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Scholars interested in the development of English romance have long found the later thirteenth-or early fourteenth-century Havelok the Dane both an intriguing and a puzzling example of the artistry of the period. 1 The poem was apparently composed in Lincolnshire based on a tale which was known in the area from at least the twelfth century, when it appears in two versions, one at the beginning of Geoffrey Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis and the other in a courtly poem known as the Lai d'Haveloc. 2 The story in the English poem concerns Havelok, a young Danish prince whose regent Godard steals his crown after the death of King Birkabeyn. The usurper orders Grim, a fisherman, to drown the child, but, instead, Grim takes Havelok to England and raises him as his own son in Grimsby. Havelok soon takes a job as a kitchen boy in Lincoln Castle, where he is forced to marry Goldeborw, an English princess whose crown is similarly usurped by her regent Godrich. Havelok and Goldeborw return to Grimsby, where Havelok's ancestry is revealed through a light shining from his mouth and a cross-shaped birthmark, and they sail to Denmark to take back Havelok's throne. Upon accomplishing this task, Havelok leads an army to England, defeats Godrich, and becomes king of both countries.The poem's authorship and audience have been discussed extensively in recent years with the result that Havelok has been viewed as anything from an oral tradition based ultimately on history before the Norman Conquest to a thirteenth-century handbook for princes. 3 Opinions differ on the extent to which the poem derives from oral or written sources. My own view is that the basic story derives from Gaimar's twelfthcentury Estoire des Engleis and that the later versions are all based directly on Gaimar's account or indirectly on reworkings of Gaimar's version after it had passed from chronicle into local legend. 4 Many of these reworkings were responses to a process (in which the Middle English poem participates) of reexamining the Danish role in the origins of England, and possibly to other changes in social and politics conditions 1 The poem is cited from G. V. Smithers, ed., Havelok the Dane (Oxford 1987).

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