Beowulf: Lejre and the Scandinavian Setting

Beowulf opens in Hrothgar's great hall, where the monster Grendel attacks by night and devours many of Hrothgar's warriors in their sleep, until Beowulf tears the monster's arm from its shoulder. Heorot is not named in any Scandinavian source, yet Lejre on Zealand has long been thought its real counterpart. The saga of Hrolf Kraki places that king's hall at Lejre, and excavators found three halls about 50 metres long, one built in the mid-6th century. A rival theory puts Heorot at Harty in Kent. Nearby, the Land of Legends rebuilds an Iron Age village.

Location precision: The poem's Heorot is a literary hall; the pin marks Gammel Lejre, where the excavated halls lie, and a Kent site has also been proposed.

Visitor guidance: The Land of Legends (Sagnlandet Lejre) in Lejre Municipality is open to the public.

Beowulf is a young warrior from Geatland who hears of Hrothgar's troubles and, with his king's permission, leaves home to help. Decades later he is king of the Geats himself, facing a dragon, and his people raise a burial mound by the sea in his honour. The Geats (Gautar) are agreed to be the same people as the Gautar of what is now Götaland in southern Sweden, mainly its western part, Västergötland. The poem's setting is dated to the 5th and 6th centuries.

Location precision: Geatland is a people's territory, not a single place; the pin marks the middle of the Götaland region.

Beowulf's own king, Hygelac, dies on a raid into Frisia. The 6th-century historian Gregory of Tours records the raid, which is dated to around 516 or 521, and a later chronicle calls him a king of the Goths, agreeing with Beowulf. The raiders' survivors fled to sea in such haste that they left their dead, their king among them. Of all the Geatish kings, only Hygelac is confirmed outside the poem.

Location precision: Frisia is a wide coastal region of the northern Netherlands and north-western Germany; no battlefield is known, and the pin marks the Dutch province of Friesland.

The poem mentions a battle between the Swedish rivals Eadgils and Onela. Snorri Sturluson says Eadgils was buried at Uppsala, and the three huge Royal Mounds still stand at Gamla Uppsala. When the western mound was opened in 1874, it held a powerful man buried c. 575 on a bear skin with two dogs, a Frankish sword and rich grave offerings. Helmet panels from the eastern mound are of a type known otherwise only from Sutton Hoo and Staffordshire. Whose burials these are remains unproven, and the middle mound has never been excavated.

Location precision: The link between Eadgils and these mounds rests on Snorri's later account, not on the poem.

Beowulf begins with the funeral of the Danish king Scyld Scefing in a ship laden with treasure, and ends with the hero's own funeral. In Suffolk, a ship about 27 metres long was found in a mound, dated to between 610 and 635, and the burial has prompted comparisons with the poem's world. Several of its objects have east Swedish connections. The site is not a place from the poem, but it is the nearest thing we have to its funerals.

Visitor guidance: National Trust site; the visitor centre has original artefacts, replicas and a reconstruction of the ship burial chamber.

Beowulf survived in a single manuscript, written in ink on parchment around 975 to 1025. It is catalogued as Cotton Vitellius A.XV after the shelf of Sir Robert Cotton's library on which it once stood, under a bust of the Roman emperor Vitellius. It was damaged in the fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and part of its text has since crumbled. The British Library lists it among the manuscripts in its free Sir John Ritblat Gallery.

Visitor guidance: The Sir John Ritblat Gallery is open seven days a week at no charge; check that the manuscript is on show before you go.