Angul (mythology)



Angul (or Angel) is a figure in Nordic mythology who, according to the Gesta Danorum was the ancestor of the Danes, along with his brother Dan. He was also the ancestor of the Angles in Denmark, who later migrated to Great Britain, naming the land they settled England.

Gesta Danorum
Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum describes how the two sons of Humble, Angul and Dan, are the forefathers and founders of the Danes. Together, they became rulers of their realm through the support of their kinsmen but did not use the term "king".

Angul is then described as also being the ancestor of the Angles, who later migrated to Britain, naming the region England after Angul:

Relationship to other Germanic tribal beginnings
Though not mentioning Angul, his brother Dan is referred to in other medieval works as the ancestor of the Danes. In the Chronicle of Lejre Dan, the son of King Ypper of Uppsala, becomes king of the Danes, while his brothers Nori and Östen become kings of Norway and the Swedes. Consistent with this, in Jordanes' Getica, written in the 6th century, the Danes, of the same tribe as the Swedes, are said to have emigrated from Sweden to Denmark in ancient times. Unlike other accounts such as the Prose Edda, Gesta Danorum makes the founders of the Danish royal line descended from humans rather than gods.

Inclusion by Saxo Grammaticus
In contrast to many other writers at the time that traced the descent of the nation in question to the Trojans, Saxo favoured heathen forefathers from the land itself. This was possibly intended to show that the Danes were independent from, and equal, to the Romans. It has been argued that Dan and Angul resembling Romulus and Remus, fitting into a wider system of parallels between the accounts in Gesta Danorum and Roman tradition. It is unclear when Saxo conceived of Dan and Angul as having lived, with the Chronicle of Lejre recording that Dan lived at the time of Emperor Augustus, while Saxo puts them over twenty generations before him. This would be a further similarity with Romulus and Remus, with whom they would have been roughly contemporaries by his account.

It has been further proposed that Saxo included Angul in his account of the origin of the Danes to emphasise the close connection between the Danes and the English. This is consistent with earlier Old English literature that shows that the history of the Angles during and before the migration from the Danish region was remembered and seen as part of the history of the English more widely. It has also been noted that along with the works of Bede, Saxo refers to the writings of Dudo and Paul the Deacon who discuss the origins of the Normans and the Langobards, who, like the English, can be seen as having descended from the Danes.