We often read that women in Anglo-Saxon England had an important role in making and maintaining peace. It is said that queens were often exchanged in marriage between hostile nations as a way of making peace and that they were expected to promote peace both internationally and within the kingdoms to which they had been sent. It is impossible to prove a negative; but having searched long and hard for evidence that would back up these claims, I have concluded that there is next to none. Rather, our received ideas about women in Anglo-Saxon England can be traced back to the responses of nineteenth-century scholars to one word and one story, both in Beowulf: the word freoðuwebbe ‘peaceweaver’, used twice of queens in Old English poetry, and the story of Freawaru, who is married to Ingeld of the Heathobards as part of a peace-agreement between that nation and the Danes. These items—one hesitates to call them evidence—are a weak basis for the kind of sweeping generalization we often encounter in the scholarly literature.

This and the following chapter will take a careful look at the history of scholarship concerning the word freoðuwebbe, propose an alternative explanation of that word, and offer readings of three of the queens of Beowulf, ending with Freawaru, who has set the pattern for much of our thinking about women in Old English poetry. The first two sections of the present chapter digress somewhat from my discussion of the relationship of honour and exchange to violence; but they are necessary preparation for what follows, which I hope will repay the reader’s patience.