October 11, 2026
Last week's stanza ended with a door: the monsters, said the Hyndluljóth, went among men. For fifty tellings this series has stayed inside the two Eddas — the poems and the handbook, Iceland's memory of the gods — and the monsters it met there stayed where those books keep them: at the world's edge, in the Ironwood, under the roots, off the ledger. But the stanza says they went among men. So tonight, for the first time, the series follows them out — out of the Eddas entirely, into a book written by a man who did not believe in them.
The accounting first, because this series pays at the door. Every quoted word of last week's teaser stands on the page it promised — the rumour, the hands, the chastening, the three spans, the semblance of a penalty, all letter-true. One compression to own: the teaser said that Odin "took an interest" in the monster. He did not. Read closely and the page is colder than that: Odin's interest was in a king he wanted dead, and everything he gave Starkad — the bravery, the poetry, the three lifetimes — was a fee. Hold that; it is the hinge of the whole telling.
The book is the Gesta Danorum — the Deeds of the Danes — written in Latin around the year 1200 by Saxo, called Grammaticus — the Lettered — a churchman in the service of the archbishop of Lund. Where Snorri wrote a handbook for poets who needed the old gods kept straight, Saxo wrote a national history for a Christian kingdom that needed them explained away. The English on our desk is Oliver Elton's, and it keeps Saxo's manner whole: the manner of a man transmitting, with visible reluctance and perfect thoroughness, every tale he disclaims.
And in Book Six, the history stops mid-dynasty to introduce a man. He arrives the way heroes arrive — sole survivor of a wreck, taken in by King Frode for "his incredible excellence both of mind and body", given a ship and the guarding of the sea. Saxo writes that "nature had gifted him with a body of superhuman excellence", that no man matched him in valour, and — pause on this, from a historian writing a thousand years ago about a man supposedly centuries older still — that "the renown of his name and deeds continues famous even yet." His name is Starkad. Tradition, Saxo says, put his birth in the country east of Sweden. And then the historian does the thing this series crossed a sea to watch him do.
But a fabulous yet common rumour has invented tales about his birth which are contrary to reason and flatly incredible. For some relate that he was sprung from giants, and betrayed his monstrous birth by an extraordinary number of hands, four of which, engendered by the superfluity of his nature, they declare that the god Thor tore off, shattering the framework of the sinews and wrenching from his whole body the monstrous bunches of fingers; so that he had but two left, and that his body, which had before swollen to the size of a giant's, and, by reason of its shapeless crowd of limbs looked gigantic, was thenceforth chastened to a better appearance, and kept within the bounds of human shortness. — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
Read what the rumour actually says, under the historian's cold water. Starkad was born a giant's kin, and his body confessed it — six hands, a "shapeless crowd of limbs", a frame swollen past the human. And Thor — the same god this series has watched break giants at №34's duelling-ground and №35's river — came to this monster not to kill him but to edit him. Four hands torn off, sinew by sinew; the giant's size pruned back; the monstrous made to fit "within the bounds of human shortness." Not a slaying. A chastening. The rumour's Thor is a god who looked at a monster and carved a man out of it — and what he carved away was, in Saxo's marvelous phrase, "the superfluity of his nature". The extra nature. The part that was true of him but too much.
Last week the handbook's ledger filed a monstrous motherhood under the politest word it could find. Here is the same gesture performed with hands: the record of what Starkad was, reduced until it fits the entry. And notice who is telling us. Saxo calls the tale flatly incredible — and then transmits it whole, with the sinews. The historian's scissors and the god's are doing the same work at different desks, and neither quite finishes the job, because the rumour was common: everyone had heard what Starkad was. The hands were gone. The story of the hands would not come off.
Then something wonderful happens: the dismissal will not stay closed. Having sniffed at one god in a rumour, Saxo finds he must now explain to his readers what a god is doing in a history at all — and the explanation is the boldest filing decision in tonight's telling:
For there were of old certain men versed in sorcery, Thor, namely, and Odin, and many others, who were cunning in contriving marvellous sleights; and they, winning the minds of the simple, began to claim the rank of gods. — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
There it is: the entire pantheon this series has spent fifty-one weeks among, filed as a confidence trick. Thor and Odin were men — sorcerers, showmen "cunning in contriving marvellous sleights" — who gulled Norway, Sweden and Denmark into worship, and "gave to blasphemous error the honour due to religion." Snorri, our handbook, plays a version of this game too in his framing chapters, but Saxo means it as history.
And his evidence is the calendar. Readers of №9 will feel a door swing open here, because this series has stood on exactly this ground facing the other way. The days of the week, Saxo argues, are named for these pretended gods — "the days, called among our countrymen Thors-day or Odins-day" — where Rome named the same days for Jove and Mercury. Very well, says the historian, suppose Thor is Jove and Odin Mercury: then, since "it is told as a matter of common belief, that Thor was Odin's son", "it follows that Jove was the son of Mercury" — and since Rome insists on the reverse, the identification collapses. The northern gods cannot be the Roman ones; they are local frauds with borrowed honours. №9 read the weekdays as a fossil pantheon — the old gods surviving in plain sight, embedded in Tuesday and Thursday. Saxo reads the same fossils and concludes the animals never lived. Same evidence, opposite verdicts, eight centuries apart — and his genealogical arithmetic, note, works only if you grant him the mythology he is disproving. Having settled the gods, he closes the ledger with a historian's shrug: "This must be sufficient discourse upon the deities of Danish antiquity", and, a line later, "Now I will go back to my subject where I left it."
He goes back to Starkad. And watch what the very next tale requires him to transmit.
Ancient tradition says that Starkad, whom I mentioned above, offered the first-fruits of his deeds to the favour of the gods by slaying Wikar, the king of the Norwegians. — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
First-fruits — a harvest word, an offering word. Starkad's career of deeds opens with a king's death, given to the gods the way a farmer gives the first sheaf. Saxo hands the tale to ancient tradition and to "the version of some people" — his fingerprints carefully absent — and then tells it straight:
Odin once wished to slay Wikar by a grievous death; but, loth to do the deed openly, he graced Starkad, who was already remarkable for his extraordinary size, not only with bravery, but also with skill in the composing of spells, that he might the more readily use his services to accomplish the destruction of the king. — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
Sit with the shape of that sentence. On the previous page of the same book, Odin was a sorcerer who claimed the rank of a god. Here he is a god in full working order — with a grudge, a preference for deniability ("loth to do the deed openly"), and a payroll. He wants Wikar dead, grievously; he will not be seen doing it; so he makes an instrument. The gifts we would call a hero's endowments — bravery, and poetry, of all things — are enumerated here as tools issued for a job. And then the terms of the contract, the line last week's teaser carried whole:
For the same reason he also endowed him with three spans of mortal life, that he might be able to commit in them as many abominable deeds. So Odin resolved that Starkad's days should be prolonged by the following crime: — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
Three lifetimes, and the price named in the same breath: one abominable deed per life, the first due immediately. Read the last line twice, because it is the tale's whole theology in nine words: his days should be prolonged by the crime. Not despite it. The murder is the mechanism. In the Eddas this series has watched Odin buy wisdom with an eye and runes with a hanging — the god pays himself. Here he has learned to pay with other people's lives, and the coin he mints for Starkad is time.
So Starkad goes to Wikar and becomes his man — "hiding treachery under homage", Saxo says, a phrase that would have fit half the dark tellings of this series' Völsung autumn. They rove together; and in a certain place the winds turn against them, and hold, most of a year. The remedy is the old one: "they thought that the gods must be appeased with human blood. When the lots were cast into the urn it so fell that the king was required for death as a victim."
The lot falls on the king. Of course it does; we know who is holding the winds. And now the scene the teaser promised, whole:
Then Starkad made a noose of withies and bound the king in it; saying that for a brief instant he should pay the mere semblance of a penalty. But the tightness of the knot acted according to its nature, and cut off his last breath as he hung. And while he was still quivering Starkad rent away with his steel the remnant of his life; thus disclosing his treachery when he ought to have brought aid. — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
A mock sacrifice — that is the offer. The lots have spoken, the gods must have their rite, but no one need die: a noose of green withies, pliant as rope never is, a brief instant of theatre, "the mere semblance of a penalty." The king consents to be hanged on the understanding that hanging is, tonight, a figure of speech. And then the semblance stops pretending. Saxo's explanation is the driest line in the telling: "the tightness of the knot acted according to its nature". No god reaches down; nothing shimmers. A knot does what knots do. The historian has arranged the scene so that physics commits the murder — and then Starkad's steel finishes it while the king still quivers, and the word Saxo chooses is treachery, twice in the tale, "when he ought to have brought aid." The first abominable deed is filed. The first lifetime is paid for.
And then Saxo, having told all of that with a level voice, permits himself one sentence of scruple:
I do not think that I need examine the version which relates that the pliant withies, hardened with the sudden grip, acted like a noose of iron. — Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, trans. Elton (1905)
Here is the find of the night, complete. There was another version — one where the miracle shows: soft green withies turning to iron in the instant of the drop, the god's hand visible in the hardening. Saxo knows it. He reports it in the act of refusing to examine it, which is how a historian buries a thing where everyone can see it. And now set his three verdicts side by side, all from one stretch of one book. The giant's-birth: rumour, contrary to reason and flatly incredible — transmitted whole. The god's murder-plot: ancient tradition — transmitted without a blink, deniability and payroll and all. The hardening withies: beneath examination — transmitted in the sentence that dismisses them. The eyebrow rises and falls on no principle this reader can find, except perhaps this one: the closer the marvel stands to the killing of a king by a god's design, the less Saxo cares to look at it directly. He will give you a monster edited by Thor. He will give you Odin commissioning a death. What he will not examine is the moment the trick rope went hard — the one detail where the design shows its hand inside the human world. The semblance of a penalty is also a way of writing history.
One more thing the page confesses about its own sources, and it is the strangest credit-line in tonight's telling. Later in the book, wounded nearly to death in a battle in Ireland, Starkad survives — and Saxo notes that "he afterwards related in a certain song that a ghastlier wound had never befallen him at any time". He related, in a song. The monster kept his own ledger, in verse, and the historian is citing it. Odin's second gift — the skill in composing — turns out to be how the first gift's deeds reached the page at all. Saxo's source for Starkad is Starkad. The rumour he dismissed came, at least in part, from the throat it describes.
So run the tally, the way last week's telling ran the handbook's. The Eddas keep their monsters at the edges: in the Ironwood, under the world, at the end of things — catalogued, fettered, filed under kennings and politer words. The books outside keep them, as №50's stanza promised, among men — walking, sworn into retinues, editing themselves to pass. Starkad survives the old books twice-edited: Thor took four hands off the body, and Saxo took the credibility off the story, and neither operation held. The body stayed famous; the rumour stayed common; the renown "continues famous even yet", on the page of the man who called its origin flatly incredible. And the god the historian demoted to a conjurer walks through his own next paragraph arranging a king's death with three lifetimes for wages, one abominable deed each — a ledger with two entries still open, in a history with three books yet to run. The old books inside the Eddas told us where the monsters came from. The old books outside tell us what became of them: they were chastened to a better appearance, kept within the bounds of human shortness, and written into history by men who did not believe in them and could not stop transmitting them. A brief instant of scepticism, the mere semblance of a penalty — and the tale, like the knot, acted according to its nature.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else — may every knot you trust be exactly what it seems, and may your own deeds need no historian's eyebrow.
Sources: Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Book Six, translated by Oliver Elton — The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus (Norroena Society, 1905; first published 1894). All texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: Starkad's second gift was a poet's tongue, and it points the road onward — because the north kept a whole class of poems where the war-world talks about itself. One of the oldest is a raven-song: a praise-poem from the age of Harald Fairhair, built as a conversation overheard at dawn — a valkyrie, wise of speech, questioning a raven fresh from the slaughter-field about the king he feeds behind. She asks; the bird answers; and between them they inventory a warrior-king's whole court — the warriors, the poets, the berserks who howl. A chooser of the slain interviewing the battlefield's own undertaker: the series has met valkyries at the fire-ring, at the river, riding air and water — but it has never yet heard one conduct an interview. Where the road turns next, the raven knows first.