THE ONLY GUIDANCE which the poem offers as to where the Danish king Hrothgar's hall is located is its account of Beowulf's sea journey to reach it and his visit there.

The preceding discussion has lent strong support to Gad Rausing's conclusion that Beowulf's voyage started out from Gotland. Drawing on his own experience of sailing in the southern Baltic, and using information in the poem, Rausing attempted to determine Beowulf's destination and how long it could have taken him to get there (Rausing 1985).

Rausing assumed that the sea journey to Heorot was made under sail. But the poem says nothing about sails. On the other hand, it says nothing about oars either, and the idea of sails may seem to be supported by the reference to the vessel having been winde ġefӯsed,i.e., driven by the wind. Yet again, a following wind is also a great help when rowing, and a headwind sheer torment. For the voyage home, however, both sails and a mast are mentioned.

There is no firm archaeological evidence of sails and masts at the time the events of the poem unfold, either in Scandinavia or in Anglo-Saxon England. A possible explanation for sails being mentioned in connection with Beowulf's journey home is that later Old English bards or scribes with experience of sailing may have felt that having eight horses on board would have left little elbow room for rowing, and therefore assumed that the boat would have been sailed. My own view, though, is that the linguistic evidence of Beowulf's return journey from Frisia having been under oars (see Chapter 20) suggests that his voyages to and from the Danes would have been undertaken in the same way.

On the other hand, it is scarcely possible that people in Scandinavia and England at this time would have been unaware of the basic principle of sailing. Perhaps the simple explanation is that only high-status oared warships, and not new-fangled square-sailed ships for the mundane carriage of cargo, were regarded as worthy vessels for a prince's journey to the realm of the dead, the main motif on early picture stones featuring ships.

Raiding from the sea was a popular activity among the southern Scandinavian elite of the time, an activity based on surprise attack and a rapid getaway. Oared ships offered the necessary manoeuvrability, even with an unfavourable wind.