He Will Rock You:

Abstract

This article draws on medieval accounts of athletic sport and its literary depictions to examine a tradition of Havelok the Dane's athletic prowess that runs across the Lai d'Haveloc, the Middle English Havelok, and numerous chronicles. Robert Mannyng describes a physical remnant of this athletic tradition: a stone lying in Lincoln Castle said to have been thrown by Havelok. By reading Havelok's stone not merely as a relic of a past king but as marking a playspace—the imagined site of a former game—we may understand the stone as a point of intersection between the pleasurable activities of contemporary sport and historicist imagining. In the romances, Havelok's athletic wonders highlight the social effects of wonder as sport. In turn, Mannyng's stone creates an imaginative playspace within his Chronicle: one that exploits an affective connection between the wonders of athletic spectating and an imaginative engagement with history.