Gesta Danorum

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Gesta Danorum, which translates as "Deeds of the Danes," is a sixteen-book Latin chronicle of Danish history written by a medieval scholar known as Saxo Grammaticus. It begins before recorded time, in the age of gods and giants, and pushes all the way to the late twelfth century. Buried inside its pages is the earliest known prose version of a story the world would come to know as Hamlet. What kind of mind sits down to write such a thing? Who commissioned it, and why? How did a work of this scale nearly vanish from the earth, surviving only because one Danish translator went searching door to door across his own country?

• 2. The Man and the Commission

  ›

  Saxo Grammaticus, whose Latin surname simply means "the Grammarian," wrote the entire work at the invitation of Archbishop Absalon. That relationship runs so deep through the text that Book 14, which covers Absalon's era, makes up nearly one quarter of the entire work. Absalon's importance in the book outweighs that of King Valdemar I himself.

  Saxo identifies himself on the front page of the first printed edition as a Zealander and provost of the church of Roskilde. Beyond those details, the source text is quiet about his biography. What survives is the work itself, written in prose with occasional excursions into poetry.

  The dedication in the work's preface is addressed to Archbishop Anders Sunesen, who held office after Absalon. That same preface mentions a Danish military event of 1208, which sets the earliest possible date when the work could have been finished. The last event actually narrated in Book 16 is King Canute VI subduing Pomerania under Duke Bogislaw I, which took place in 1186. Those two dates together suggest the work took shape over a long stretch, possibly decades.

• 3. How the Books Were Built

  ›

  Svend Aagesen, who wrote his own brief history of Denmark around 1186, recorded that Saxo had already decided to write about "the king-father and his sons," meaning King Sweyn Estridson. That phrase points to Books 11, 12, and 13 as an early nucleus of the project.

  Scholars believe Saxo may have started with Book 14, which covers Absalon's own era and ends precisely with Absalon's appointment to archbishop in 1178. Book 14 is so large and so focused on Absalon that some researchers think it may have originally stood alone as a separate work. Saxo may then have added Books 15 and 16 to carry the story through King Valdemar I's last years and King Canute VI's early reign.

  The first ten books, covering Norse mythology and semi-legendary kings, were likely added last. That sequencing would account for the gap of twenty-two years between the last event described in Book 16 and the 1208 date mentioned in the preface.

• 4. From Mythology to Medieval War

  ›

  Book 1 introduces a lineage stretching back to a figure named Dan, the eponymous founder of the Danish nation, along with his brother Angul, his sons Humble and Lother, and his grandson Skiold. Saxo's source material for these early figures is largely his own invention, drawing some inspiration from ancient Greek epics rather than from other Norse primary works.

  The adventures of Hading, son of the king Gram and a Finnish princess named Signe, anchor much of the first book. Hading loses Denmark to the Swedes, then fights to reclaim it with the help of giants and Odin, and the book closes with his suicide after he hears of his closest friend's death.

  Books 2 through 9 move through a gallery of legendary kings, shieldmaidens, and heroes, including Helge and Rolf Krake, the hero Starkad, and Ragnar Lothbrok, whose sons Saxo says governed territory stretching from Scotland to Scythia. Book 5 contains a striking theological aside: Saxo states that it was during the reign of King Frotho III that Jesus came to earth, and that an uninterrupted peace spread across the world during that reign.

  Books 10 through 16 then shift register entirely. Book 14 holds what the source calls a unique description of the pagan temple on the island of Rügen. The final three books, covering Danish conquests along the south shore of the Baltic Sea and wars against Slavic peoples, are treated by historians as the most valuable surviving record for the history of the Polabian Slavs, the Pomeranians, and Slavic paganism.

• 5. A Record Hiding in Plain Sight

  ›

  By the early sixteenth century, the original manuscripts were nearly gone. What most readers knew of Saxo's work came from a summary written around 1342 called Compendium Saxonis, found inside a document known as Chronica Jutensis. It is actually in that summary, not in Saxo's own pages, where the title Gesta Danorum first appears. The title Saxo himself gave the work has never been recovered.

  In the years 1510 to 1512, a Danish translator named Christiern Pedersen, working from Paris, mounted a search across Denmark for a surviving copy. He eventually found one in the collection of Archbishop Birger Gunnersen of Lund, in Skåne, a region then still part of Denmark though it is now Swedish territory. Gunnersen lent it willingly.

  With a printer named Jodocus Badius, Pedersen prepared the text for publication. On the 15th of March 1514, Badius published the first complete printed edition in Paris under the title Danorum Regum heroumque Historiae, meaning "History of the Kings and Heroes of the Danes." The colophon records the date in Latin as the Ides of March, 1514. All translations and editions that exist today trace back to that single Paris printing.

  Of the original manuscripts themselves, only four fragments survived. The largest is the Angers Fragment, the only one confirmed to be in Saxo's own handwriting. The other three fragments, the Lassen, Kall-Rasmussen, and Plesner Fragments, are copies dating from around 1275. All four are held today in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen.

• 6. Amleth, Before Hamlet

  ›

  Books 3 and 4 of Gesta Danorum contain a story that William Shakespeare would retell centuries later as Hamlet. In Saxo's telling, two brothers named Orvendil and Fengi receive joint rule over Jutland from King Rorik Slyngebond. Orvendil marries the king's daughter Geruth, and their only child is Amleth.

  Fengi, resentful of his brother's marriage and hungry for sole power, murders Orvendil. After a brief period of mourning, he marries Geruth and declares himself sole ruler. Amleth, fearing his uncle, pretends to be a fool. His uncle sends him to Britain to be killed, but Amleth secretly rewrites the death warrant and instead marries the daughter of the British king.

  When Amleth returns to Denmark and kills Fengi, he does not die. He survives, claims the throne of Jutland, and then travels back to Britain, where his father-in-law assigns him the impossible task of wooing the Scottish queen Hermutrude, a woman famous for murdering all her suitors. Hermutrude refuses the assignment and marries Amleth instead. Amleth is eventually killed by a rival Danish king named Wiglek, who then takes Hermutrude as his own wife.

  The name Hamlet is an anagram of Amleth, though the source notes it is not clear whether Shakespeare made that transposition deliberately. The structural difference that stands out most between the two versions is the ending: where Shakespeare's prince dies moments after killing his uncle, Saxo's Amleth goes on to rule, travel, and fight across several more books before meeting his fate.

• 7. Reach Beyond Denmark

  ›

  Gesta Danorum is the most ambitious literary project undertaken in medieval Denmark, but its reach extends far outside Danish borders. The work is also among the oldest known written sources on the histories of Estonia and Latvia, a fact that gives it significance well beyond Scandinavian studies.

  From a purely European perspective, the text offers a Scandinavian viewpoint on the affairs of the High Middle Ages that sits alongside, rather than beneath, the accounts left by historians from Western and Southern Europe. Two early Danish translations, one attempted by Christiern Pedersen around 1540 and another by Jon Tursons around 1555, were never published and are now lost entirely. Modern translations in English, Russian, French, German, and Swedish, including Daniel Palmqvist's 2021 Swedish translation of the first nine books, now bring the work to readers who cannot read medieval Latin.