Through
Darksome Wood
T he Danish ballad “Young Svejdal” was written sometime in the thirteenth century, but the following verse might just as easily have been addressed to a young warrior of the Nordic Bronze Age (1800 to 500 BC):
A shining sword I’ll give thee,
Was tempered in dragon’s blood,
’Twill glow like a burning bale-fire
When thou ridest through darksome wood.5
The elite of southern Scandinavia three thousand years ago were farther traveled, more richly accoutred, and, well, more elite than those of the more dismal Iron Age that followed. Their feasts were more lavish, their festivals noisy with the music of their sinuous bronze trumpets, their conversations a little more interesting. With the last ice age long forgotten, Europe’s northern hinterlands were warmer and drier in the early to middle portions of its Bronze Age than they are even today. As the Bronze Age drew to a close, the weather turned colder and wetter, so it would not be an exaggeration to say that the sun shone a little brighter in those earlier days.
The Nordic Iron Age (overlapping the end of the Bronze Age to AD 800) began when local deposits of bog ore were discovered, precluding the need to venture far from home in search of the tin and copper needed to make bronze. By this time, the Bronze Age had become a golden age that lived on in tales of foreign adventures, glittering treasures, and impossibly wealthy princes, all told as the rain drummed on the round thatched roofs and the puddles grew in the yards. The thing about golden ages is that the people living in them often don’t realize it. And while they spark and blaze in the memory of a people, they do not remain static but change, taking on new meaning as the memory is passed from mouth to mouth down through the generations. The people who occupied southern Scandinavia from about 1800 to 500 BC were just that: people. Ethnically, they were for the most part the same people who had lived there since the Neolithic or New Stone Age (5000 to 1799 BC, give or take) and who would stay on through the Iron and Viking Ages, but time and imagination have transmuted the Bronze Age folk into a race both more and less than human.
Let’s take a look at their stomping grounds, the area I like to call Old Elfland, because it was in this northern realm around 1250 BC that the elves as a concept began to crystallize into the forms that would be familiar to the Vikings and later Scandinavian peasants, the same forms that would eventually fall into Professor Tolkien’s capable hands—that is, a race of tall, shining, otherworldly creatures. At the heart of Old Elfland was Denmark: the northward-jutting peninsula of Jutland along with the large islands of Funen, Lolland, Zealand, and the many smaller ones as well. There was, however, no such thing as “Denmark” back in the Nordic Bronze Age. We don’t know where the political boundaries were drawn, but the cultural sphere encompassed modern-day Denmark, southern Sweden, southern Norway, and parts of Germany. Writing in 1970, Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob acknowledged that the influence of the “mound people,” as he called the ancient aristocrats who had been laid to rest in well-appointed graves under huge mounds of earth, extended all the way down to Lüneburg in Lower Saxony. Recently, we’ve learned that the acquisitive fingers of these Bronze Age princes reached all the way to Germany’s Black Forest.
I have not yet been to the Black Forest, but I have been to the Lüneburg Heath. In fact, it was there that my journey into Old Elfland began in earnest. I was only ten, so my memory of the place is like one of those postcards that crams too many images on one surface, affording detail to none. I remember an enclosed bird park in nearby Walsrode, lots of sheep, beehives, and acres of heather and juniper shrubs, though I didn’t know or even think to wonder what they were. Mention might have been made of Heide (heather) and Wacholder (juniper), but my German at the time was even sketchier than it is now. I remember hordes of the bathing-capped elderly bobbing like barrels among the artificial waves of the mineral baths and a little vacation apartment in the spa town of Bad Bevensen. But most of all, I remember The Hobbit.
This was 1978, and our whole family had hobbit fever. The book itself wasn’t new; it had been published in 1937, but we’d recently seen the animated 1977 movie on television and it had affected us all deeply. In my humble opinion, Peter Jackson has nothing on the Rankin Bass musical The Hobbit cartoon. My German cousins had a jigsaw puzzle of the liquid-eyed Bilbo finding the ring deep beneath the Misty Mountains and we had put it together on my aunt and uncle’s living room floor. My sister had brought the mass market paperback along on the trip, the one with the top half of the cover white and the bottom half with Bilbo astride one of the barrels as he and the dwarves go bobbing past the huts of the raft elves. By the time we fetched up on the Lüneburg Heath, she had finished it and passed it on to me.
I didn’t finish the book on that trip. The truth is, it would be more than thirty years before I read The Hobbit from cover to cover, though I would dip into it every now and then and reread my favorite parts. Looking back, I think my fascination with the book had less to do with the story and more to do with the creatures and landscapes of Middle-earth. I distinctly remember asking my sister how big a hobbit was and my sister holding her hand up at about waist height. To my ten-year-old brain—and keep in mind that ten-year-olds were a little younger in 1978 than they are today—if you could hold your hand up to show how big or small something was, it meant that that something, on some level, actually existed.
I read the first pages of The Hobbit while holed up in an old, dark wardrobe in the bedroom of that vacation apartment at the edge of the heath, bombé front doors cracked to let in just enough light to read by. It was a little like being in a hobbit hole. And, to my sister’s and my delight, there was an even bigger swath of Middle-earth just outside the front door: a hilly forest of majestic conifers. This forest was significantly darker than any woods we had traipsed through at home in New Jersey. My uncle’s house in Schleswig-Holstein, a long bus ride north of Bad Bevensen, stood near a beech wood with a complex of streams like the one outside the elven king’s gate in chapter IX of The Hobbit, where “great beeches came right down to the bank, till their feet were in the stream.” 6 But this new world of dark pines, my sister and I agreed, was none other than Tolkien’s Mirkwood.
Actually, we were not far off. Had we traveled a little further north, beyond the heath and beyond Schleswig-Holstein, we might have discovered the mirkwood through which young Svejdal rode in the ballad. Yes, that’s mirkwood with a small “m,” and it’s used in an earlier verse to describe that same “darksome wood.” So, was there a the Mirkwood before Tolkien invented one for Middle-earth? Yes, there was. Or, rather, there were.
There is a Myrkviðr, translated by J. R. R.’s son Christopher Tolkien as “Mirkwood” in verse 82 of the Old Norse Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. It was, however, nowhere near Denmark. It was in this “renowned forest” 7 that the kings of the Goths were buried inside their mounds with all their treasures on the banks of the Dnieper in southern Ukraine, just spitting distance from the gathering Hunnish hordes. By verse 91, this Mirkwood seems to have become a heiðr, a heath or moor covered in heather.
Tenth-century Saxon bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, who liked to write about history, Latinized Mirkwood to Miriquidui and placed it in the Erzgebirge mountains between Germany and Bohemia. The Erzgebirge is an important source of tin, so our intrepid Nordic Bronze Age traders would have been quite familiar with the region. In fact, we know they roamed even farther afield in search of goods, technology, ideas, and royal brides.
But Thietmar doesn’t get the last word on Mirkwood. In verse 42 of Carolyne Larrington’s translation of the Old Norse poem Lokasenna (“Loki’s quarrel”) the inhabitants of the fiery realm of Muspelheim must ride through “Myrkwood” in order to invade Midgard or “Middle Earth,” the habitation of mortals. The “mirk” in Mirkwood does not always mean “murky”; it comes from the Old Norse mork, meaning “boundary.” It is the same word as the English “march,” as in “the Welsh marches,” the borderlands between England and Wales, and the “mark” in “Denmark.” You might find a Mirkwood anywhere that one realm leaves off and another begins, be it the boundary between Goth and Hun, German and Slav (or perhaps Celt since Bohemia was named for the Celtic Boi tribe), forest and heath, or the primordial and the mortal.
During my first assault on The Hobbit, it was the dwarves’ adventures inside Bilbo’s hobbit hole, through Mirkwood and elsewhere, that fired my imagination, but it was the elves that kept me coming back. Many years later, on another visit, my oldest daughter and I did that same jigsaw puzzle on my aunt and uncle’s floor at the edge of the elven king’s wood. And it was in that same living room, while riffling the pages of my uncle’s history books, that I first learned the magical word Bronzezeit, a word I would eventually come to associate with elves.
For me, the English term “Bronze Age” conjures up images of Minoans and Mycenaeans, while the German Bronzezeit means fragile bits of gold foil clinging to a darkened sun disc, amber beads, finely netted caps, and barrows topped by birch and linden trees.
Happily, my uncle had a map of all the Neolithic and Bronze Age grave mounds in the neighborhood. Off we went down the country lanes, fields of barley and yellow rapeseed on one hand, the quietly sighing Baltic on the other. Much as I tried to keep them straight, it was a lot of mounds all at once and they have since become jumbled in my mind. Some were Hügelgräber, run-of-the-mill grave mounds, others Hünengräber, grave mounds composed of boulders and dating all the way back to the days of the first Scandinavian farmers and into which people continued to insert the bones and ashes of the dead over many generations. Not all of them had been officially excavated, though probably all of them had been pilfered at one time or another.
I remember one mound that was covered in grass and difficult to make out over the shoulders of the black and white cows grazing around it, just as cows (though probably not Holsteins) would already have been doing three thousand years before. Another mound rose up dramatically and improbably from a field of broccoli. That one had been a Hünengrab. I scraped a bit of moss from the rocks crowning the incline, frightening a russet fawn from the underbrush as I clambered over the roof of this ancient house of the dead. Moss from an ancestor’s barrow, when placed beneath one’s pillow, is supposed to summon prophetic dreams. Since I’ve never been particularly eager to see what the future holds, I’ve never tried it, but I still have the moss.
I cannot say with absolute certainty that the occupants of that mound were my ancestors, but the chances aren’t bad. Whoever had been buried in that mound had been a person of high standing. He, she, or they must have presided over many head of cattle and a sizeable swath of arable land. They may even have had the means to launch their own trading ventures. Their children would have been well fed, well dressed, and well married. The wealthier you were, the healthier you were and the more children you could have. A greater percentage of your children would survive to have children of their own who would go on sprinkling their genes throughout the landscape.
There were far fewer people in Schleswig-Holstein three thousand years ago than there are today, so many fewer that there simply aren’t enough ancestors to go around, so they must do double duty. Some of my ninety-times great-grandfathers would also have been my uncles, cousins, and who knows what else. Anyone who lived in the Bronze Age and was successful enough to parent a small tribe of children at a time when there were really not that many people in the world probably still has descendants living today, like me and you and even that faintly suspicious-looking person sitting next to you on the train.
Our ancient ancestors were much more adventurous than we usually give them credit for. Even the most sedentary farmers advanced about five miles per generation, and our Bronze Age river traders, as we’ll learn in Chapter Three, were seriously affected by wanderlust, so even if you’re not European, there is very likely a wealthy mound person somewhere in your family tree.8 I am probably descended for the most part from Neolithic and Bronze Age lackeys, the people who actually built those mounds, but I’m sure there is also some glittering prince from whom I derive a skosh of my DNA still strutting around in the Mirkwood of the otherworld.
SPELL BREAK: In the Gloaming Grey
Those low-population figures for the prehistoric and even early historic worlds mean that I am probably also descended from the nameless “franklin free” (or someone like him) introduced to us in the first verse of the medieval Danish ballad “Sir Bosmer in Elfland.” 9 Why? Because that franklin, or free-born farmer, was the father of five sons and “daughters twain,” a veritable flooding of the gene pool. But the following story is not about any of our ancestors; it’s about Sir Bosmer, the franklin’s one son who was removed from the pool before he had a chance to make a splash.
Much will be said about the “hill man” or “fairy lover” in this book. Sir Bosmer, however, was a mortal who was seduced by a true femme fatale of Elfland. She has no name. If she did, I’m not sure I would want to say it out loud, for she is certainly one of the more frightening characters in the ballads. She is referred to simply as “the Elf-maid.” The skogsrå and elle maid of later tales pale by comparison, for this is no chance encounter in the woods; this Elf-maid is cold and calculating.
We are not told much about her. She lives underwater, probably in a stream close to human habitation, because she has been able to pop her head up and observe Sir Bosmer over the course of fifteen winters. We don’t know what attempts she has made thus far to woo him, only that she has failed to win his love and now she means business. Toward the end of the ballad, there is some indication that she may have been wailing and weeping all this time, but I have to wonder. It seems to me that in this Elf-maid’s eyes, Sir Bosmer is nothing more than a prize to be won.
Her first move is to knock on his door in the “gloaming grey,” that is, dusk. Sir Bosmer is in bed already, so it must be summer, when the sun doesn’t set in Denmark until after ten o’clock. Sir Bosmer hasn’t lined up any dates for that night, so he’s reluctant to open the door. But it turns out that the knock was only a courtesy. When Sir Bosmer declines to let her in, the Elf-maid uses her nimble elven fingers to undo the locks herself.
She sits at the edge of Sir Bosmer’s bed, plays with his hair, and bids him to meet her at midnight on the stone bridge. This is a rather bold move on her part, for, as verses 11-16 reveal, Sir Bosmer is not alone in bed. Who is with him? We find out later that Sir Bosmer had a “true-love” to whom he was not yet wed, so it can’t be her in the bed at this point—at least, it shouldn’t be. More likely, it’s one of Bosmer’s brothers bunking with him. Whoever it is, the person wisely counsels Bosmer that it must have been an Elf-maid that invaded their chamber, and if he knows what’s good for him, he won’t go to meet her on the bridge.
Bosmer goes. Of course he does. But the Elf-maid is not sitting there waiting for him; she must first lure him to her own country. Bosmer’s horse throws a shoe and Bosmer is tossed over the bridge and into the water. He surfaces not in Denmark but on the twilit shores of Elfland, and it is there his would-be lover is waiting for him.
Those of us who were hoping for a detailed description of Elfland must go home disappointed. The Elf-maid keeps a hall of her own, but it must have been so unremarkable that the balladeer found nothing worth mentioning about it. Her serving maid brings wine and mead in an aurochs horn, but is the natural horn polished to a warm glow or sheathed in gold foil like the one stolen from the draugs at Vellerhaug? Disappointed though we are, at least we can go home again; Sir Bosmer cannot. When he first arrives, his fondest thoughts are still for Denmark and the true-love who awaits him there, the girl with whom he would “fain … live and die.” The Elf-maid can’t have this, so, like Circe, she directs her servant girl to add “two grains of corn,” which we can imagine to be any old-world grain, to the horn.
Unlike Odysseus, poor Bosmer has no magic herb to protect him from the enchanted draught, and once he drinks it, he quite forgets both Denmark and his betrothed. He thinks that he has always lived in Elfland and the Elf-maid has always been his true-love. When he fails to return home, his real true-love weeps herself into an early grave, so whoever our medieval ancestors are, Sir Bosmer and his tragic fiancée are not among them.
Good travel writing this ballad is not, but it does provide one telling detail. When the Elf-maid first sits down for drinks with Sir Bosmer, she opens the conversation with:
Tell me in the tongue of earth
What land bred and gave thee birth?
The Elf-maid appears to conduct her household as any ordinary Dane would, but it is implied that she and Bosmer speak different languages, just as mortals, elves, and dwarves all had their own sets of runes. The idea that the elves speak in a nonhuman tongue bolsters the feeling of otherworldliness but also supports the notion that a belief in elfkind arose in part from an early, not quite complete mingling of cultures. It’s that quiet clash that we’ll investigate in our next chapter.
5. Olrik, A Book of Danish Ballads, p. 122.
6. My sister’s copy of The Hobbit with the stream and barrels on the cover is long gone. I have replaced it in my own library with the 2001 Houghton Mifflin edition with cover art by Peter Sís. All Hobbit quotes in this book are from that edition. The one above appears on p. 186.
7. Tolkien, The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, p. 49.
8. Will he show up in your DNA profile? Possibly not. There’s just not enough room in each of us for all the genes of all our ancestors, so many of them drop out over the course of generations.
9. Olrik, A Book of Danish Ballads, p. 257.