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Stories are told in the Icelandic sagas of the way such persons were entrapped and put to death by the chiefs they served when they became too troublesome. It is the same "motif" as Guy of Warwick and the Saracen lady, and one of the regular Giant and Knight stories. Beside men-warriors there were "women-warriors" in the North, as Saxo explains.
a. Scef Heimdal Rig. b. Sciold Borgar Jarl. c. Gram Halfdan Koming. Chief among the mythic tales that concern Saxo are the various portions of the Swipdag-Myth, which Dr. Rydberg has been able to complete with much success. They may be resumed briefly as follows:
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.
For it was he who, as archbishop of the North, "strictly and earnestly" charged his friend and clerk Saxo to gather the Danish chronicles while yet it was time, because, says Saxo, in the preface of his monumental work, "he could no longer abide that his fatherland, which he always honored and magnified with especial zeal, should be without a record of the great deeds of the fathers."
Heads seem to have been taken in some cases, but not as a regular Teutonic usage, and the practice, from its being attributed to ghosts and aliens, must have already been considered savage by Saxo, and probably by his informants and authorities.
GODS AND GODDESSES. The gods spring, according to Saxo's belief, from a race of sorcerers, some of whom rose to pre-eminence and expelled and crushed the rest, ending the "wizard-age", as the wizards had ended the monster or "giant-age". That they were identic with the classic gods he is inclined to believe, but his difficulty is that in the week-days we have Jove : Thor; Mercury : Woden; whereas it is perfectly well known that Mercury is Jove's son, and also that Woden is the father of Thor a comic "embarras". That the persians the heathens worshipped as gods existed, and that they were men and women false and powerful, Saxo plainly believes.
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 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.
To which the dead Helgi replies: "Nothing is to be regarded as unexpected, since thou, living, a king's daughter, sleepest in a grave-mound, in the arms of a corpse." Saxo Grammaticus tells us a grimly tale. Asmund and Asvid, brothers in arms, had vowed not to be separated in death. It fell out that Asvid died, and was buried along with his horse and dog in a cairn.
Ingjald, whom he has in his story about Hrolf Kraki, he also retained, but in a different relationship from that in his second book. It will be observed that Saxo merely shifted the name Halfdan from father to son, and that Harald, almost a conventional name, he employed twice. Finally, he introduced a strange person, Olaf, about whom, he says, nothing, practically, was known.
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