SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Appendix
he has confused Uppland in Norway and Uppland in
Sweden. In the year 1677, a search for relics of antiquity
was made throughout Sweden, and the people of the
Husby district were then calling the mound Ottarsh6gen
(S. Lindqvist Uppsala hagar och Ottarshogen, 1936,
English summary, 329-31; conclusion, 352). Lindqvist
holds that on the archaeological evidence and the
traditional name-evidence: 'attar and some of the
generations immediately following him can - thanks to
their being mentioned in Beowulf - be looked upon as
historical personages with far greater right than most of
the others mentioned in the Y[nglingaJ T[al].' But
M. Stenberger is far less sure about the relation between
Ottarr, the mound at Vendel, and history: 'It is possible
that the huge grave-mound in Vendel really was built
over the remains of the ancient king mentioned in
Ynglingatal and Beowulf, but it is impossible to prove it'
(Det forntida Sverige, 1964, 537).
The problems associated with the Uppsala mounds are
much more vexing. There are three major mounds,
known as the east mound, the west mound, and the
centre mound. Lindqvist (op. cit., 334-5) gives the
traditional names for the tumuli; the eastern is known as
Odin's, the centre as Frey's, and the western as Thor's.
The eastern mound was excavated in 1846-7, and the
western in 1874; the centre mound has not yet been fully
investigated. The artifacts recovered in excavation are
very few, and any firm decision on them hard to establish,
for as Lindqvist tells us, 'With regard to certain objects,
particularly those of iron and bone, it appears that the
finds in the eastern and western mounds have been mixed
up' (op. cit., 341). From the archaeological side, without
entering into a full discussion of the finds, one can only
say that relations between Beowulf, the Swedish kings
mentioned in that poem, and the Uppsala and Vendel
tumuli are indeed tenuous. The only externally verifiable
date is that of Hygelac's raid on the Frisian coast, as