The ‘History of the Danes’ of Saxo Grammaticus

Summary

Not a great deal is known about Saxo Grammaticus, who seems to have been actively working on his history from about 1185 to 1208: the term Grammaticus means ‘man of letters’, and was applied to a ‘certain Zealander by birth, named Saxo’ by a fifteenth-century editor of his work. Saxo himself, however, tells us in the preface to his Gesta Danorum that he wrote his history at the behest of the powerful archbishop of Lund at the end of the twelfth century. He says the archbishop prevailed on ‘one of the least of his followers’ to assemble a history which would record the glories of Danish history, and chronicle the deeds of Danish warriors. The first nine books of the work are dedicated to legendary ‘prehistory’, and Saxo says that he assembled much of this material from the heroic poems of the Norse people and the antiquarian material gathered by Icelandic monks, whom he praises for their scholarship. His story of the foster-brothers who conclude a pact which will endure beyond death itself is to be found in a slightly different form in the Icelandic Egils Saga ok Ásmundar, where the Viking hero Asmund's dead foster-brother is a Tartar prince named Aran. Although the notion of a pact against death which does not have the intended outcome has similarities to William of Malmesbury's story of the Two Clerks of Nantes, the details in Saxo's horrifying account draw primarily on the funerary practices of the Scandinavian world. The burial of horse and dog with their aristocratic master (in the Egils Saga a hawk is buried in the tomb as well, to be devoured along with the other animals); the depiction of the tomb as an underground domain which living men enter at their peril; and the gruesome evocation of the dead man coming to monstrous life each night and ravening after the flesh of his companion: in such vivid details there is both consistency with saga accounts of the activities of draugar and revenants, and basis enough for the wounded Asmund's reiterated assertion, in the verses which conclude the passage, that ‘every living man fades once he is among the dead’.

The Burial of the Foster-Brothers

Book V

Meanwhile Asvith died of an illness, and was buried with his horse and dog in a cavern in the earth.