Apparently, it was a legendary story worth reciting during feasts in halls of lords, kings, overkings and other big men. In the story of Beowulf, the fight at Finnsburh is one of the tales told when warriors gathered and celebrated their heroic deeds. The whole affair is called freswæle too, meaning ‘Frisian slaughter’ in Old English. The name Finn is sometimes written as Fin. The word leoð is similar to the current Mid-Frisian word liet for song, or Lied and lied in respectively German and Dutch languages.įinnsburh is also written as Finnsburg, Finnesburg and Finnsburuh. The Fragment also happens to be the oldest surviving pagan poem in Old English. The latter, the Fragment, is a leoð being a heroic poem that was sung. Namely the monumental Old English epic poem Beowulf, and the so-called Finnsburh Fragment. Two early-medieval texts report about the famous battle in which “the edge of a sword sealed Finn’s doom”.

The Finnsburg Encounter (Dickerson 1991)Īfter the heroic story of the battle had been sung by minstrels and bards, and orally passed on for centuries, it was finally put into writing as well. Our land stands at the center of these like a young sapling in the midst of a great oak forest. And beyond the Frankish kingdoms lie all of the great kingdoms of the continent. And south of us,” he finished, turning around and looking out over Hwitstan, “is the Merovingian kingdom – the land of the Franks. To the north and east,” he continued, adjusting his grip on his staff and pointing just north of the rising sun, “lies the land of the Danes. To the north and west of us, across the Swan Road, lies the land of the Britons where the Angles and Saxons now rule. In fact, a long-standing historic concept which we found, very appropriate, in a novel about king Finn too: Frisia was located central because liminal (IJssennagger 2017). When at the wet waterfront of the southern North Sea a new tribe identity was forged, using building blocks from the Franks, the Old-Frisians, the Old-Saxons, and southern Scandinavians. To a time when the Wandering of Peoples, or Migration Age, just had ended.

This post takes the reader back to the dawning of Frisia. But why was and is it a battle to be remembered? And who is this Finn anyway? Finn, son of Folcwald and young king of the Frisian tribe. A poem dating from the early tenth century. Or, Fin Folcwalding Fresna cynne, as he was named in the Anglo-Saxon poem Widsith. We’re talking about the bloody battle at the citadel of king Finn.

A tragedy the peoples in northwestern Europe haven’t forgotten ever since. Around the year 440 (Shippey 2022) a betrayal took place on the southern shores of the North Sea.

Finn and hengest