Chronicle
Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes
Gesta Danorum
Saxo Grammaticus · 1208
Synopsis
The history of the Danes from their origins. The first half tells of the pagan times: Dan, who gives the country its name, the Viking king Hadding helped by the giants and by Odin, the death of the god Balder at the hands of Höd, the old warrior Starkad, who was granted the lives of three men, and Amleth, prince of Jutland, who feigns idiocy before his uncle, the murderer of his father and now the husband of his mother, and whom this uncle sends to Britain to have him killed there. The second half follows the historical kings, the conversion of the country and the wars against the Slavs down to 1185.
Context
Absalon commissioned the work so that the kingdom might have, like other nations, a written history. Begun before 1190, it was completed shortly after 1208 and dedicated to the archbishop's successor and to King Valdemar II. The author imitates the Latin of the Silver Age, Valerius Maximus above all, and inserts into the legendary part poems that he claims to have translated from old Danish songs. In the fourteenth century, an abridgement in plain Latin, more widely read than the original, gradually supplanted it, and the complete text is known only through the edition of Christiern Pedersen, printed in Paris in 1514. Shakespeare knew the story of Amleth only through Belleforest's French version (1570). Together with Snorri's Edda, it is a major source on the myths of the North, of which it gives different versions, as for the death of Balder.
Who it is for
Only the first nine books, the legendary ones, exist in French; the rest, a chronicle of the kings of the twelfth century, can be read in English. Very ornate Latin, best read in translation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the greatest literary monument of medieval Denmark and one of the high points of its literature; Erasmus was already praising its style in 1528.
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