SAXO GRAMMATICUS. – Medieval Danish historiographer, born probably in the second half of the twelfth century.
He followed Bishop Absalon, who urged him to write the monumental history of Denmark (Gesta Danorum); he completed it in 16 volumes between 1216 and 1219, in a Latin modeled on that of Valerius Maximus, Justin, and Curtius Rufus (nor are Horatian and Virgilian reminiscences lacking in the poetic sections of the work). He recounts the history from the biblical age to A.D. 1187 (the subjugation of the Wends by the Danes), with the dual purpose of inflaming the young through the account of their fathers’ exploits and of making Denmark known to the world. For the first 9 books S. draws extensively on the body of sagas common to the Germanic world and on his own imagination; for the later books he makes use of oral tradition and of all the information he is able to gather. At the center of the work stands the figure of Absalon, Viking and bishop, warrior and servant of the Lord; S. is more a narrator than a historian in the modern sense of the word; Roman, or at least classical, is his conception of the state, which merges with the loyalty to the king innate in him. A personal anti-ecclesiastical attitude has been attributed to him; instead, his work merely reflects the free aristocratic outlook of the high Danish clergy in the age of Valdemar, when one could “just as well honor God by fighting the enemies of the faith as by attending to divine service.” The work enjoyed success among contemporaries and posterity.
Particularly successful in spiritual affinity, though not in fidelity to the text, was Grundtvig’s translation (1783–1872); the first translation into Danish, by A. S. Vedel, dates from 1575. All editions derive from the editio princeps, published in Paris in 1514 by Christiern Pedersen, since the most complete manuscript has been lost (a large part of the text is preserved in a manuscript found at Angers in 1863, now in Copenhagen; other fragments are found in a fourteenth-century manuscript at the Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen).