Halfdan - The Children of Halfdan

The Children of Halfdan

The poem Beowulf reads (lines 59–63):

Ðæm feower bearn forðgerimed
in worold wocun weoroda ræswa
heorogar. 7 hroðgar 7 halga til
hyrde ic þ elan cwen
heaðo-Scilfingas healsgebedda

This appears in Gummere's translation as:

Then, one after one, there woke to him,
to the chieftain of clansmen, children four:
Heorogar, then Hrothgar, then Halga brave;
and I heard that – ela's queen,
the Heathoscylfing’s helpmate dear.

There is obviously something wrong with line 62. A name of a daughter has dropped out, a daughter who was the wife of someone whose name ends in -ela and who was a Heatho-Scylfing, a battle-Scylfing. It is likely enough that at some time in copying the poem a scribe was unable to make out the exact spelling of these names and so left the text blank at that point to be fixed up later. It was never fixed up and so the names were lost in later copies.

Surviving Scandinavian texts know nothing about Heorogar though they speak much of the other two sons. Two sources also mention Halfdan's daughter. According to the Latin eptiome of the Skjöldung saga, the sons of Halfdanus are called Roas and Helgo and their sister Sigyna is married to a certain Sevillus. In Hrólf Kraki's Saga, Halfdan's eldest child is his daughter Signy who is married to a certain Jarl Sævil. Then Hróar and Helgi are born.

Friderich Kluge (1896) accordingly suggested that the line be restored as hyrde ic þ Sigeneow wæs Sæwelan cwen, rendering the Norse names in Old English forms. But Kluge has been seldom followed by editors or translators, in part because Sævil in Hrólf Kraki's Saga is in no way connected with Sweden so far as is told. Since the only certain Swedish (Scylfing) royal name ending in -ela that has come down to us is Onela, more often -ela is expanded instead to Onela. By Old English poetic rules of alliteration the name of the daughter must also begin with a vowel. The choice is usually the name Yrs or Yrse, since Scandinavian tradition speaks much of Yrsa the granddaughter of Halfdan and wife of King Adils of Sweden. This assumes great shifting of names and roles, since Adils is the Eadgils of Beowulf, the enemy of Onela. Onela appears in Norse texts as Áli. Accordingly many editors and translators prefer to simply note that the line is corrupt. But modern commentary sometimes refers to the marriage of Onela and Yrsa without indicating that this exists only through somewhat dubious conjectural emendation.

If the tradition of Halfdan/Healfdene being slain by Fróði/Froda is an old one, it might be that the Beowulf poet knew that tale and that Heorogar (Healfdene's eldest son in Beowulf) was imagined Heorogar to have died with Halfdan. Unfortunately the Beowulf poet skims over all such matters.