Gripla - 20.12.2013, Blaðsíða 36

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If this was the agency of transfer, the mechanisms remain to be articu-
lated. While there are no records of poets, as such, accompanying danish
rulers to the Carolingian prestige centres, we can reasonably postulate
that various members of the danish kings’ entourages would have had
skills as interpreters, go-betweens, negotiators, mediators and counsel-
lors across language or dialect boundaries, even though we have scant
knowledge of these functionaries now. extrapolating backwards from
later medieval practice in denmark, søren M. sindbæk posits a highly
mobile ‘elite collective’, who clustered round the various danish kings
and whose class culture would have been determined by international
fashion rather than the local norm.173 A place in this elite, if it existed
at the earlier stage, would fittingly have been accorded to the holders of
the office of þulr, who seem to have been competent in counsel, general
knowledge and savoir-faire alongside poetic composition. We happen to
possess an attestation of the þulr from the right period in the shape of a
late eighth-century rune-stone originally located at snoldelev in sjælland:
kunuAltstain sunaR ruHalts þulaR asalHauku(m) ‘the stone of Gunnvaldr,
son of Hróaldr, þulr on salhaugum’.174 More legendarily, the old english
poem Beowulf shows the hall ‘Heorot’, seat of the danish king Hroðgar, as
boasting a þyle called unferð; the same seat is named Lethrae/Hleiðrar in
saxo’s Gesta Danorum and in Hrólfs saga kraka and can be identified with
modern danish Lejre and thus with an outstanding ‘central place’ in early
medieval denmark.175
We should also not neglect the possibility that the danish leaders
might themselves have practised poetry, as seen in the case of the leg-
endary Hroðgar and more securely documented for later scandinavian
tradition by Haraldr harðráði and Rǫgnvaldr Kali, the latter of these a
self-styled þulr.176 such a leader would be the obvious person to absorb
173 sindbæk, ‘the Lands of Denemearce’, 200.
174 Lis jacobsen and erik Moltke, eds., Danmarks Runeindskrifter, 3 vols. (Copenhagen:
Munksgaard, 1942), 729–30, n. 248; erik Moltke, Runes and their Origin: Denmark and
Elsewhere (Copenhagen: national Museum of denmark, 1985), 158 and 183.
175 stefan Brink, ‘Political and social structures in early scandinavia: A settlement-Historical
Pre-study of the Central Place’, Tor: Journal of Archaeology 28 (1996): 245.
176 for further discussion of these points see Russell Poole, ‘Þulir as tradition-Bearers and
Prototype saga-tellers’, in Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability and Editorial
Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature, eds. judy Quinn and emily Lethbridge, Viking
Collection, vol. 18 (odense: university Press of southern denmark, 2010), 237–59.