Gesta Danorum

Written around 1200 by the Danish cleric Saxo Grammaticus for Archbishop Absalon, Gesta Danorum ('Deeds of the Danes') runs from legendary founder-kings to Saxo's own day. Its first nine books are a parallel universe of Norse legend: the gods appear as cunning sorcerer-kings of Byzantine 'Byzantium' (Asgard euhemerised), and the stories differ sharply from the Icelandic versions — evidence that the myths lived in many shapes.

Saxo's Baldr is no gentle victim but a lustful demigod warring with the human hero Høtherus over a princess, killed with a special sword rather than mistletoe. His Odin (Othinus) is exiled by the other gods for disgraceful sorcery; his Utgarthilocus lies chained in a stinking cavern, visited by Danish adventurers — Útgarða-Loki and bound Loki fused into one. And his tale of Amleth, the prince who feigns madness to avenge his father, travelled through a French retelling to London, where Shakespeare made it Hamlet.

Read against Snorri, Saxo is the control experiment: where the two agree, something old is showing; where they diverge, the tradition's variety is showing. Norse mythology was never one canon — Saxo is the proof.

Who was Saxo Grammaticus?

Almost everything known about Saxo comes from his own book and a few contemporary mentions. He was a Danish cleric — probably a secretary or canon in the circle of Absalon, the warrior-archbishop of Lund who dominated Danish politics in the late twelfth century and who, Saxo tells us, commissioned the work. The nickname Grammaticus, "the lettered" or "the learned," was attached to him later, in tribute to his extraordinary Latin: he wrote not in the plain church Latin of his era but in an ornate, deliberately classicizing style modelled on Roman "silver age" authors, complete with the flourish of recasting Norse verse into classical Latin metres. The book was completed in the early thirteenth century — around 1200 for its core, with the preface among the last parts written — and its sixteen books carry Danish history from the legendary founder Dan down to 1185.

The learned Latin was a statement of intent: Denmark, Saxo's preface insists, deserves a monumental national history like Rome's, and its ancient deeds — preserved, he notes, in old songs, in stones carved with verse, and in the lore of the Icelanders, whom he credits as tireless collectors of tradition — were worthy of the grandest dress available.

A parallel universe of Norse myth

Books I–IX are where mythology lives, and they read like transmissions from an alternate timeline. Saxo, like Snorri, euhemerizes: his gods are not gods but cunning magicians who ruled at "Byzantium" and gulled the peoples of the North into worship — Asgard relocated to the most impressive city a medieval author could name. But where Snorri's euhemerism is a thin cover over lovingly told myth, Saxo's is hostile: a Christian moralist's exposure of fraudulent sorcerer-kings. The result is a body of story that overlaps the Icelandic corpus while contradicting it constantly.

His Balderus is the showpiece. In the Icelandic tradition, Baldr is the shining innocent whose death by mistletoe is the mythology's great grief. Saxo's Balderus is a lustful, aggressive demigod who spies on the maiden Nanna bathing and wars for her against his human rival Høtherus (the Icelandic Höðr, the blind brother-slayer, here a gifted hero). The war sprawls across battles with gods on the field; Balderus can be harmed by no ordinary weapon, so Høtherus wins a special sword from a wood-spirit and deals him a lingering, mortal wound. No mistletoe, no Loki, no weeping world — and yet recognizably the same underlying story-stuff: an invulnerable Baldr, a killer named Höðr, a death that summons vengeance, for in both traditions Odin begets an avenger (Saxo's Bous; the Icelandic Váli) to destroy the slayer.

Saxo's Othinus is equally unsparing: a king of tricks who is exiled by his fellow "gods" when his degrading behavior — including the shape-changing, cross-dressing seductions by which he begets his avenger — disgraces the reputation on which their divinity trades. His Thoro (Thor) swings a club rather than a hammer. And in Book VIII, Danish adventurers led by Thorkillus sail beyond the edge of the world to a stinking, snake-infested cavern where the giant Utgarthilocus lies bound in monstrous chains — the Icelandic tradition's illusionist Útgarða-Loki and the bound, punished Loki fused into a single chained devil-figure, worshipped, Saxo sniffs, by fools.

Amleth, and the road to Hamlet

Books III–IV contain Saxo's most consequential story: Amleth, prince of Jutland, whose father is murdered by a jealous brother who then marries the widow. Amleth feigns witless madness to survive, speaks in riddles that are all secretly true, evades the tests set for him (including a spy hidden in his mother's chamber, whom he kills), is shipped to Britain with a treacherous letter he rewrites en route, and returns to burn the hall and take his revenge. The tale passed into French in Belleforest's Histoires tragiques in the sixteenth century, and from there — probably via a lost English play scholars call the Ur-Hamlet — to Shakespeare. Everything structural in Hamlet is already in Saxo except the hesitation: Amleth does not agonize; he plans, waits, and executes. The distance between the two princes is a fair measure of the distance between saga ethics and the modern soul.

The control experiment

For the study of Norse mythology, Saxo's value is exactly his disagreement with the Icelanders. He wrote in Denmark around the same time Snorri wrote in Iceland, drawing on partly different streams of tradition — Danish, and by his own account Icelandic informants too. So the comparison works like a controlled experiment. Where Saxo and Snorri independently agree — an invulnerable Baldr killed through Höðr, Odin's exile and sorcery, a bound giant awaiting release, the hostage-history of the Vanir gods — the shared material is likely old, predating both authors. Where they diverge wildly — mistletoe versus magic sword, victim Baldr versus warlord Baldr — we are seeing what oral tradition actually was: not a canon but a living braid of regional variants. Saxo is the standing proof that "the" Norse myth of anything is a modern convenience.

How reliable is it?

As history, the legendary books are not reliable at all and do not pretend to modern standards; as evidence for mythology, they are precious but heavily filtered. Saxo was a hostile witness — a churchman debunking the old gods, moralizing freely, and dressing everything in classical costume (Latin metres for Norse verse, Roman gods' names sometimes shadowing Norse ones). He rationalized magic, relocated geography, and had political motives: glorifying Denmark and Absalon's church. The transmission is also fragile: no complete medieval manuscript survives. The text rests on a handful of fragments — most famously the Angers Fragment, possibly in Saxo's own working hand — and otherwise on the first printed edition, produced in Paris in 1514 by Christiern Pedersen from a manuscript since lost. Everything must be read through those filters. Read with them in mind, Books I–IX remain one of the two great narrative windows onto Norse legend, and the only large one written outside Iceland.

Reading it today

The standard English version of the legendary books is Peter Fisher's translation (edited with commentary by Hilda Ellis Davidson); a complete modern Latin-English edition by Karsten Friis-Jensen with Fisher's translation covers all sixteen books. Oliver Elton's Victorian translation of Books I–IX is long out of copyright and easy to find. Start with Books I–IX for the myths and with Books III–IV for Amleth; the ornate style takes a few pages to acclimatize to, and then becomes part of the pleasure.