Saxo Grammaticus

Saxo Grammaticus finished the Gesta Danorum, the history of the Danes, early in the 13th century. He says at the beginning of the preface to this work that is was written to satisfy the wish of Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, who saw how other nations had glorified their ancestors in written histories, and very much wished for the same to be done for the Danes.

Other than the Gesta Danorum itself, and a mention from 1185 from another Danish historian, Svend Aggesen, that Saxo was writing it, we have no sources of biographical information about him. From his history, we may infer that Saxo's forebears were of the high Danish nobility, that they were warriors by profession, in the retinue of kings, and that Saxo himself was a cleric in Bishop Absalon's inner circle.

For a long time, the name "Saxo" confused me. I thought that it might have denoted that Saxo, or perhaps his recent ancestors, were foreigners in Denmark, from Saxony. I also wondered whether it might be connected to the Latin word "saxum," which means "rock." But whatever its origin, apparently Saxo is a very common male name in Denmark, or at least it was in the Middle Ages. The epithet Grammaticus was added to the name of our historian centuries later, because of the ornate style of his Latin prose, which borrows turns of phrase from a fairly impressive range of ancient authors including Sallust, Martianus Capella, Justin and Vergil, but in the great majority of cases from Valerius Maximus, the 1st century compiler of anecdotes. There can be little doubt that Maximus was the favorite author of Grammaticus.

Saxo divides his history into 16 books. The first 9 deal with the legendary past of Denmark, and are often the sole source for episodes from that legendary past. Saxo draws on sagas, he translates old Danish poems into Latin verse, he makes frequent mentions of runes. After the first 9 books, the legend becomes mixed more with the historical, covering the period from the middle of the 10th to the late 12th century. 

Today, it is above all the legends which move people to consult Saxo. And some of these legends have spread out from Saxo's accounts into the wider world long before our own time. In book 3 there appears a Prince Amleth of Denmark, the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the 10th book there is an archer, Toko, who a few centuries later had become William Tell, the national hero of Switzerland.

Saxo himself has become something of a hero in Denmark, but for a long time after his own life, he was little known and little read. No complete manuscripts of the Gesta Danorum are extant. The first edition of the history was printed in Paris in 1514, from a manuscript which has since been lost. A critical edition appeared already in 1644, by Stephanus Johannes Stephanius. Several other critical editions have followed since then. In 2015 a critical edition by Karsten Friis-Jensen, with a facing-page English translation by Peter Fisher, was published in the Oxford Medieval Texts series in 2015. Friis-Jensen's Latin text had previously appeared with a Danish translation by Peter Zeeburg, published in 2005.