It is believed that its inhabitants are the same as the Brondings who are referred to in the Anglo-Saxon poems Beowulf and Widsith.
It is moot whether Widsith literally intends himself, or poetically means his lineage, either as a Myrging or as a poet, as when "the fictive speaker Deor uses the rhetoric of first-person address to insert himself into the same legendary world that he evokes in the earlier parts of the poem through his allusions to Weland the smith, Theodoric the Goth, Eormanric the Goth, and other legendary figures of the Germanic past" (Niles 2003, p 10).
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Since the discovery of the Exeter Book in 1076, it has been housed in the Exeter Cathedral in southwest England.
Widsith |
One of the islands, Brännö, is described as an important location for fairs in the Laxdæla saga, and it is also considered to be the likely location of Breca and the Brondings of the Anglo-Saxon poems Widsith and Beowulf.
Beowulf, England's national epic, relates that Breca the Bronding was the childhood friend of the hero Beowulf and Widsith tells that Breca later was the lord of the Brondings.
They and Breca the Bronding are mentioned in Beowulf (Th. 1047; B. 521.), as Beowulf's childhood friend, and in Widsith (Scóp Th. 51; Wíd. 25.), where Breca is the lord of the Brondings.
The issue is further complicated by a number of references to various Dani people in Scandinavia or other places in Europe in Greek and Roman accounts (like Ptolemy, Jordanes, and Gregory of Tours), as well as some mediaeval literature (like Adam of Bremen, Beowulf, Widsith and Poetic Edda).