SAXO GRAMMATICUS. - Medieval Danish historiographer, b. probably in the 2nd half of the 12th century.
He was in the retinue of 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 reminiscences of Horace and Virgil lacking in the poetic parts of the work). In it he narrates history from the biblical age to 1187 A.D. (the submission of the Wends to the Danes), with the twofold purpose of inflaming the young with the account of the deeds of their fathers and of making Denmark known to the world. For the first 9 books S. draws largely on the heritage of sagas common to the Germanic world and on his own imagination; for the last books he makes use of oral tradition and of all the information he manages to gather. At the center of the work is 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 sense of the State, which blends with the loyalism toward the king innate in him. Some have wished to see in him a personal anti-ecclesiastical attitude, whereas his work merely reflects the free aristocratic attitude of the high Danish clergy at the time 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 was well received by contemporaries and posterity.
Particularly felicitous for its spiritual congeniality, even if not for its fidelity to the text, is the translation by Grundtvig (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, the most complete manuscript having been lost (a large part of the text survives in a manuscript found at Angers in 1863, now in Copenhagen; other fragments in a 14th-century manuscript, in the Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen).