SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Trohetsvisan and Chaucer's Lak of Stedfastnesse 287
But Engelbrekt never really gained the position for which
he and his followers had hoped. He had strong enemies
and in 1436 the Council chose as their man the marshall
Karl Knutsson. Although Engelbrekt shared the leadership
of the army with Karl at this time he was soon
murdered by the nobleman Magnus Bengtsson and the
people were forgotten. Karl Knutsson gained supremacy
and even executed Engelbrekt's right-hand man, Erik
Puke. We do not know where Bishop Thomas stood at
every change of alliance but he was in the centre of these
temporal events. Earlier he had been Erik of Pomerania's
candidate for the vacant archbishopric of Uppsala-" and
during the year of the revolt (1434) he was urged by
Engelbrekt to undertake the naval defence of Sweden
together with the lords of Uppland against Erik's
counter-attackI 7 Such a man as he could easily have
been the author of Frihetsvisan which refers to the main
figures and events of this period. If he also wrote
Trohetsvisan, as all the evidence suggested, would there
not also be precise reference in that poem? Gottfrid
Carlsson, and other historians before him, looked and
found, latching on to a phrase in verse 10 of the poem:
It happened last year,
Fidelity committed a murder,
then she escaped.
This, he surmised, was a reference to Engelbrekt's murder
by Magnus Bengtsson on a small island in Lake
Hjalmaren j!" and the older historian Hans Hildebrandt"
thought that there was a hint about the place of murder in
verse 3:
Fidelity went to the shore
and put out from the land;
it is very difficult
to get to her help at such a hard time;
she sank to the bottom.
.. Ny Illustrerad Svensk Litteraturhistoria, I 269.
17 Andersson, op, cit., 81.
18 Carlsson, op, cit., 24 ff., cited by Hildeman, op, cit., 125.
,. Hildeman, op. cit., 126.