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Saxo Grammaticus (Volume II) - Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R8,615
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Saxo Grammaticus (Volume II) - Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Medieval Texts
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Saxo was probably a canon of Lund Cathedral, at that period a
Danish cathedral, and lived at the end of the twelfth century. He
was in the service of Archbishop Absalon, who encouraged him to
write a history of his own country from the beginnings up to his
own time, with a strong Christian bias. Starting with the myths and
heroic tales of primitive Scandinavia, he devoted the first nine of
his sixteen books to legendary material before dealing with the
first kings of the Viking age and finished in 1285, after relating
the earlier exploits of King Cnut Valdemarsson. The activities of
the Danish kings were intimately bound up with the monarchies of
Norway and Sweden; Cnut the Great, one of Saxo's heroes, whose
empire stretched as far as Britain and Iceland, was ruler of both
these countries. In the last books Saxo took particular concern to
describe the campaigns of Valdemar the Great and his warrior
archbishop, Absalon, against the Wends of North Germany. The work
is a prosimetrum, that is, in six of the first nine books he
inserts poems, which are intended to parallel specimens of old
Danish heroic poetry in Latin metres. Saxo's Latin prose style is
often complex, based as it is on models like Valerius Maximus and
Martianus Capella, but he is a lively and compelling story-teller,
often displaying a rather sly sense of humour, and an interest in
the supernatural. He is the first author to give a full account of
Hamlet, whose adventures he relates at some length, the elements of
which in a great many respects correspond surprisingly closely with
the characters and incidents of Shakespeare's play. Volume II of
Saxo Grammaticus contains books 11-16 of Saxo's work, mainly
dealing with the history of the first Danish kings.
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