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.

Reprint Volumes of and pertaining to Valerius Maximus

Valerius Maximus published, around AD 30, a work known as factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novum (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Words). A miscellaneous collection drawn from Roman history, it was intended for use in schools of rhetoric. It was immensely popular during the Middle Ages; however, modern scholars have mostly found it to be rather dull and poorly-written. I think it's quite possible that my grasp of Latin is not yet refined enough to be offended by Valerius; however, the crude patriotism of which others have complained is clear even to me. Also, Valerius does not name his sources, which is frustrating for moderns, who often pore through ancient Roman encyclopaediac works chiefly in order to find bits and pieces from the works of other authors whom they find more interesting. I gather from scholars that it can be inferred that Cicero, Trogus and Livy were among Valerius' chief sources.

I have a reprint copy of the Teubner edition of Valerius by Friedrich Kempf, the 2nd edition published in 1888, which in addition to the entirety of Valerius' lengthy work contains late-ancient summaries of it by Julius Paris, Januarius Nepotanius, and another by an unknown author, attribued, Kempf assumes erroneously, to Julius Paris. The original late-19th century Teubner editions such as this one had large, easily-readable type which extended right out to the edges of the pages; this reprint has type of about the same size, but it s much larger than the Teubner because of very large, and, to me, at least, completely unnecessary margins. Who knows, maybe some other people love the huge margins in reprints like these, and write copious notes in them.

The cover of my reprint volume has a picture of a green bicycle on a sidewalk leaning against a nondescript urban wall, which suggests that no-one at the publisher can read a bit of Latin or has the faintest idea what this book is about; on the other hand, they somehow managed to correctly print the authors' names in the nominative Latin and the editor's name in German on the cover, while the authors' names are in the genitive on the title page and the editor's name there is latinized, so who knows. Maybe they had a library card to copy from for the cover, and wouldn't even be able to find the title page.

I have another volume from the same publisher, reprinted from the third volume of an earlier edition of Valerius ("EX EDITIONE JOANNIS KAPPII," the title page says, and I won't pretend that I know whether this means that Johann Kapp prepared this volume in addition to editing Valerius in the previous volumes, or that someone else, unnamed, prepared this volume while referring to Kapp's edition, or something else.) which contains none of the primary text, but notes referring to words and phrases in all nine books, plus some passages from later authors about Valerius' life and work, plus an index, all in Latin, published in London in 1823 by Valpy. The notes on words and phrases from the nine books are sometimes references to alternate readings found in manuscripts other than the readings in Valpy's edition; but mostly they are definitions of the words or explanations of the meaning of the text. The margins in this reprint volume are perhaps a bit less huge. I must confess, I like the various and rambling nature of this thick volume of notes about Valerius. It's not entirely unlike the rambling nature of Valerius' work itself.

Once again, the author's and editor's names are given correctly in the nominative on the cover, while they appear in the genitive on the title page. The cover photograph of this volume shows windows against a black background. Windows which are not ancient, but which open onto a hilly landscape which, I suppose, could possibly be somewhere close to Rome.