quite possible that Saxo's knowledge of the site reflects his community's knowledge of the site rather than his personal presence on or experience of the island (fig. 3).However Saxo came to know of Hjarnø and the existence of its ship settings, it was apparently not from his extensive reading. Most of his material on Danish kings—whether mythical, legendary, or historical—tends to be serious in tone, while his account of Hiarni has obvious folkloric and even comic aspects, which Saxo criticizes or tries to dignify by turn. More significantly, Saxo's accounts of Danish kings typically have parallels in other medieval texts, but the story of Hiarni is not otherwise attested. There is no mention of him in Sven Aggeson's Brevis Historia Regum Dacie, the Chronicon Lethrense, Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga saga, the Prose Edda or any other extant medieval text listing kings of Denmark. Further, although Niels Clausen Lukman argues that Hiarni should be associated with the mythical poet of the Hjaðningavíg tradition as attested in other Germanic literatures—Heorrenda of Deor or Hôrant of Kudrun, for example (Lukman 1981, 72)—there is little evidence for this.6 Apart from their common designation as poets, there are no points at which the Hiarni's tale can be considered to intersect with Hjaðningavíg. Moreover, Saxo gives his own rendition of that tale earlier than, and quite independent of, Hiarni's appearance, and there is no evidence to connect either Hiarni or his story to an external literary source (Gesta v.8.3–8.5, 9.1).In fact, it seems unlikely that King Hiarni ever existed. In addition to the lack of documentary evidence (aside from Gesta), Saxo's account of the island being named after Hiarni is incorrect. As Friis-Jensen notes, “the etymology is false: the first element from the place name is not derived from a personal name” (Gesta 2015, 364n5). This is a common phenomenon with Scandinavian place-names. Often a legend either becomes associated with, or inspired by, a place, and a false etymology is then invented to corroborate it (Barraclough 2012, 84–5, 87–9; Egeler 2019, 2–4; Harðar saga1991, xxxvi–xxxviii). An excellent example of this is found at the end of Chronicon Lethrense. Here, the Swedish king, Ring, defeats the Danes but allows the Danish warrior and princess, Hethæ, to take queenship over the Danes. We are told she gives her name to Hethæby (Hedeby) (Chronicon Lethrense1917, 52–3), though in fact the Old Norse origin of the place-name as Heiðr (heath) býr/bær (village) is readily reconstructed.7 Similarly, the name Hjarnø most likely derives from the Old Norse hjarn, meaning “ice” or more specifically “frozen earth covered in snow.”So, these two facts, that Hiarni is not mentioned by any of Saxo's extant sources and that the island is not named after a person, suggest that Saxo's Hiarni episode is not an exaggeration of historical events, but rather that the legendary king was invented and named after the island. This further supports the idea that the island itself was famous enough to inspire the legend and, since the island's role in the legend revolves around a burial place, it suggests that the presence of burial monuments was also known in Scania. Yet the absence of the Hiarni legend in other written sources, including those that Saxo drew upon, suggests that the legend was not well-known throughout twelfth-century Scandinavia. Indeed, it is possible that it was limited to Scania, or even that it was invented by Saxo himself. However, since Saxo is often rather scathing about the story, it seems curious that he would fabricate it only to deride the plot at every moment. Instead, it seems more likely that Saxo is reporting an origin story associated with the naming of Hjarnø known locally. This is an idea supported by the obviously folkloric elements of the story: the heir who is presumed dead, the contest of skill, and the elevation of a lowly, unlikely, but talented, hero. This suggests that the unique tale of Hiarni's succession may, therefore, be one of regional tradition as opposed to one more widely held throughout Denmark and Scandinavia. Moreover, since the story culminates in Hiarni's interment in a burial site such as that found on Hjarnø, it suggests there was also some direct knowledge or experience of the island in circulation in Saxo's time—an especially intriguing idea since, although small grave fields with uniform monuments such as the Kalvestene are comparatively rare in Denmark, they are common in what is now southern Sweden (Hansson 1998, 49–63; Sebo et al. 2021), possibly indicating closer links between the two places.Given the questions surrounding the source of the Hiarni legend, it is worth considering its features and role in the Gesta, as well as how Saxo presents his account of the story. Although the episode is short, it is embedded in a section of the text with complex connections to external narrative and historical traditions. Close examination of the composition reveals the underlying ideological themes of Saxo's narrative and chronology and, thereby, the function and provenance of the Hjarnø passage.As noted, Saxo is apologetic in recounting the folkloric aspects of the tale, as demonstrated in his treatment of the verse that wins Hiarni the crown. When the people decide the new king should be the man who composes the best verse memorializing the old king, Hiarni delivers the following stanza and is duly anointed as king: Frothonem Dani, quem longum uiuere uellent,Per sua defunctum rura tulere diu.Principis hoc summi tumulatum cespite corpusAethere sub liquid nuda recondite humus.(Gesta vi.1.1)(Because they wish to extend Frothi's life, the Daneslong carried his remains through their countryside.This great prince's body, now buried under turf, is coveredby bare earth beneath the lucent sky.)Though Saxo describes the original composition as one of “rude vernacular,” for which his Latin translation can provide only a “sense,” Saxo's own translation is a fair imitation of classical epitaphs.8 Indeed, in spite of the folkloric tropes, there are few places in Gesta where Saxo's knowledge of Roman literature and history are so readily on display than in the opening chapter of Book 6. Interestingly, the original composition, as suggested by N. F. S. Grundtvig (Lundgreen-Nielsen 2015, 41n2), may in fact have been much longer, and what we see here is the refrain of a dróttkvætt drápa.9 Typically termed “court meter,” dróttkvætt refers to a stylized and prestigious form of vernacular Old Norse poetry, while a drápa is a long-form poem that features a refrain (Clunies Ross 2005, 33–9; Firth 2020, 9n40). A similar example of a refrain from a dróttkvætt drápa being preserved within prose narrative can be found in Gunnlaugs saga, in that instance spoken at Æthelred's court in praise of the English King (Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu 1928, 71; Firth 2020, 7–8). Whether originally a part of a longer composition, it seems Saxo believed Hiarni's poem to be limited to that which he translated, for he remarks (scornfully) that it was “hic agresti sceptrum incondite uersuum paucitas ministrauit” (G. Dan vi.1.2) [one or two uncouth verses won the scepter for a peasant].It is not surprising that Saxo's account of a popular story would be pejorative, nor that he would embellish it so as to display his own considerable learning—a combination that explains the incongruous and sometimes conflicting tone of the passage, which strives to Romanize and criticize simultaneously. Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be seen in Saxo's statement that the Danes “ita ab eis epitaphium regno repensum” (G. Dan vi.1.2) [reimbursed an epitaph with a kingdom], which, although obviously critical, also acts to draw, as Louis Christensen points out (1999, 18–9), a parallel between Denmark and Rome at its imperial height. In what are the only Roman exempla in the whole of Gesta, Saxo compares the rewarding of Hiarni to Caesar's honoring of the historian Theophanes (an act that should rightly be attributed to Pompey the Great) and to Scipio's veneration of Ennius (Gesta vi.1.2; Gesta 2015, 256n3). Saxo's decision to use direct examples from Rome's past at this point alone in his monumental history cannot be thought arbitrary. Yet his statement in recounting these exempla, that “nunc uero rusticano regnum prodiga plebis humanitas erogauit” (Gesta vi.1.2) [now the lavish generosity of the people squandered the realm on a churl], leave little doubt as to his own opinion on Hiarni's elevation. Christensen suggests that Saxo sought to portray the Danes as excelling the Romans (1999, 19), but this seems unlikely given his tone. Rather, if Saxo were reporting an event he perceived as historical, his efforts at comparison read as apologia: as the Danes were foolish at this moment, so, too, had the Romans succumbed to such folly.Though these direct exempla are unique in Gesta, this is not the only moment at which Saxo seeks to establish parallels between Danish and Roman history. Friis-Jensen suggests that the organizational principles of Gesta reflect the chronology of the Roman Empire—taken by Saxo to mean both imperial Rome and the empire of Charlemagne (Gesta 2015, xxxviv–xxxix, xliii–xlv). A clear example of this, he argues, is Saxo's adaptation of the chronology of Gesta in order to make the founding brothers of the Danes, Dan and Angul, contemporaries of Rome's Romulus and Remus (Gesta i.1.1–31; Gesta 2015, 19n1). This is particularly illuminating of Saxo's dating of the reign of the well-attested semi-legendary King Frothi “the peaceful,” whom Hiarni succeeds. The whole of the fifth book of Gesta is devoted to his kingship and, in its closing chapters, Saxo identifies the 30-year period of peace that Frothi brought to the region as coinciding with Christ's lifespan (Gesta v.15.3). This is Saxo's first explicit reference to external chronology in Gesta—yet another unusual element of the Hiarni episode. It does not seem, however, that this was his own innovation, and there is evidence of a Scandinavian tradition associating the so-called “peace of Frothi” and the Pax Romana. Snorri Sturluson, too, dates the peace of Frothi to the lifetime of Christ in his Skáldskaparmál (2008, 51–2), though he explicitly ties its advent to Augustus's Pax Romana, contrasting with Saxo's statement that it more likely “non adeo terreno principatui quam divino ortui famulatam fuisse” (G. Dan v.15.3) [attended the divine birth rather than an earthly emperor]. Whether the peace derived from divine or from temporal origins, Saxo's dating of it places Hiarni's rule of Denmark in the early years of the first century CE.Interestingly, the chronology of Saxo's Gesta is not universally attested. In Chronicon Lethrense, for example, authored some decades before Gesta, it is Dan and Angul who are the contemporaries of Augustus (1917, 44–7). The chronology of Gesta is primarily internal, based on the succession of kings until the “peace of Frothi” provides an external chronology to work from, placing Dan and Angul some twenty generations before Hiarni's time. Friis-Jensen suggests Saxo's knowledge of Roman history was such that this may be a deliberate calculation to ensure Denmark's foundation, and Denmark's pax paralleled that of the Romans (Gesta 2015, 19–20n1). In Chronicon Lethrense, however, the various reigns of Frothi's heirs fall within five generations of the reign of the semi-historical king Rolf Krake in the sixth century (1917, 52–3). This places Frothi's reign and, therefore that of Hiarni, alongside those of a group of legendary kings. The Danish kings Frothi largus and Ingiald, for example, both mentioned in Chronicon Lethrense and identified, respectively, as Frothi the Peaceful's grandson and great-grandson by Saxo, are the same Frothi and Ingiald referenced in Beowulf (2008, lines 2023–2029, 2063–2066) and in Skjǫldunga saga (1982, 2–38). The reigns of Rolf, Frothi, and Ingiald are usually roughly dated to the sixth or seventh century CE (see, for example, Byock 1998, i–ii, vii–viii), which corresponds, perhaps coincidentally, to the approximate date of the ship settings on Hjarnø. However, this probably reflects a general sense of history that dates folkloric stories, like the peasant-poet Hiarni's rise to the kingship, to a “heroic age” rather than specific knowledge of the date or circumstances of the settings.Despite his apparent ambivalence toward the tale of Hiarno's crowning, Saxo seems to have chosen to include it for didactic and narrative reasons. Book 6 of Gesta introduces the character of Starkath, an aging warrior and poet still loyal to Frothi largus, even after his assassination, who is dismayed by the behavior of Frothi's heirs and their failure to seek vengeance for that act. Starkath, like Hiarni, derives much of his agency from his poetic abilities. While the two poets never share the page—Hiarni last appears in chapter 3, Starkath arrives in chapter 5—Friis-Jensen suggests that Saxo uses Book 6 as a whole to demonstrate the power of poetry (Gesta 2015, 354n1). The importance of poetry as a cultural marker of prestige and as a perceived repository of collective knowledge from Scandinavia's pre-literate past is well recognized (Clunies Ross 2005, 74–8; Firth 2020, 6–10; Hermann 2018, 156–9). Saxo's Icelandic contemporary Snorri emphasizes this latter point in the opening to Óláfs saga helga hin sérstaka, stating that “at sǫgur hefði eigi gengizk í munni, ef eigi væri kvæði, bæði ný ok forn, þau er menn tœki þar af sannendi frœðinnar” [it is possible that histories would not have persisted in oral tradition if there had not been poems, both new and old, from which people could verify their knowledge]. Saxo is, broadly speaking, less invested in the use of poetry as a means of establishing historical authenticity than is Snorri, though he does acknowledge both his indebtedness to the poetic compositions of past Danes and to Icelandic cultural memory in composing Gesta (Pr.i.3–4). Nor does he intersperse his history with verse with the regularity characteristic of Snorri's works. Yet Book 6 of Gesta stands as an exception. Hiarni's is the first of a large number of poems, some of which are significant literary compositions, such as Starkath's Lay of Helga, which Saxo renders in Latin in ninety-two dactylic hexameters (Gesta vi.6.7–12). Unfortunately, there are no known extant vernacular exemplars for the chapter's poems, and Saxo's practice of conforming them to Classical Latin poetic archetypes makes assessing their authenticity problematic. Nonetheless, the poems are central to the chapter, and it is Hiarni's seizing of the throne via his short verse that sets the chapter's tone regarding the power of poetry. The episode also creates a narrative framework for Saxo to introduce Frothi's legitimate yet hitherto unmentioned heir Frithlef to the narrative in the guise of a conquering yet magnanimous hero.It is of note that Saxo does not reserve the same criticism for Hiarni's kingship as he does for his account of the crowning. Frithlef's return is something of a Bildungsroman trope, and Saxo portrays the prince as proving himself worthy of the Danish throne and of being Frothi's heir through this conflict. This necessitates that his opponent be a test of his resolve. Thus, Saxo declares that “at Hiarno lucis auiditatem honori anteferre salutemque glorie dispendio querere morte tristius ratus” (Gesta vi.3.3) [Hiarni considered it a sad business to cling to life before honor and, by sacrificing his glory, seek safety instead of death], and so the peasant king gathered his forces to oppose Frithlef's return. Twice facing the prince in battle, Hiarni's troops were twice defeated, and the deposed king was forced into flight. It is here, as an appeal to authority, that Saxo declares “quam insula uocabulum ex eius nuncupatione sortita testatur” (Gesta vi.3.3) [an island named after (Hiarni) testifies to the event], with the obvious implication that the island was so named and widely known prior to Saxo's composition of Gesta. Finally, and recalling the folkloric nature of the tale, Hiarni sought to infiltrate Frithlef's court in disguise, intent on murder. Exposed, Hiarni suggested a duel with Frithlef to resolve the matter of the kingship. Emerging victorious, Frithlef took Hiarni “tumulo cadauer obruens interfecti uocabulum referente” (Gesta vi.3.3) [and buried his body in a barrow which bears the dead man's name].As noted, there is no evidence of a barrow (tumulus) ever having been built on Hjarnø, but interestingly, Saxo uses the word on a number of occasions, often to refer to royal graves, such as the barrow graves in Zealand where Frothi's the Peaceful own tumulus was purportedly raised (Gesta v.16.3), and also at Jelling in association with Harald Bluetooth and the burial of his mother, Thyra (x.6.1, x.8.1), among other instances (for example, i.7.2, i.8.4, v.16.3, vi.1.1). Saxo's account of this latter also suggests that he had not seen it in person since it runs contrary to the evidence of one of the Jelling runestones, which indicates that Thyra pre-deceased her husband King Gorm the Old and was buried there by him (or at least that he raised a monument to her there). A second runestone is inscribed with the statement “King Harald commanded these monuments to be made in memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Thyra” (Kähler Holst et al. 2013, 475–80). Unfortunately, neither stone stands at its original site, so it is impossible to state which of the two large tumuli at the site was associated with which person. Traditionally, however, the smaller barrow at the center of the stone ship setting at Jelling—the longest yet discovered—is termed “Thyra's mound,” and the larger barrow that overlays the ship setting toward its southern end, is termed “Gorm's mound” (Kähler Holst et al. 2013, 479–83). The dating of the stone ship and the tumuli are incongruous, if both medieval. The Jelling mounds, which dendrochronological analysis date to around 960–970 CE and the reign of Harald, were built over the stone ship setting (Kähler Holst et al. 2013, 479–83). This was the configuration of the site in Saxo's time, and it was clearly known by him as a royal burial place. The presence of stone ships, in addition to the royal context, means that, for Saxo at least, it must have suggested parallels with the monuments on Hjarnø; the stone ship setting there remains largely intact (indeed, more so than that at Jelling), and Saxo attests the presence of a tumulus on the island: Hiarni's barrow. The similarities between the two sites may well have affected Saxo's judgment of the plausibility of the otherwise unattested Hjarnø tale, allowing both to be reconciled as royal burial places.Ultimately, the story of Hiarni's rise and fall is a complex intertextual literary construct. Firstly, Saxo seeks to establish parallels between Imperial Rome and ancient Denmark, in both their peace and their folly. His investment in establishing the Danes as heirs to the Romans has already been noted. Secondly, he accesses regional literary conventions in the use of both verse and folklore. Thirdly, he brings didactic motifs of good kingship to his characterizations of both Hiarni and Frithlef, no matter his judgment of the former's crowning, seeing both Hiarni's resolve and Frithlef's honoring of his fallen foe. Lastly, Saxo seems to have been imposing his knowledge of other royal Danish burial sites onto Hjarnø. Gesta's account of Hiarni's burial is at once fundamentally rhetorical and intertextual and ahistorical.After Saxo's time, the story of King Hiarni becomes popular. Notably, it appears in the seventeenth-century account by Ole Worm who, despite conducting a physical survey of the site, was strongly influenced by the legend that he apparently embellished, including the idea that the neighboring island of Alrø was named after Hiarni's wife and that a wild bull unearthed a sword from Hiarni's grave, both details that were assimilated into the legend and appear in later accounts. Worm's interest in the site seems to stem from Saxo's account. Worm's Monumenta Danica includes hundreds of Danish sites (1650), but it also excludes many sites larger and more impressive than the Kalvestene. This returns us to the problem with which we began this paper: how, given the sheer number of fascinating sites near Lund, did Saxo come to know of such a small and ostensibly obscure site as the Kalvestene, and why was it of such interest to him? Although these questions cannot be comprehensively answered, we have attempted to outline the most plausible scenario. On the former, Saxo most likely became aware of the Kalvestene as the story of King Hiarni was popular in Scania while he was in Lund. Hjarnø sat within important regional economic infrastructure and maritime trade networks due to its position in Horsens Fjord. Close links between the Danish communities in and around Hjarnø and those of Scania are further suggested by the fact that the Kalvestene comprises a grave field of a type more common to southern Sweden than to Denmark. Through this cultural contact, descriptions of the grave field and its associated folklore thus filtered to Scania and, ultimately, to the ears of Saxo in Lund. On the latter, this was a story that had elements that fitted with Saxo's rhetorical and ideological interests. The original story or stories as they were first heard by Saxo are, of course, unrecoverable. Gesta is the only extant mediation of the Hiarni story, and the editorializing hand of Saxo and influence of Absalon are clear in the shaping of the narrative. Hiarni, his death on Hjarnø, and the Kalvestene monuments that, in Saxo's reckoning, are proofs of the story he relays, are turned to legitimating intent. In Saxo's hands, King Hiarni and the island that is reputed to bear his name become elements in his mythos of an ancient Denmark.