His narration is usually bald, his style usually florid and often preachy. He has misunderstood a great deal of what he was handling and garbled a great deal more. Nevertheless he saved this treasure hoard for us, damaged though it may be. It includes the oldest extant account of Hamlet. All honor to Saxo Grammaticus.

The story of Hadding comes near the end of the first book. There is no point in searching for a historical kernel of it. Saxo places Hadding three generations before Hrolf Kraki. Some truth undoubtedly lies behind that saga, which can be dated to the middle sixth century. But a fuller, though later Icelandic rendition does not square with the Qesta Danorum. For instance, Hadding’s son Frodi cannot be identical with Hrolf’s great-uncle of that name. Saxo was probably fitting together what pieces he had in a rather arbitrary fashion.

Besides, the tale of Hadding is not properly even a legend. It is a myth. Saxo may have had some intimation of this, but if so, it was dim. Into his chapter he inserts an awkward description of Odin as a mortal sorcerer, then completely fails to recognize Odin when the god appears to Hadding in person.

Just the same, here is a grand yarn, full of action, color, and glimpses of a world altogether strange to us. I have long wanted to share it with modern readers. Georges Dumézil’s brilliant study Du mythe au roman: La Saga de Hadingus et autres essais shows that Hadding was actually the god Njord. This first suggested to me how the tale might be made into something more than another sword-and-sorcery swashbuckler. I owe considerable as well to the Eddas, the Heimskringla, and the work of archeologists and literary scholars.

On the whole, the earthly part of this retelling follows Saxo’s text. Mainly I have tried to flesh it out, find causes and motivations for events he leaves obscure, and limn their background. That background is frankly anachronistic—not the Germanic Iron Age, in which the story ostensibly takes place, but the viking era. Societies, technologies, horizons, and doings belong, in an ahistoric fashion, to the ninth or tenth century, as they do in Saxo. However, though avoiding Latinisms as much as possible, I have not sought to imitate the austere style of the Icelanders. What was familiar to them is alien to us and needs explaining. I hope I have evoked a little of it.