
Saxo Grammaticus (Volume II) Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes
by Friis-Jensen, Karsten; Fisher, PeterBuy New
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Summary
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.
Author Biography
Karsten Friis-Jensen was born in Copenhagen, and educated at the University there, where he became a teacher from 1985 and a senior lecturer from 1990 in the Institute of Greek and Latin, now a part of the Saxo Institiute. Previously he had worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich from 1983 to 1985. He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters from 1997 onwards. His main field of study was Medieval Latin literature, which culminated in a scholarly edition of Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, published in 2005, with a Danish translation by Peter Zeeberg. His other principal area of research was the medieval reception of the Roman poet Horace, and he directed the work on Horace for the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum in Toronto.
Peter Fisher was born in Sheffield, and was educated there and later at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read Classics and English. He continued as a teacher in these subjects in Welwyn Garden City and subsequently as a lecturer at what is now Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. During this time he wrote an M. Phil. thesis on Christopher Marlowe with Warwick University. Since the late 1970s he has translated and published a number of historical and medical texts from Medieval and Renaissance Latin, mainly Scandinavian. A keen amateur clarinettist, he regularly plays in local chamber groups and orchestras, with whom he has performed several concertos. He is married and has four children.
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