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"Saxo Grammaticus' account of the Danish prince Amleth would become Shakespeare's Hamlet."
I should specify that I've only read Saxo's first nine books, as those are all that are included in the Brewer edition I have, translated by Peter Fisher with extensive commentary by Hilda Ellis Davidson. Supposedly they worked or were working on a full version having all sixteen books. Apparently the later books deal with what was for Saxo fairly contemporary Danish history, while the first nine books deal with material that could almost be called more folklore or legend than history.
Saxo doesn't give any dates, for instance. He constructs an elaborate genealogy of legendary Danish kings, starting with Dan, who supposedly gave the Danes their name, up through about fifty-three generations (though there is a break in the lineage about halfway through) to Gorm III, whose son Harald IV (Bluetooth) is mentioned, and who would firmly bring in Christianity around 960 AD.
Before that, though, the Danes as told by Saxo don't seem overly concerned about religion in general, except that Odin (who Saxo is careful to emphasize must have been a human "wizard" rather than a god) would every now and then come along and grant a king a blessing, or change the course of a battle. Thor is in there a bit too, early on, smashing things pretty good. Taken all in all the History is a rip-roaring account of battles, adventures, and kings getting it on with whoever they pleased.
Saxo is at pains to make it sound like good solid history but much of what he tells is so clearly storybook in fashion that someone, in many cases Saxo himself, must have made most of it up--like the journey of the explorer Thorkil to consult (the god) Utgard-Loki, in the course of which he has to overcome storms, starvation, giants, tempting liaisons with sexy daughters of giants, spectres, various monstrous cave-dwellers, cursed treasures, and the stench of the massive imprisoned god himself. Historical? Nah. But it makes for a darn fine read. My favorite character is Starkather (possibly a giant), a champion who was granted a threefold lifespan by Odin, but he seems to have aged at the normal rate up until pretty old age, so he lived for a century or more as a really cranky old cuss who could still whip any young sissy who came along.
Swedes and Norwegians figure largely in Saxo's picture, mostly as hapless subjects of Danish might. In Saxo's view the ancient Danes pretty much kicked everyone's ass, really, and were only held up by wars amongst their own champions, unruly appetites of their rulers, or the fickle allegiances of the Danish people. Saxo seems to figure that Denmark used to be much more powerful and populous than it was in his day, and I suppose this helps him explain how the legendary Danes managed to lord it over everyone else (especially the Saxons and the Slavs, who Saxo seems to detest in particular, probably because they figured in events current with his own time, according to Hilda's commentary).
Despite all the sex and violence going on, Saxo's style can be fairly dry at times. A compulsive Latinist, he enjoyed nothing more than slipping in proverb after proverb to prove his points, and when he doesn't have a handy proverb he will tend to pile on righteous phrases until the reader must surrender to his point under the weight of his words. For instance, instead of just saying that the Danish king Regner was shocked to lose a battle to a small group of lightly-armed, ski-shod Finns, Saxo gives us the following edifying speech:
"You can imagine how aghast Regner was at being helpless to control his own fate; the vanquisher of the Holy Roman Empire at the height of his power saw himself dragged into utter disaster by an uncouth, defenceless fighting-force. So it was that the man who had superbly pulverized the glittering splendour of the imperial armies, the renowned troops of that most magnificent and clement of leaders, now yielded to a band of peasants and their miserable, flimsy equipment. He whose warrior glory could not be dimmed by the strength of the most courageous nation was unable to withstand a tiny bunch of contemptible men."
And that's actually a pretty minor example, but I can't seem to find one of the many more extensive ones at the moment.
As far as scholarship goes, Saxo seems to attract most attention for his extensive account of the Danish prince Amleth, whose story would eventually metamorphosize (is that a word? ah well) into Shakespeare's Hamlet (see entry 20). Amleth does the whole pretending to be crazy to kill his uncle and avenge his father thing, and although the details are pretty different than the story of Hamlet, it's obvious that this is where Hamlet came from and thus makes for a fascinating read for the Hamlet buff.
In the version I have, the huge amount of commentary (165 pages for 300 pages of Saxo) is presented as end notes rather than side-by-side with the main text, which means you have to keep two places in once as you read if you want to follow the commentary. And it's doubly frustrating because Hilda Ellis cannot resist commenting on every single parallel in classical or Scandinavian (including all the various Sagas, and Beowulf (see entry 32) literature that she can think of, and even though a lot of her linkages appear to be wild speculation based on what is probably coincidence, she still has to list them all out in the end notes. He also has to annotate pretty much every proverb used by Saxo with a modern Scandinavian equivalent. Thanks for that, Hilda, that's so very useful. There are good things to read in the commentary, but much of a page-flipping could have been minimized. |
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