Grendel's Curse. Alex Archer

away.

      The reporters, who only a few moments before had been pressing their microphones forward trying to catch every word Thorssen said, had their backs to the barrow and were doing their final pieces to camera, telling their viewers what they’d just seen and why it was so significant. Fifteen minutes later it was a ghost town. The TV crews had packed away their equipment and driven off in a convoy. Now that Thorssen was gone the barrow was back to being a grassy hill. They’d return if and when evidence was unearthed that Skalunda Barrow truly was the last resting place of Beowulf. Until then, story filed, they’d forget all about it as soon as the next piece of news broke.

      “How about I make myself useful?” Annja asked as Lars and his team started to unpack rolls of plastic sheeting from their van. He doled out instructions to others, surprisingly in English rather than his native Swedish, which led her to think that it was for her benefit. He had everything under control, but Annja never was one for being a spectator.

      “It’s fine, we’ve got it covered. Unless you fancy a shift with the shovel?”

      Annja laughed, assuming it was a joke. Dig sites used mechanical diggers these days to scrape the surface back and mark out the trenches for excavation, not teams of slave labor with shovels. She looked around for the digger, but there was no sign of one anywhere.

      “So when is the digger arriving?”

      “Digger? You’re looking at him.”

      “Are you serious?”

      “Sadly. Yes.”

      “What? Why?”

      “Red tape. We could only get approval to excavate if everything was done by hand—minimal impact on the environment, every single sod replaced as close to its current position as is humanly possible.”

      “Wow. Better grab a shovel, then. We’re going to be at this for a while.”

      “Tell me about it,” Lars said. “It’ll take us a day to clear out what a backhoe could do in half an hour. But in this as in the rest of life beggars can’t be choosers. Lucky for you I’ve enlisted half of the horticultural department from the university to do the grunt work. Let the big strong farm boys do the backbreaking stuff.”

      “Nothing wrong with a little extra muscle.” She held out her hand. “Pass the shovel.”

      Lars handed her the shiny new shovel Thorssen had used to break the ground.

      “Where do you want me?”

      “Over there, we’ve marked out a trench where, according to geophys results, we believe the entrance to the barrow lies. Have fun.”

      Annja hefted the shovel onto her shoulder, but before she walked off to lose herself in some good old-fashioned manual labor, she asked, “Do you really believe he’s down there?”

      “It’s been a long time, and there’s no way of knowing for sure, but yes. I wouldn’t be getting involved in this unless I thought that there was the realistic chance of finding something.”

      “That’s not the same as saying you think we’ll turn up Beowulf’s bones. We’re talking fourteen hundred years for grave robbers, looters, despoilers, defilers, never mind treasure hunters, and heaven knows what else to come along and plunder the barrow.”

      “That’s always a risk,” the archaeologist agreed. “We won’t know until we’re inside. Just as we won’t know if this is the tomb of Böðvar Bjarki—the Norse warrior king from the Saga of Hrólf Kraki, for instance, whose story mirrors the legend of Beowulf in many significant areas. We know it was from Geatland that Böðvar arrived in Denmark, and moreover, that upon his arrival at the court there, he killed a monstrous beast that had been terrorizing the court at Yule for two years, not unlike Grendel. Of course, there’s no evidence as to whether Beowulf was real or not, but his character from the poem does fit seamlessly into the context of his society and Germanic family tree.”

      “Seamlessly? It doesn’t exactly fit the poem, does it?”

      “In terms of what we actually know, it’s difficult to say anything with certainty. The poem may have been composed as an elegy for a seventh century king like Böðvar, corrupting his name over time, but there’s little surviving evidence to indicate who it was actually written about, much like King Arthur. It’s a legend. And with all poems of the time, it has evolved with the telling and retelling. We have no idea who the original author was. Indeed, there’s as much as three hundred years between its composition and the oldest surviving manuscript, which remains unnamed. The poem itself wasn’t called Beowulf until the nineteenth century. Indeed, from the 1700s it was known as Cotton Vitellius A.XV, after Robert Bruce Cotton, the manuscript’s owner, and there was no transcription of it until 1818.”

      She had heard much of this before, but Lars’s passion when he started in upon the subject close to his heart made every word fascinating.

      “The burial rites described in Thorkelin’s Latin transcription bear a strong resemblance to evidence found at the Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo. Likewise Grundtvig’s Danish translation and Kemble’s subsequent modern English version echo the same funereal rites.”

      “But wasn’t Beowulf’s body burned in a funeral pyre on a boat?” Annja recalled having read several retellings of the story as a child long before she’d ever encountered a direct scholarly translation. The image of the burning boat was always one that had stuck with her. If she closed her eyes she could see the flames and feel their heat on her skin. Fire.

      “You are correct. The image of the Viking funeral boat sailing out ablaze does provide for a much more dramatic conclusion to the tale. Though I truly believe there has to be a reason why the site of Skalunda has become so intrinsically linked with everything we believe to be true about our hero. Stories don’t endure without a grain of truth to them, do they?”

      It was a question she couldn’t answer, but she wasn’t entirely convinced by his reasoning. Yes, it made sense that the poem would have been changed over time. The only extant copy of the original showed at least two authors, and the story itself was riddled with dichotomies of paganism versus Christianity, which supported the notion that each subsequent teller of the epic tale had added their own beliefs to the core story, but was burial really a part of Nordic culture of the time?

      “Well,” she said wryly, “the answer’s only a backbreaking dig away.”

      3

      They had been at it until well into the night, working in shifts and stopping occasionally for food, but now that the sun had finally set and everyone had been sent home, Lars could savor the scene. It was real. It was happening. After all of the paperwork, all of the begging, all of the disappointments, they were finally here, digging down to what could well be the biggest discovery of his lifetime.

      He allowed himself a small smile.

      Putting the dig together had been a herculean task, and while they were still a long way from finding anything, the sense of satisfaction he felt surveying the site couldn’t be denied. They could make do without the backhoes and all of the other machinery. It was all about what was down in the ground now. The team had spent most of the first day clearing the ground, cutting and rolling away a strip of turf a few inches deep to reveal the undisturbed soil beneath, then marking it so the sod could be relaid exactly where it had been. It had taken hours of painstaking work, but the students had put in a full shift, cutting out a trench almost six feet deep, three wide and fifteen long.

      It had been a good day, and they’d ended it with a ritual wetting of the site, sharing a beer while they cleared the equipment. It had been one of the students who’d come up with the idea to have that beer out of an old horn, each taking a sip and passing the horn around the circle until it was empty. It was a nice ritual, and very in keeping with the nature of the dig. Then they’d taken a few shots to immortalize their handiwork for posterity, each of them standing beside the deep trench, beer horn in hand. They were all part of this great work, and for him there