The Danish History, Books I-IX | Page 6

MS. material, therefore, covers but a
little of Saxo's work, which was practically saved for Europe by the
perseverance and fervour for culture of a single man, Bishop Urne.

SAXO AS A WRITER.
Saxo's countrymen have praised without stint his remarkable style, for
he has a style. It is often very bad; but he writes, he is not in vain called
Grammaticus, the man of letters. His style is not merely remarkable
considering its author's difficulties; it is capable at need of pungency
and of high expressiveness. His Latin is not that of the Golden Age, but
neither is it the common Latin of the Middle Ages. There are traces of
his having read Virgil and Cicero. But two writers in particular left
their mark on him. The first and most influential is Valerius Maximus,

the mannered author of the "Memorabilia", who lived in the first half of
the first century, and was much relished in the Middle Ages. From him
Saxo borrowed a multitude of phrases, sometimes apt but often crabbed
and deformed, as well as an exemplary and homiletic turn of narrative.
Other idioms, and perhaps the practice of interspersing verses amid
prose (though this also was a twelfth century Icelandic practice), Saxo
found in a fifth-century writer, Martianus Capella, the pedantic author
of the "De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii" Such models may have
saved him from a base mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy
of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style. These
are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a
garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity,
his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy to
translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some
inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful
vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and the excellent variety of his
images"; but also of his feeling for grouping, his barbaric sense of
colour, and his stateliness. For he moves with resource and strength
both in prose and verse, and is often only hindered by his own wealth.
With no kind of critical tradition to chasten him, his force is often
misguided and his work shapeless; but he stumbles into many
splendours.

FOLK LORE INDEX.
The mass of archaic incidents, beliefs, and practices recorded by the
12th-century writer seemed to need some other classification than a
bare alphabetic index. The present plan, a subject-index practically, has
been adopted with a view to the needs of the anthropologist and
folk-lorist. Its details have been largely determined by the bulk and
character of the entries themselves. No attempt has been made to
supply full parallels from any save the more striking and obvious old
Scandinavian sources, the end being to classify material rather than to
point out its significance of geographic distribution. With regard to the
first three heads, the reader who wishes to see how Saxo compares with
the Old Northern poems may be referred to the Grimm Centenary

papers, Oxford, 1886, and the Corpus Poeticurn Boreale, Oxford, 1883.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.
King--As portrayed by Saxo, the ideal king should be (as in "Beowulf's
Lay") generous, brave and just. He should be a man of
accomplishments, of unblemished body, presumably of royal kin
(peasant-birth is considered a bar to the kingship), usually a son or a
nephew, or brother of his foregoer (though no strict rule of succession
seems to appear in Saxo), and duly chosen and acknowledged at the
proper place of election. In Denmark this was at a stone circle, and the
stability of these stones was taken as an omen for the king's reign.
There are exceptional instances noted, as the serf-king Eormenric (cf.
Guthred-Canute of Northumberland), whose noble birth washed out
this blot of his captivity, and there is a curious tradition of a conqueror
setting his hound as king over a conquered province in mockery.
The king was of age at twelve. A king of seven years of age has twelve
Regents chosen in the Moot, in one case by lot, to bring him up and
rule for him till his majority. Regents are all appointed in Denmark, in
one case for lack of royal blood, one to Scania, one to Zealand, one to
Funen, two to Jutland. Underkings and Earls are appointed by kings,
and though the Earl's office is distinctly official, succession is
sometimes given to the sons of faithful fathers. The absence of a settled
succession law leads (as in Muslim States) to rebellions and plots.
Kings sometimes abdicated, giving up the crown perforce to a rival, or
in high age to a kinsman. In heathen times, kings, as Thiodwulf tells us
in the case of Domwald and Yngwere, were