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Saxo's version is in the fifth book of his History. According to Bragi, Hild has a necklace, which has caused comparison of this story with that of the Greek Eriphyle. Irish legendary history describes a similar battle in which the slain revive each night and renew the fight daily, as occurring in the wanderings of the Tuatha De Danann before they reached Ireland.
The idea of dismembered bodies of children is indeed absent; but the whole passage in Meriadoc is so suggestive of what we find in Saxo, even to the hiding of a dog, whose name is given, in an "ilex," that it would be remarkable if there was no connection between Saxo's story and Meriadoc.
The paralleling of the two lines of kings also furnishes the key to the explanation of how the different names and a different setting for the Hroar-Helgi story, from those found in other versions, got into Saxo's version.
The notice, however, helps us approximately towards Saxo's birth-year. His grandfather, if he fought for Waldemar, who began to reign in 1157, can hardly have been born before 1100, nor can Saxo himself have been born before 1145 or 1150.
But when Hjalti is made to drink the blood of the wolf, it seems to be another instance of the author's keeping in mind the version of the story in the Hrólfssaga, where Hjalti drinks the blood of the dragon. It is not necessary to go to Saxo's version for this. Why did they go out of the hall so that the king's men did not know of it? No reason is assigned; the deed is unmotivated.
In Saxo's account of Bjarki, Boer thinks that the dragon has been stripped of its wings and changed to a bear. Finnur Jónsson regards the story in the Hrólfssaga of Bjarki's slaying the winged monster as a reflection, though a feeble one, of the Grendel story in Beowulf.
In such passages as I have examined it is vigorous, but very free, and more like a paraphrase than a translation, Saxo's verses being put into loose prose. Yet it has had a long life, having been modified by Vedel's grandson, John Laverentzen, in 1715, and reissued in 1851. The present version has been much helped by the translation of Seier Schousbolle, published at Copenhagen in 1752.
Bjarki having acquired a reputed bear-ancestry from the fictitious story about Siward, the saga consistently takes this into account and substitutes a dragon, also acquired from the story about Siward, for the bear, which, in Saxo's version, is the kind of animal that Bjarki slays.
Vigffisson be right the conqueror of Varus, or into the story of Beowulf, whose real engagements were with sea-monsters, not fiery dragons. They wax wonderfully, have to be fed a whole ox a day, and proceed to poison and waste the countryside. The courtiers hide "like frightened little girls", and the king betakes him to a "narrow shelter", an euphemism evidently of Saxo's, for the scene is comic.
The version of the Hroar-Helgi story which we find in the Skjọldungasaga and the Bjarkarímur is the result of an attempt to harmonize conflicting traditions emanating from events about which we now find the first account in Beowulf and Widsith, as is also Saxo's treatment of the same matter in his sixth and seventh books.
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