The History of the Danes

At last the whole of Saxo’s historical work, covering the reigns of Danish kings from well before the birth of Christ to AD 1187, is presented to English readers in a convincing Latin text with an English version on facing pages. The difficulty with the Latin is that the earliest complete version is that published in Paris in 1514, about 300 years after the earliest MS was concluded, and set up in type with many questionable readings and emendations. The survival of a few pages of earlier MSS, and the application of a few more centuries of textual criticism, lay behind the publication in 1931 of Olrik and Raeder’s sumptuous edition, which appeared to be the last word in recreating the thirteenth-century original. Not for long. By 1950 it was clear that more work needed to be done, and it was eventually accomplished by the late Karsten Friis Jensen with such meticulous scholarship that it is unlikely to be superseded in the foreseeable future. His text appeared in two volumes in 2005, with Zeeberg’s Danish translation; Peter Fisher’s translation of books 1–9 came out with Ellis Davidson’s edition of 1979; and an amateurish English version of the remaining books in BAR International Series 84, 1980. Thus the entirely new component of the present edition is Fisher’s translation of books 10–16; with footnotes, endnotes and introduction to the whole. The convenience of having all these elements combined justifies the asking price of £150, because the Gesta, although composed over a period of at least twenty years (not in its present order and with striking variation of styles and scope), is held together by insistent and recurrent author’s opinions, as well as repeated themes and patterns of thought easier to appreciate when printed together. It seems very likely that the material about the most recent times was composed in the immediate aftermath of the wars against the Wends which ended in 1185; the pre-Christian or ancient history not until Saxo’s original patron, Archbishop Absalon, was dead, and his original commission to record the reigns of kings after 1047 had lapsed. Then he was free to create a Danish antiquity as a series of anticipations of the splendours and miseries of modern times, the gesta of unbaptised but often exemplary ancestors in mortal combat with gods, demons, foreigners and themselves. By applying Roman standards of civic virtue and public conduct, he recycled a mass of old Nordic material to serve as a warning and encouragement to his contemporaries, the recent victors in a struggle to dominate the Baltic and escape the embrace of the Roman emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. Among the many peculiarities of the work—such as the persistent recourse to Silver Age Latin, the rarity of allusions to the Vulgate bible, the frequent use of Valerius Maximus as a model and the avoidance of normal Middle Latin terms—the most striking is the attention given to gods, wizards, apparitions, witches and warlocks excluded from their narratives by most serious medieval historians as opposed to entertainers. Heathenism had been defeated in Denmark for about 200 years, and was in no obvious need of attention, but the Danish kings and clergy had been occupied with crusading against the pagan Wends for much of the twelfth century, (or so they claimed) and tales of how their forebears had endured this satanic servitude were of interest; especially if it could be shown that wit, wisdom and culture had flourished long before the Christian era. Friis Jensen argues that the aim was to match Roman antiquity not merely in examples of valour, but of verse, hence the fifty poems in twenty-four metres which appear in the first eight prosimetrical books. Trumping Old Rome defied the New Rome of the Hohenstaufen, as did the recital of previous Danish empire including the entire North from the Atlantic to Russia

Art · Criticism · Danish · Linguistics · Literature · Scholarship · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Law · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy