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The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together." The statement is all the more significant because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the Pictish kings.
Saxo Grammaticus, or "The Lettered", one of the notable historians of the Middle Ages, may fairly be called not only the earliest chronicler of Denmark, but her earliest writer. In the latter half of the twelfth century, when Iceland was in the flush of literary production, Denmark lingered behind. No literature in her vernacular, save a few Runic inscriptions, has survived.
Saxo Grammaticus, certainly a competent authority, and Snorry Sturleson, the first to translate the Edda into Latin, who is still considered one of the greatest antiquarians of the nation both of whom lived in the times we speak of, when this religious system still flourished or was fresh in the minds of all solved the question ages ago, and demonstrated beforehand the falsehood of those future theories by stating with old-time simplicity that the abominable stories of the Edda and the sagas were founded on real facts in the previous history of those nations, and were consequently never intended by the writers as imaginative myths, representing, under a figurative and repulsive exterior, some semblance of a spiritual and refined doctrine.
Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time.
The Scholasticus, who took the place of the ancient Grammaticus, was not an investigator, but merely an interpreter. On the one side the books of the sacred Scriptures as interpreted by the Fathers were the rule of faith; on the other side as the guide of reason stood the works of the Philosopher, as Aristotle was called in the Middle Ages.
That is all we need say about King Knud, but it must be said of Bishop Absolon that he was a wise patron of knightly arts and historical learning and encouraged the great scholar Saxo Grammaticus to write his famous "History of Denmark," in which were gathered all the old Danish tales that could be learned from the skalds and poets and found in the monasteries of the age.
27. -Litterator- and -grammaticus- are related nearly as elementary teacher and teacher of languages with us; the latter designation belonged by earlier usage only to the teacher of Greek, not to a teacher of the mother-tongue. -Litteratus- is more recent, and denotes not a schoolmaster but a man of culture.
But there are no kennings of the same sort in the poem, and the line would have no meaning. If it refers to the mistletoe, as most commentators agree, it merely shows that the poet was ignorant of the nature of the plant, which would be in favour of its antiquity, rather than the reverse. Saxo Grammaticus.
We shall begin with the annual festivals of fire and shall reserve the pulling of the mistletoe for consideration later on. Compare pp. 8, 34, 264. Balder's story is told in a professedly historical form by the old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in his third book. See below, p. 103. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i.
Saxo Grammaticus and Theodoric the monk, in the thirteenth century, adopted the Latin language in their chronicles of Denmark and Norway, and from that time it usurped the place of the native tongue among the educated. In the sixteenth century the spirit of the Reformation began to exert an influence, and the Bible was translated into the popular tongue.
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