Three Beowulf Cruces: healgamen, fremu, Sigemunde

Abstract

AS early as the twelfth century, commentators on the skaldic poets could mistake unfamiliar kennings for the names of heroes, as when the author of the late twelfth-century Norwegian chronicle Ágrip invented a small biography for skeiðarbrandr ‘ship’s beak’, which he took to be the name of a king.1 Similarly, in his 1861 edition of Beowulf, Nikolaj Grundtvig exploited the repetition of an unusual adjective in order to endow the poem’s dragon with the name Stearcheort ‘Stoutheart’, an identification which no modern editor now takes seriously.2 In a number of places, the most recent editors of Beowulf have emended or invented proper names, twice creating names never before seen in an edition of the poem.3 The purpose of this note is to reevaluate three of these passages. I will argue in the case of the first two passages that it is best to leave the characters in question anonymous, and in the case of the third that it is stylistically preferable to retain the manuscript reading.