Saxo Grammaticus

Saxo's story of Gram consists mostly of three poetic fragments loosely bound together (Olrik 1894, 12). The poem survives in Saxo's own hand in the Angers Fragment . Olrik characterized this poem as a "skændesamtale", literally "quarrel dialogue", ie. the Old Norse poetic genre senna or flyting. According to Carol Clover, this genre "consists of an exchange of verbal provocations between hostile speakers in a predictable setting. The boasts and insults are traditional, and their arrangement and rhetorical form is highly stylized". Joseph Harris considers the senna to consist of a single pattern: "a preliminary, comprising an Identification (in the form of a question and answer) together with a Characterization (which may be insulting, factual, or even laudatory) and then a central exchange, consisting of either Accusation and Denial, Threat and Counterthreat, or Challenge and Reply or a combination […] No standard pattern emerges for the endi

"After his victory Frothi desired to re-establish peace throughout his peoples; to ensure that each individual’s personal property should be safe from thievish marauders and to maintain quiet in his realms now the war was over, he fixed one bracelet to the rock they call Frodefjeld and another in the Vik province; he had had a meeting with the Norwegians, at which he warned that it would be necessary to punish all the chieftains of the area if these treasures were filched, for they were intended to serve as a test of the honest conduct he had imposed. It was to the utmost peril of their leaders that this unguarded gold was set up at the very places where roads met, an easily snatched prize to stimulate greedy minds and therefore a fine temptation to the avaricious."  

In Gesta Danorum , the giants are defined primarily by their physique. It is especially their size that Saxo emphasizes again and again. In the first mythical excursus, it is the magnitudo of the giants that characterizes them, and likewise it is magnitudo that characterizes the giantess Harthgrepa. The giant whom Fridleuus mutilates almost reaches the sky, Starkatherus' giant heritage showed itself in the size of his body, the giantess whom Syritha and Otharus meet is likewise immanis , and the two fire-guarding giants whom Thorkillus meets are also described as unusually large. The size of the giants is also reflected in Saxo's terminology. There is much confusion between the categories jǫtnar , trǫll , risar and þursar etc. in the legendary sagas. Possibly one can read mutually divergent meanings into the terms to a lesser extent, but in the legendary sagas they are more or less synonymous. The situation is somewhat more straightforward in Gesta Danorum : Saxo predominantl