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Updated: June 1, 2025
Saxo, it is true, makes Hild's father a Jute, instead of her lover, and Snorri apparently agrees with him in making Hedin Norwegian; but in the Gudrun Hettel is Frisian or Jutish. The Anglo-Saxon and German agree on another point where both differ from the Norse.
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.
Writing about the end of the twelfth century, the old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus tells the story of Balder in a form which professes to be historical. According to him, Balder and Hother were rival suitors for the hand of Nanna, daughter of Gewar, King of Norway. Now Balder was a demigod and common steel could not wound his sacred body.
That, in the rímur, the men are said to leave the hall in the daytime, instead of at night, is a consequence of the substitution of the wolf for the troll-dragon; a wolf is usually hunted in the daytime. It might be surmised that their going out secretly is in imitation of the story as Saxo knew it. But this is not the case; Saxo does not say that Bjarki and Hjalti went out secretly.
"All Denmark grieved for him," says a German writer of that day, "and commended his soul to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, for that in his lifetime he had led many who were enemies to peace and concord." In his old cathedral, in Roskilde town, lies Saxo, according to tradition under an unmarked stone. When he went to rest his friend and master had slept five years.
But what caused this whole emigration? The statement of Livy, that the Gauls were compelled by famine to leave their country, is quite in keeping with the nature of all traditions about migrations, such as we find them in Saxo Grammaticus, in Paul Warnefried from the sagas of the Swedes, in the Tyrrhenian traditions of Lydia, and others.
It was a time, says Saxo, in which "he must be of stout heart and strong head who dared aspire to Denmark's crown. For in less than a hundred years more than sixteen of her kings and their kin were either slain without cause by their own subjects, or otherwise met a sudden death."
Half his long and stirring life he lived on the seas, seeking them there. Saxo mentions, in speaking of his return from one of his cruises, that he had then been nine months on shipboard.
"Burglary". The crafty discovery of the robber of the treasury by Hadding is a variant of the world-old Rhampsinitos tale, but less elaborate, possibly abridged and cut down by Saxo, and reduced to a mere moral example in favour of the goldenness of silence and the danger of letting the tongue feed the gallows.
Hamlet, Amleth I find, is really a mythic personage; and his Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear, and the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it a Danish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is a twig of the world-tree that has grown, I think; by nature or accident that one has grown!
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