work is written with great elegance for the time in which it was composed, but the rhetorician and the patriot are every where so apparent, as to make us sometimes distrust the fidelity of the historian. In short, to be convinced that this high antiquity, which he attributes to the Danish monarchy, is extremely uncertain, we need only examine the authorities on which he builds his hypothesis. Torfæus[1], a native of Iceland, and historiographer of Norway, hath shewn this at large in his learned “Series of kings of Denmark.” He there proves that those songs, from which Saxo pretends to have extracted part of what he advanced, are in very small number; that he can quote none of them for many entire books of his history; and that they cannot exhibit a chronological series of kings, nor ascertain
- ↑ Thermodius Torfæus, who was born in Iceland, in the last century, and died about the beginning of the present, had received his education at Copenhagen, and passed the greatest part of his life in Norway. He was a man of great integrity and diligence, and extremely conversant in the antiquities of the North, but perhaps a little too credulous, especially where he takes for his guides the ancient Icelandic historians, upon whose authority he hath filled the first volumes of his history of Norway with many incredible events. His treatise of the Series of the Princes and Kings of Denmark contains many curious researches, and seems to me to be his best work.
