Saxo Grammaticus

Óðinn is the Norse deity who appears most frequently throughout the first nine books of Gesta Danorum. His name is variously rendered as Othinus, Othynus and Othin ,  and readers familiar with the Icelandic corpus will instantly recognize his many characteristics: The one-eyed old man appearing in many guises and under many names, riding a special horse, consulting oracles, granting courage, poetic ability and invulnerability to his chosen champions, ever anxious to have the spirits of the fallen dedicated to him etc., ie. the  Óðinn from poetry and legendary sagas.  Óðinn/ Othinus appearing under strange names is familiar to us - but was he familiar to Saxo? Axel Olrik expressed serious doubt about the cleric's ability to recognize the deity in his source material: "We recognize Odin easily enough; even the names under which he appears do not serve to hide him from us, but to reveal to us his true nature [...] this is not the case for Saxo; only a few times does he know ...

Free download here           This small chronicle, by Marcus Lorenzen called "The Legendary Chronicle in Stockholm" because it only contains            legends, is found in Cod. Holm. K 46. The chronicle is a rather clumsy adaptation of earlier texts such as Annales           Ryenses and ultimately Gesta Danorum, with the author frequently misunderstanding his sources or even forgetting           to include material. The chronicle was dated by Peter Skautrup to around 1460, and was most likely authored           by the Franciscan monk Olavus Jacobi in Næstved. Text sample:           Ten tredyæ oc føryætyuennæ vor ten sammæ Halden, som draph koningh Eryk af Suørygæ oc en kempæ aff Suerighæ,           som hed Syuald, oc hans broder met hannum at en synnum, oc han vor sa sterk, ...

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...