Chapter 8 - Other Links to Eastern Sweden

Summary

THE CONCLUSIONS that King Hrothgar's hall of Heorot is in southeastern Zealand and that the Geats are the Gutes of Gotland give Beowulf a markedly eastern Scandinavian centre of gravity, further underlined by the battles of the Swedes with the Gutes in the later part of the poem. The connection with eastern Svealand can be brought out even more clearly, however.

Swiorice and Sweoðeod

The word Swīorīċe, “the realm or dominion of the Swedes,” occurs twice in Beowulf, once with reference to the homeland of the Swedish king Onela (Ale)and once in a more neutral context.In addition, the poem speaks once of Swēoðēod,“the Swedish people” or, in a transferred sense, “the land of the Swedes.”

These designations are unknown in other early Old English texts. Swēoðēod only appears in such sources with the advent of Scandinavian influence in the late Viking Age. As Gösta Langenfelt has noted, moreover, the ending -rīċe as a political-geographical designation is conspicuous by its absence in other texts in Old English. As in the West Norse area, the ending used is always -land (Langenfelt 1932).

Since the poem so clearly represents an eastern Scandinavian context from the late Migration Period, with not the slightest involvement of later traditions, what we have here are quite evidently the earliest definite recorded occurrences of the names Svearike and Svethiudh. Another indirect attestation of Svethiudh is to be found in Jordanes’ Getica from the same period, in which the Swedes are first spoken of as Suehans, with a Gothic ending, and a little later as Suetidi (Getica, 20), which can be seen as a Latinisation of Svethiudh (Svennung 1967, 33). That Svearike and Svethiudh were in use as eastern Swedish designations at least from the Migration Period onwards is entirely in line with Thorsten Andersson's philologically-based view that Svethiudh as a power centre of the Swedish kings goes back at least to that time (Thorsten Andersson 2004, 2005b).