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Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977)

Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977)

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Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977)

SOURCE: Amory, Frederic. “The Medieval : A Lesson in the Use and Abuse of a Myth.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 51, no. 3 (September 1977): 357-95.

[In the following essay, Amory explains how myths may be transformed by the very act of being studied and searches for the historic Hamlet, in part, in Saxo's .]

I.

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY

It is significant that in common critical parlance one cannot really distinguish terminologically between the making of myths and the study and analysis of them in speaking of mythology, or mythography. In English as in other languages they are terms which do not exclude the imaginative, and incautious, habit of myth-making, even when they are applied to the so-called “science of myth.” Perhaps this disconcerting confusion of terms stems from the fact that while the making of myths is as old as Eden, the sober study and understanding of them may not be older than the eighteenth century at the most, beginning with the publication of Giambattista Vico's Princìpi di una Scienza Nuova (1st version, 1725; 2nd, 1744). Some would say that comparative mythology began with Friedrich Creuzer's Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (1810-12) and went out with the school of Max Müller at the end of the nineteenth century, to be refounded again on a firmer philological footing by Georges Dumézil in the entre-deux-guerres period. But “chips from a German workshop”—interpretations of nineteenth century mythologists—still fly about today, as we shall see in the recent book of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill,1 under consideration here. In any case, the hardiest of the modern masters of myth, Claude Lévi-Strauss, has not hesitated to seize the dilemma, verbal or real, by the horns and affirm of his first volume of Mythologiques (Le Cru et le Cuit) that “it is not wrong to hold [it] for a myth—the myth of mythology, after a fashion.”2 In his view of the subject every interpretation of a myth or a group of myths is merely at one remove from its immediate object in the communication-code circuit, language—myth—interpretation. Like the original aetiologies which are often tacked on to the myths, the final “scientific” or scholarly interpretation is destined in turn to become part of the total corpus which it has interpreted for a time. Thus the corpus will be constantly enlarged, to the point of infinity, not only by retellings of the myths, but also by re-interpretations of the same, which bring them into ever different relationships with each other, or into new relationships with the myths of other corpuses.3

From its first fragmentary appearance in a verse of the tenth century Icelander, Snaebjörn galti Hólmsteinsson, down to the latest interpretation of it, in Hamlet's Mill, the Hamlet story comprises a mythology in the Lévi-Straussean sense—a mingled yarn of myth and mythography, literature and criticism, invention and interpretation. Indeed, the involuted verse of Snaebjörn was preserved for us in an interpretative work of thirteenth century mythography, the of , who recorded it as a choice example of “skáldskaparmál,” poetic diction. He it was who interpreted the obscure allusion in it to the “líðmeldr … Amlóða,” the “ale-mash of Hamlet,” ground between the sea and the rocks by the northern nereids, as being

Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) 1 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) the peculiar product of Hamlet's quern or mill, thus providing Santillana and Dechend with the title of their book, though it remains unclear from the verse in what way the mill or its grist was peculiarly Hamlet's.4 This can only be inferred from the better-known account of Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (III, vi to IV, ii), which was written in the last decades of the twelfth century, not long before the Snorra Edda in the first decades of the thirteenth. There, in book III, vi, 10, we have an amusing scene, set on the seashore of , where Amlethus in his feigned madness is being observed by the henchmen of his father's slayer, who are cavalcading with him. “Past the sand dunes,” the passage relates, “his attention being directed to the sand, and how it was like meal [farra], he rejoined that that meal was ground up by the white storm-tossings of the sea. When his companions commended his rejoinder, he agreed that it was sensibly spoken by him …”5 And so, acting madly but joking sanely, he outwits them with one jest after another.

In the Danish History as in Snaebjörn's verse the mill in question, whether it ground prosaically flour for bread or malt for ale, figures indirectly as a poetic metaphor or for the sea breaking against rocky islands or a sandy shore and turning the rocks and stones into sand and more sand. Snorri accordingly quoted the verse in the second, literary section of his treatise—the Skáldskaparmál—to illustrate the poetic practice of the in the classic age of the tenth century. The parallel passage of the Danish History suggests that Hamlet's ale-mash (Snaebjörn's kenning) was once a witticism of Hamlet's. Hence the mill may be said to be his only with the same propriety that a figure of speech comparing sea-sand to flour or malt was attributed to him by Snaebjörn from some lost Amlóðasaga or -kvaeði which was already current in the tenth century. In fact, as Snorri knew better than most mythographers, the mill of , Grótti, was not Hamlet's at all, but an adjunct of the nereids, or of the giants and the two giantesses who were forced by King Fróði in the Gróttasöngr to grind peace and abundance for him.6 But that, to be sure, is another story. Far from it being the case that this mill “must also be central to the original Hamlet story,” 7 it is much more likely that it was peripheral to his story, as in Saxo's version of it.

In response to the anxious question, “How is it possible to support Amlodhi's claim to be the legitimate owner of the Mill?,” 8 which would seem to be impossible, Santillana and Dechend come up with a cosmological interpretation of the Gróttasöngr for an answer, which draws upon Hellenistic and Near Eastern astronomical and astrological speculations constituting ex hypothesi the germs of the idea of “Hamlet's mill” and the mill of the Scandinavian gods or giants. They have tremendous hopes that if Hamlet and Grótti had any comparable place in the universal scheme of things, say, like Chronos and a salt mill mentioned in a magical papyrus of the mid-fourth century a.d., then they should somehow belong to each other! However, the argument, which rambles from text to text, is not as matter of logic, really but of mytho-logic, more precisely—the logic which invests the study of myth. We shall examine the argument primarily for its correctness in a Scandinavian context and inquire into its logic afterwards.

Whatever the instructions in the magical papyrus were meant to perform with the grinding of salt and an invocation of Chronos, which the myth-exegetes do not elucidate,9 the “mill song” of King Fróði's giant maids-of-all-work served aetiologically to satisfy curiosity about the to us rather idle question of why the sea is salt, or the more technical poetic puzzler, “Why is gold called Fróði's meal?,” which Snorri posed on behalf of the poets. Behind the song there was doubtless a folk belief of some kind in a magic wishing mill which could grind out almost anything on request, including the salt in the sea and the Norwegian Maelstrom, if not the “swelchies” or whirlpools of the North Sea which mythographers delight to chart. 10 The marine marvels were not particularly requested in the song. Further in the background stood the legendary king of the Skjöldings, Fróði, from whom the Danish royal house was reputedly descended and whose peaceful rule in the good old days virtually rivalled the pax augusta, in the idealization of his historical posterity. The breaking of Fróði's peace by his rebellious giant servants is the tragicomic high note of the song, which subor dinate the folk belief and the historical legend to a variation on an Indo-European theme—the victory of physical force in the strength of two over the plenty of a whole kingdom—that was set forth by Georges Dumézil just a year before the publication of Hamlet's Mill, in the first volume of his Mythe et Épopée.11 In other words, Gróttasöngr is only superficially a song of a mill which lies at the bottom of the sea salting the water and

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY 2 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) churning the waves to whirl-pools. The fable presents us with a social drama beyond the natural phenomena, and Snorri, again, interprets it more for its poetic than its mythological and pseudoscientific value, since he was instructing would-be poets in their art.

In Dumézil's broad classification of Indo-European society, King Fróði, as the Danish double of the Vanr deity, , under a name synonymous with abundance, represented the third social function of wealth, fertility, peace, while the two giantesses, Fenja and Menja, who boast bitterly of their former warlike exploits, toiling at the “peacemaker,” Fróði's mill, exercise the second function of brute force in a humiliating situation which a Vanr ruler, and not an Áss, controls at the start. For two warriors like these ladies “it's dreary at Fróði's,” but strong as they are, they are in a minority in his kingdom, and must have allies from their warrior class to overthrow their taskmaster. They sing ominously at their work of the imminent arrival of an army led by the avenging Danish king Hrólfr Kraki, who is to slay Fróði, and in their mounting rage and impatience they grind so fuiosuly that the mill breaks in pieces. “The hand-shafts shivered, the ‘bed’ of the mill [= lúðr] slipped underwards, the heavy [nether] stone cracked in two” (st. 23). Gróttasöngr ends abruptly with their exultant shout to Fróði that his meal is ground.

To this abrupt ending Snorri furnishes a longer conclusion with an aetiology of why the sea is salt. The magical mill seems to have labored mightily and brought forth a somewhat ridiculous mouse in his epilogue. Having ground peace and prosperity, it then, as they wanted, ground out an army under the leadership not of Hrólfr Kraki, but a legendary sea-king with the curious name of Mýsingr, which, Dumézil points out, parodies such exalted names as Ynglingr, Skjöldungr, etc., with the meaning “of the race of mouse.” Yet another derogatory implication in the name is brought out by a passage in Hrólfs Kraka where a warrior of the Danish king vows vaingloriously to wring Óðinn's neck as he would the neck of “the vilest, littlest mousling” (“myslingr”), if he should meet him on the field of battle. 12 Nothing further is to be learned about this figure, Mýsingr, from the list of bynames of sea-kings in the Third Grammatical Treatise of Snorris' nephew, Ólafr Þórðarson,13 and one can only suspect that Snorri has substituted for Hrólfr Kraki's appellative, “son of Yrsa,” in the original Gróttasöngr (st. 22) a whimsical pseudonym which happens to pun on either suffix of mús, -ingr or -lingr.

Chasing after mythical mice and rats in the fables of mankind for a creature like Mýsingr,14 Santillana and Dechend have missed the humorous onomastic connotations of his name, which are perfectly appropriate to Snorri's general handling of the old myths of pagan Scandinavia—at once the objects of his Christian satire and his keen esthetic appreciation. Let us, however, not miss ourselves the importance, stressed by Dumézil, of Mouse and his army to the tale of the giantesses' bondage to Fróði's mill. If a mouse is small and ridiculous in itself, it makes up for its size in numbers, i.e., packs, and therefore the mouse-like creature, Mýsingr, can be of aid in a horde to the two giantesses, who are big and strong in themselves but critically weak in numbers. In Snorri's epilogue it turns out that Mýsingr was strong enough not only to kill Fróði and carry off the mill in his ship, but also to force the unlucky giantesses to grind salt for him, so that they merely exchanged one taskmaster for another, and were not to be released from their labors until the ship foundered under their weight, causing a whirlpool in the ocean when the water rushed into the pivot hole of the millstones.

In this dramatization of the social life of Indo-Germanic society, whose categories have been juggled in the myth to solve a problem of class-conflict in an entertaining manner, the “lower” function of peaceful productivity among the North Germanic peoples temporarily supersedes the function of superior force, which does not regain the upper hand except by increasing its power through numbers. The tactic forthwith demonstrates that even in the warrior class the physically smaller and weaker member (Mouse) is actually stronger than the biggest and strongest giants, but that, weak or strong, brute force has no real power over the means of production which slip from its grasp at last into the sea. Thus stated, the moral of the myth is rather more edifying than the ineloquent and creaking celestial machinery which Santillana and Dechend have reconstructed about the mill song, on the superannuated nineteenth century premise that “myth is essentially cosmological.” 15 And the bearer of the moral, Mýsingr, has been cast by Snorri in a role for which there are

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY 3 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) better confirmatory analogues than mouse and rat fables in the mythologies of the Caucasian Narts and the Vedic Indians, which the wonderful learning of Dumézil, as discriminating as it is extensive, has put at our disposal in his discussion of the Scandinavian myth. The milch cow of the Brahman Vasistha, for instance, has similar multiplicatory powers which she triumphantly displays by sweating forth an army against a tormentor who tries to abduct her by force and overwhelming the stronger adversary with masses of warriors from every pore of her body.

Now, in line with my thesis that mythography such as Hamlet's Mill partakes indefinably of the mythologizing process itself, it may be objected that one interpretation, of Dumézil's, is being arbitrarily preferred here to another, of Santillana and Dechend's, insofar as their interpretations are of equal validity within the endless modifications of the process. It is not my intention, however, that any Lévi-Straussean equation of mythography with mythology, or myth-exegesis with myth-making, should rob us of a choice of interpretations when we have to choose between a misinterpretation of texts, on the one hand, by those who cannot read them untranslated for themselves,16 and a true interpretation of words and things on the other, which fits as many facts as possible, and thus conforms itself textually to the steady drift of the story-telling and mythologizing. “The task,” as Conrad proposed for the study of fiction in Under Western Eyes, “is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a précis of a strange human document, but the rendering … of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of the earth's surface.” If we compare Hamlet's Mill with the three volumes of Mythe et Épopée in the light of this remark, I think we would say charitably that the one work has attempted the task and the other has performed it, fully.

So much, then, we discern in Hamlet's Mill at a good distance from the Grótti myth: the elaborate reconstruction, piece by piece, of a huge edifice over the northern world, a cosmological mill, allegedly Hamlet's, whose foundations are sunk in the Norwegian Maelstrom, the Scottish “swelchies,” and the very salt of the sea. It all looks as promising as North Sea gas and oil, but none of these mythologized details, be it noted, occur in the prime texts of Snaebjörn, Saxo, or even the Gróttasöngr. They are the accretions of the medieval mythography of Snorri Sturluson, who, if he did not invent them, or read them into the prime texts, adapted them from other sources now unknown to us. His mythologizing touches, I fear, have been painted over repeatedly by the heavier brush strokes of nineteenth and twentieth century mythologists, who have dimmed our picture of the mill myth considerably—by calling for ever more “restorations.”

Consider for a moment the imperious attitude of the present mythologists towards the technological model for the Grótti mill: “Whether or not … Fenja and Menja waited on an oscillating quern or on a true rotary mill is a cosmological question, and will hardly be decided by historians of technology.” 17 Will it not? Do mythologists, or historians of science turned mythologists, believe that mills, like marriages, are made only in heaven? The description of the magical mill in Gróttasöngr, of which I have quoted above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”] (p. 361) the lines on its break down, is purely factual. Certain details are blurred, but with these Snorri's epilogue and the traditional design of hand-mills (manumolae) in Iceland may help us out.

The anonymous who composed the song is slightly inconsistent in alternating between singular and plural references to the principal components of the mill—namely, to its upper or nether stone, the “bed(s)” of the nether stone, and the operating handles (“möndull,” sing., st. 20; “skaptré,” plu., st. 23)—and he does not allude anywhere to the one central component of the pivot post, without which the reconstruction of Santillana and Dechend would collapse. But since Snorri's quern consists of two millstones with a pivot hole through them, which is the “eye of the quern,” one can perhaps assume that Grótti had the familiar shape, and the central component, of a pivoted medieval handmill. If we would like to know more particularly how the handles might have been stuck into the movable upper stone—upright or sideways—and how the nether stone was immovably embedded in a “lúðr,” the wooden emplacement of the mill, secured with iron fastenings (st. 21), we shall not go far wrong in consulting the fascinating folkways encyclopaedia of Jónas Jónasson frá Hrafnagili on the much later eighteenth and nineteenth century lavastone querns of Iceland.18 Medieval handmills, which from the tenth century on had to compete with water mills in Europe, were kept in use the

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY 4 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) longest by the peasantry of and the western islands, where “winter frosts were not very favorable to the use of running water-power …, and there was no seignorial authority comparable to that prevailing in France.” 19 The elementary design of Icelandic querns cannot have altered greatly over the centuries, other than in the positions of the handles. We perceive, accordingly, that when two women worked the traditional quern they would have found it easiest (unless they chose to tail each other round the mill) to grind in an oscillating sawing motion by the handles,20 whereas one person would be able to grind more freely in rotary fashion. Upright handles must have facilitated the rotary movement, but the giantesses (for no cosmic reason) probably “heaved the rapid stone” which was on top (“slungu snúðgasteini,” st. 4), in oscillation, from either side of it.

Misled, as so often, by a mistranslation of verses in st. 23 (cf. again my translation above, p. 361), the erring reconstructers of cosmic myth have taken the plural “skaptré”—the “hand-shafts” in the upper stone of Grótti—for a single pivot post which should go through Snorri's “eye of the quern,” and they have elevated that to the skies as a symbol of the polar axis of the world. When it was disloged from the pivot pole at the break-down of the mill, they mythologize, not only was a whirlpool stirred up at one end, but at the other, the Pole Star had also shifted, by precession of the equinoxes. In their mythology this “trepidation of the spheres” is likewise registered in the Kalevala and the Old Icelandic vision-poem, Völuspá—the next texts to be filed in the Hamlet dossier. It is quite a sight, I must say, the eminent historian of science and his collaborator, the former anthropology student of Frobenius, each with a handle of the Grótti mill proclaiming that they have the pivot post of a mythical world-mill and the lever which moved the mental universe of primitive or archaic man. Suddenly there is a convenient handle to every cosmological text in literature and science.21 With a good deal of textual manipulation and some tendentious, and erroneous, etymologizing of names, they soon manage to establish the pivot post and/or handles of the Scandinavian mill up in the northern skies as well as down under the North Sea, despite the lack of support in Norse mythology for such a fantastic erection of its machinery.

Folklore may well have reported a mill at the bottom of the sea, grinding salt or sand, but a mill of the gods of these cosmic dimensions, which ground the allotted fates of men in heaven about the polar axis, and periodically once in a very great while seemed to unseat itself from its wonted course and plunge into the sea, mythology proper described nowhere in the north.22 And it never would anyhow, if, as has been fairly asserted, the North Germanic religion had no heavenly sky-gods, which is to say, no celestial being to run the cosmic mill.23 The magical mill of Scandinavian folklore was the work-tool of chthonic deities—sea-nymphs or giantesses—and Grótti's original owner, according to Snorri, was the giant Henigkjöftr (Hand-Jaw).24 Nor, in actuality, could naked-eye observations of the heavens have occasioned or else lent credence to an astral myth of an erratic mill during the first two centuries of Scandinavian astronomy in Iceland, from the tenth to the twelfth century, when the Pole Star shifted but one degree in position, an insignificant amount. A cosmic mill of the gods in medieval Scandinavia is a myth neither of mythology, nor Icelandic astronomy and computational science, but rather of modern Germanic mythography as developed in the nineteenth century under the partial inspiration of Snorri Sturluson.25

In the constellation of the pivot post and/or handles of Grótti mill before its fall into the sea, Santillana and Dechend have put up the “many-colored cover” of the Sampo mill in the Kalevala, as a fitting cosmic symbol of the vault of heaven. What was lacking to the “rough” (!) conceptions of the mill of the gods in Eddic and skaldic poetry is to be eked out from the fairy tale of the Finnish mill, Sampo, which since it was shipped somewhere in a boat and finally destroyed by a river queen in the guise of an eagle, and its “cover” and the rest scattered in a lake, appears vaguely to be a non-Indo-European facsimile of the Scandinavian mill. One might, even without a knowledge of Finnish, accept this harmless comparison, but when one is told that the name, Sampo, itself, “derives from” Sanskrit skambha, meaning “pillar,” or “pole,” one knows one is being offered the wrong end of the stick, and dismisses the whole comparison.26 For what this really implies is that the wanting pivot post of Grótti has been surreptitiously imported from India via Finland to the Scandinavian scene, and therewith the purpose of the skambha in the Atharva Veda, to uphold the universe,27 is transferred

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY 5 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) to the Sampo and by implication to the pivotal component of Grótti. But this, as just indicated, would be unacceptable for Old Norse mythology, to say nothing of the questionability of the cosmological mythologization of the Sampo's gaudy “cover,” or the impossibility of the etymology, “sampo” < “skambha.” 28 We are back where we were in the Scandinavian scene.

In their approach to the Völuspá, a cosmological text which is highly resistant to their preconceived interpretation, the engineers of the mill myth are literally driven from pillar to post, trying to reassemble their unworkable celestical machinery from a blueprint of what the text ought to mean, which was sketched out for them by the late nineteenth century Swedish mythologist Viktor Rydberg.29 They proceed, however, on their own hunch that this splendid poem of dissolution and regeneration—a poem not about the end of the world, they would say,30 because of its happy ending—registers an apparent shift of the Pole Star in the “doom of the gods,” 31 and in their haunting return to the cosmos, its replacement by another observed star. Only the first half of this Velikovskian hypothesis is seriously tested against the poem, and as for the second, it is disqualified out of hand by Mircea Eliade's mythologem of “the myth of the eternal return”—a necessary sequel in apocalyptic thought to every tale of death and loss, notably of the highest, holiest gods.32

On the Scandinavian Olympus of Iðavöllr (Ever-flowing Field),33 where the gods gather to take counsel and deliver judgement, it is , one of the more mysterious gods, whom Santillana and Dechend have focussed upon, in order to unfold the mill-like structure of the medieval northern cosmos. But why Heimdallr? Firstly, because in venerable early nineteenth cenury scholarly tradition he was regarded as the offspring of those nine nereids who in Snaebjörn galti's verse were figuratively said to have ground the “ale-mash” of Hamlet. For once the adherents to nineteenth century scholarship have the authority of Dumézil on their side in this filiation of Heimdallr,34 but, alas!, all three scholars are wrong genealogically.35 True, in the Heimdallargaldr, quoted by Snorri in Gylfaginning 27,36 the god boasts of nine mothers who have birth to him, but their names, which are given in the shorter version of the Völuspá,37 are those of giantesses, and not personifications of the waves. Both giantesses and sea-nymphs may grind at the magical mill, but one set of nine mothers is quite enough for Heimdallr, especially if they were giantesses.38

Secondly, Heimdallr is the king-pin of the mill machinery of the universe because certain epitheta ornata naming him can be read (by Santillana and Dechend) as so many labels for the milling operations that theoretically used to go on between the heavenly bodies in the cosmology of the ancient Scandinavians. The fallacious etymologies of Rydberg and others enter into the English translations of these epithets, and decisively affect at this point the reading of the Völuspá text. The epithet “Hallinskíði,” for example, 39 which means something like “bent sticks” (plu., not sing.), was bestowed equally on Heimdallr and on rams, since there was an obscure connection between this god and those animals, which does not bear much speculation now.40 Its concrete reference may have been to the curved horns of the ram.41 But Santillana and Dechend, who are always thinking in the singular of the one post which should go through Snorri's “eye of the quern,” and which must be imported from India for their reconstruction, have decided that “to be bent or inclined befits the world axis,” and hence “Heimadal stands for the world axis, the skambha,” 42 while his bestial counterpart, the ram, is a zodiacal sign astrologically “ruling” his head. This fanciful characterization of Heimdallr as the Scandinavian god of the world axis is bracketed by two of Rydberg's falsest etymologies.43

Thus, another epithet for Heimdallr, “Vind[h]lér,” 44 which can only mean “windlistener,” inasmuch as the god had preternaturally sharp hearing, was falsely etymologized by Rydberg as a verbal noun, from “vindla,” “to wind,” plus the short-vowelled agentive suffix -ir, yielding “the turner …, borer.” A twisted meaning, indeed, but for that very reason the more serviceable to Santillana and Dechend, who are looking for the ultimate motive force that twists and turns the world axis of the Scandinavian cosmos in the Völuspá. Moreover, the god of the pivot post, in Rydberg's arbitrary opinion, had a god of the hand-shaft for a father, Mundilfari, a most mysterious being, named in the Vafþrúðnismál (st. 23),45 of whom we know absolutely nothing except that he was the father of the sun and the moon. But in the minds of these scholars a deified hand-shaft would readily beget a worshipful post for the operation of the celestial machine, be it a firedrill, or

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY 6 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) a flour mill. Understandably so, by an illicit etymology. As a proper name separately of a legendary sea-king of the type of Mýsingr, and a historical Gothic name, too, “Mundill” must have derived originally from a common Germanic form *mundo for “hand” in the sense of “guard.” However, when “Mundill” was compounded with “fari,” “traveller,” it no longer, in the majority opinion of the lexicographers, 46 was correlated with “mund,” “hand” in the protective sense, but rather with “mund,” “period of time,” e.g., a day, from “muna,” “to move,” “to differ.” A closer correlation with “möndull,” “handle,” would make no sense for a man's, or a god's name. Hence “Mundilfari” might be translated as “the one who travels at set times,” or as “Mundill the Traveller” for short, but hardly as “the mover of the handle,” Santillana and Dechend's translation, after Rydberg.47 The astronomical or mythological mission of the periodic sky-traveller still remains pretty mysterious from every viewpoint.

To cap it all, and then we shall have done with this mill myth, Heimdallr's head, which the two astromythologists have subjected to the astrological rule of the Ram, is in their cosmic scheme to “measure” the measurements of the “measure-tree,” , in Völuspá, st. 2. Yet they do not, and cannot, say what these extra measurements could tell us of any use. A couple of mistranslations are responsible for this other pseudoscientific indignity on Heimdallr's head. Because the god was killed, oddly, with a man's head, as recorded in the Heimdallargaldr, Snorri commented, “thenceforth a head has been called mjötuðr Heimdallar,” 48 an epithet which Santillana and Dechend English as “measurer of Heimdallr” without sense, when it means merely the “bane” or “evil fate of Heimdallr.” Confusion is worse confounded by their nonunderstanding of the corresponding epithet in Völ., st. 2, “mjötviðr,” for Yggdrasil, the tree which is the measurer of nothing more or less than the age of the world, coeval with its existence.49 It is itself unmeasured by Heimdallr's head, of course, or anything else. As the skalds also periphrased a head by “Heimdallr's sword” (Heimdalls hjörr), it seems just possible—but only just50—that a god who typically had no weapon to fight with but his head was in this respect most like a ram, which must fight with its horned head. The animal imagery, at any rate, should turn attention away from the zodical sign or astronomic measurements to the cult animal, which, however, I am not going to consider further in this refutation.

Having dredged up the magical Grótti mill, encrusted over with the centuries-old growth of mythography, now heaviest in the last one hundred years, surely we may confidently declare that this mythopoetic object, unwieldy as it has become, did not fall from heaven, out of the eternal order of the cosmos. Without more ado, I consign it again, together with Hamlet's Mill, to the bottom of the North Sea, below the “blue land” of the Scandinavian seafarers, from which legends and learned interpretations of them may both arise, but which, not being terra firma, will never hold up the airy constructions of Rydberg, Santillana, and Dechend, who have been seeing things in the clouds that not even the older mythographers and the primary myth-makers and poets themselves imagined. Their constructions, the myths of mythography, do fall from the heights, dragging with them the wreckage of authentic myths from other cultures, which the mythographers with their vast but misguided erudition have collected from all over the world, and thus they contribute at once to the richness and the obscurity of the treasures they have buried, the native myths, just as they seemed to be bringing those to light. A Lévi-Straussean might console himself for the sea-wreck of his theories, at the erudite importation of myths by him from a far corner of the world, by reflecting that mythology and mythography, myth and myth-exegesis, archaic or primitive lore and his erudition, are, after all, practically indistinguishable, and that in due course his faulty theories will undergo the usual seachange into the precious stuff of myth—something rich and strange for subsequent scholars to untangle from the bulk of genuine myths and legends to which his theories attach. And who knows?, his theoretical refinements may seem even more valuable to somebody someday than the real myths, which are so trying to recover, and so hard to understand anyway, in the wrappings of his theories. From these undesirable consequences perhaps the mythographers Santillana and Dechend as well as we would gladly take refuge in sounder critical principles. I don't know where they would hide in the pages of their book, but I for one have adopted in criticism of current mythography the oft-quoted maxim of Árni Magnússon, the great seventeenth century collector, not of myths, but Icelandic manuscripts, who remarked philosophically, “It is the way of the world that some help to put errors into circulation, while others attempt consequently to root out those same errors. So both parties have something to keep them

HAMLET'S MILL: A MYTH OF MYTHOGRAPHY 7 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) busy.” 51 Mythography rightly is not our business, but the eradication of error from mythography, in the wake of Walter Baetke, the Leipzig Scandinavianist who has done most of the spade work in this untended field.52

The methodology of Hamlet's Mill is uninfluenced by the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, or the comparative methods of Dumézil,53 but the authors, nevertheless, should not have entrenched themselves in nineteenth century German scholarship against the newer French schools of linguistics, mythography, and anthropology (Griaule's group of Africanists excepted), for they have perpetuated through their dependence on that scholarship many ancient and ridiculous errors of fact and interpretations, and they have never faced up to the crucial dilemma before the “science of myth”—how to reconcile the mythmaking propensity with the sympathetic investigation of myths—which Lévi-Strauss seized so boldly by the horns in the preface to the first volume of his Mythologiques (1964). By his reasoning, as I said at the outset, every insight into a corpus of myths, whether right or wrong, relevant or irrelevant, is liable to be incorporated with them as a myth of the corpus along with those in it. The sole justification for this extremely dubious procedure is his compelling conviction that the same spirit animates the myth-makers or native informants and the mythographers or anthropological collectors of myths, and that through their cooperation myth reveals synthetically and analytically “an image of the world already inscribed in the architecture of the human mind.” 54 There is truth in this formulation, which recalls the Cartesian mentalistic mythography of Vico,55 but it affords no fixed criteria which adequately meet the desiderata in Lévi-Strauss's programmatic essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” 56 for the collection, organization, and evaluation of a corpus of myths by the mythographer-anthropologist. “Qu'importe?,” shrugs the irrepressible Frenchman to such objections 57—every myth, every insight into myth is grist for the mill of mythography.

Never having realized that they might be making a myth in the process of studying one, nor properly sized up the corpus Hamleticum, the American and German collaborators in Hamlet's Mill cannot shrug off the methodological difficulty so lightly. The core of this corpus, exhaustively collected by Josef Schick, is not a legend of a magical northern mill, but a ubiquitous folktale motif, “the child of fortune with the letter of death sentence,” which rightfully unites the Hamlet story with the fabling of half the world. 58 The misapprehension which the pair of them labor under, as to the true subject of the story, is given logical plausibility by the Romantic notion “that myth itself, as a whole, is a lost world,” 59 and by a platitude of the history of science, to the effect that astronomy in prescientific eras was subservient to astrological schemes which, binding man to the stars, allowed him to feel more at home in the universe. Hence, when man began to feel less at home on his planet after the Copernican Revolution, astrological mythology grew more and more unintelligible, until all mythologizing ceased in modern times. To this argument one must reply briefly that the scholarly myth of mythography which is Hamlet's Mill is proof to the contrary that mythology is not dead today—if proof were needed of the obvious. The author's Romantic notion of myth has set a gulf between them and the poetic detail of the mill in Hamlet's story, which the history of science has widened. Mistaking the small detail for the principal motif, they have magnified and mystified it out of all proportion, and mixed it up with Near Eastern and Oriental cosmic schematizations of the equinoxes which are utterly foreign to the computational science and Eddic mythology of the medieval Scandinavians. In sum, what is entirely absent from their book is the rational restraint which has guided, not always successfully, the quasi-science of mythography from Vico to Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss through the literary fantasies and secondary myths of Romanticism. I leave to the indignant shade of the austere Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, the final judgement on the failings of this ongoing intellectual enterprise in the study of myth: “Contemporary man is a traitor to the spirit of his own culture if he creates myths in the knowledge that they are, or rather pretend to be, myths. Our culture's form of intellectual cognition is that of critical scholarship.” 60

II.

II. 8 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET

In the first installment of this essay we disposed of the mythical mill which was said by Snorri Sturluson to be “Amlóði's quern.” 61 With the distracting mill out of the way, one can now ask, who was the Scandinavian Hamlet, Amlóði or Amlethus, as he was named to the story in Iceland and ? The etymologists, predictably, have been very busy with his Icelandic name from the end of the nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War.62 Because in early modern Icelandic and Swedish usage the name became a synonym for a fool or a weakling,63 it has been the etymological practice among them to segment Amlóði into two morphemes which will spell out this acquired meaning of his name in at least one morpheme—e.g., Mod. Ice. aml, “a dither,” plus Old Ice. óðr, “mad.” Such a segmentation, however, is but a cut above a folk etymology,64 and leaves us with a morpheme, aml, which is unattested as a word or a name in the Old Icelandic language. The genesis of the putative meaning of Amlóði was in all likelihood the reverse of what the etymologists have thought. As the nineteenth century English translator of Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History put it, “The prince was not called Amleth because he feigned stupidity; but because Amleth did so, his name came to mean ‘stupid’.” 65 We cannot say what the name might have meant in the old language, outside the story, but we can say, the name did not give rise to the story—the story, rather, gave meaning to the name. And if a historical Viking bore this name in the Irish annals of the beginning tenth century, as some Dane or Norseman indubitably did, in the transliterated Old Irish form of Amlaide,66 one must not therefore imagine that it hinted, of itself, anything to the Irish about Hamlet's legendary character of a “coal-biter” and a trickster, or that any historical person of that name had that character too. The Irish source is precious testimony for us that in the early Middle Ages history and legend had not yet converged in one uniform tradition of story-telling wherein the name of Hamlet would be proverbial for the (feigned) fool.67

A word in passing on this Irish source will not be amiss, in view of the much disputed cultural relations between medieval Ireland and Iceland, and the uncertain provenience of the Hamlet story. The verse-quatrain in which the historical Amlaide and another Viking are coupled together as hateful foreigners and evil-doers voices a reproachful lament by Queen Gormflaith, of the Brega royal family, over Amlaide's egregious slaying of her husband, King Niall Glúndubh, in a pitched battle between the Irish and the at Áth Cliath, 919. The wretched queen may have been the composer of the lament, since she came from a poetic family, but whoever its author, it is John Kelleher's guess that “it belongs to a saga written [in the tenth century] within living memory of the persons and events narrated.” 68 This Irish “saga” will have been a truer tale, then, of the queen and her three husbands (of whom Niall Glúndubh was only one) than the subsequent romance which misrepresented her marriage to Niall as a love match with a youngish man, and misconstrued her obituary, “Gormflaith, daughter of Flann Sinna mac Máel Sechnaill, in penitentia extensa obiit,” to mean that she ended her life in prolonged poverty and neglect, cast off by her royal kin.69 Nial was already middle-aged when he was killed in battle, and read aright, the Latin phrase from Gormflaith's obituary commemorates the long years of religious penance, or claustration, which she spent in a nunnery before her death. How the Viking slayer of the lamented Nial would have emerged in the truer tale of her life is not to be guessed, if only because the Irish story-teller or the queen herself might have minimized his deed, and because, by literay convention, the chroniclers of the British Isles give the credit for it not to him, but to the leader of the Viking host, Sitriuc caech (the blind), alias Gáile (the foreigner).70

Nevertheless, the fact that Amlaide, a foreigner, was even named in a local Irish source was a distinction of which Gormflaith might well complain, as she does of the “fine feat” of the other, Viking Ulbh (ON Úlfr), for having slain the king of Leinster, Cerbhall mac Muirecáin, in 909. Kelleher would identify this one of the two foreigners who are odious to her in the quatrain with the plunderer of Inishowen, in Loch Foyle, 921,71 who was repulsed by the suzerain of the northern Uí Néill, Fergal mac Domnaill. If Ulbh was twice in the public eye as the killer of the king of Leinster and the plunderer of Inishowen, he must have been a rather important personage in the harrying hosts of the and the Norse. Amlaide, the slayer of Niall, seems similarly to have been a person of bad eminence, and if he was named but once in Irish sources, with Ulbh, it may have been merely because, as my informant conceives, he had returned to Denmark after the great battle

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 9 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) of Áth Cliath was over, a slaughter in which no less than sixteen Irish kings died. Either of these two Vikings could have been Danish was well as Norse or Icelandic, since, despite the victory of the Norseman Ólafr the Whìte over the Dublin Danes in 851 and the Irish recapture of Dublin in 901, neither the Norsemen (the Finngaill) nor the Danes (the Dubhgaill) were ever entirely expelled from the country. Sitriuc, in his reign, up to 927, was styled “rí Dubhgall 7 Finngall”—i.e., “king of Danes and Norsemen.” 72 Kelleher summarizes the evidence in our source thus: “(a) the poem on Ulbh and Amlaide is old and most likely factual; (b) Amlaide was a well-known Viking noble and could well have been a Dane; and (c) the fact that he is not mentioned again in the Irish annals, which for some years around that time contain pretty full accounts of the activities of even fairly minor Viking leaders, may simply indicate that he went back to Denmark not long after the battle.” 73

The historical evidence in Ireland for a real Hamlet from Denmark could be collocated with the place-name Ammelhede—Hamlet's Heath—in Jutland74, but all told it must be obvious that the historical Amlaide has no visible relationship to the almost mythical Amlóði of Snaebjörn, or the legendary Amlethus of Saxo.75 Even in Denmark medieval tradition was unsettled as to the final resting-place of Hamlet: Saxo localizes his death in battle at Ammelhede, on land, but a notice in the late thirteenth century Rye Annals speaks of a naval engagement with the Norwegians and a watery grave in Øresund.76 This geographical divergence in Danish tradition about his grave marks a divide in the source materials for the Hamlet story, not only between what little we can call historical and what legendary, but also between what may be Danish and what Icelandic-Norse in its composition. Saxo seems to have purposely oriented the story to the more indigenous restingplace of Hamlet, in Jutland, but further details in his version of the story will corroborate its prior Icelandic-Norse provenience—e.g., the Icelandic name of Amlethus' stepfather, Fengo (from Old Ice. Fengi, an Óðinn byname), and the moot reference to a strange place “whose name is Undensakre, unknown to our people.” 77 Whether the allusion in that reference is to the Old Norse Elysium of Ódáinsakr, or not, it plainly signals the transmission of an unDanish place-name from Saxo's Scandinavian sources in Norway and Iceland.78 In the preface to his history he has generously acknowledged his indebtedness to those sources: “no small part of the present work,” i.e., in the first nine books of the Gesta Danorum, was composed of stories which he had heard directly or indirectly from Icelanders who were conversant with West Norse history and legend in Norway, or out in Iceland.79 In brief, the Hamlet story itself probably took form in Iceland, whatever the nationality of Hamlet happened to be. Although the Irish quatrain, of about the same date as Snaebjörn's lines on Amlóði, can certify that a person with the name of Hamlet—Amlaide—from Denmark or elsewhere did once exist in the tenth century, the Scandinavian story does not concern him, but the increasingly famous hero of Snaebjörn, Saxo, and Shakespeare. If he too ever existed, he died a hero's death on Ammelhede or in Øresund, and was perhaps buried on his heath; but this was all enchanted ground when Saxo received the story, which runs as follows in his version of it, Gest. Dan. [Gesta Danorum] III, vi to IV, ii.

There were two brothers, Horwendillus and Fengo, sons of a former jarl of Jutland, Gerwendillus,80 whom they succeeded to the jarldom with the assent of their overlord, Roricus, the Danish king. The youthful Horwendillus administered the inheritance with his brother for three years, then went off a-viking to win wider renown. A king of Norway, Collerus (ON Kollr), was cruising about on the same errand, and for the sake of honor, they fought a duel, a hólmgangr, on an island. In saga fashion Horwendillus severed the foot of Collerus with a blow of his sword, so that he bled to death. When he had interred his opponent in accordance with the etiquette of hólmgangr, he pursued the king's sister, Sela (= ON Selja?), a female Viking, and slew her also. He shared the spoils from these conquests politically with his overlord, Roricus, and in return the latter gave him his daughter, Gerutha (Shakespeare's ), in marriage. Though a son was born to them—Amlethus—, fortune no longer smiled on Horwendillus. Jealous of his fame and of his favor with Roricus, his brother, Fengo, murdered him and married Gerutha when Amlethus grew up. In justification of these acts he encouraged people to believe that he had “saved” Gerutha thus from the mental cruelty, the “gravissimum … supercilium,” of his brother, but in Saxo's eyes he had only compounded murder with incest in marrying his dead brother's wife.81

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 10 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) To save himself from his uncle and to prepare an adequate revenge for his father's death, the cunning Amlethus pretended to be a notorious character in medieval Scandinavian society—the lazy, good-for-nothing “coal-biter,” or “fireside-sitter,” who, instead of seeking manly fame and exciting adventure (as Horwendillus and Collerus did), squats by the ash-pit of the fire in the hall, at home, and passes remarks on the housecarls and the womenfolk, an inert object of contempt to everyone, dirty, satirical, without a deed to his name. Such a character, however, may be transformed in a trice energetically, in tales of the “lubberly younger son” description, and it has always a hidden heroic-demonic side to it, a promise of better things or a threat of worse, as here. “Sitting at times by the fire, and sweeping together the embers with his hands, it was his wont to shape wooden hooks and harden them in the fire … Asked what he was up to, he replied that he was fashioning barbs for the revenge of his father. There was not a little merriment at his reply, for everyone made light of the presumptuousness of his absurd occupation; and yet that sped his purpose afterwards.” 82 Amlethus' frightful revenge on Fengo and his entourage at the end of book III of the Gesta is foreshadowed in the last words, but his reply to the company here will highlight in his behavior, for every fool trick up to the bloody dénouement, its deceptive blending of devious activity with plainspeaking, declarative of his true intent.

This trait, ‘“twixt jest and earnest,” gives him the essential character of of the trickster and ironist, whose hyphenated role it is to link opposites—truth and falsehood, good and evil, heroism and churlishness, etc.—between which he is in his own person the tertium quid, the mediator.83 The great exemplar of trickery in Scandinavian mythology is of course , the enemy and the friend of the “high” gods, whom he both helps and hinders in their contests with the giants, the chthonic powers of the cosmic underworld. Amlethus, whether by nature or by special circumstance, has the same character as Loki, but his behavior is polarized, more exactly, between feigned madness or inertia, which allays people's suspicions in Fengo's household, and a profound wiliness and resoluteness of spirit, which arouses them. Test after test is tried of his sanity, either with leading questions or compromising situations, but Amlethus dodges every one by never saying or doing more or less than the truth warranted.84 His temporizing is often so evasive that it is a question in places whether even Saxo has understood the double-entendres of his hero, back in the Old Norse or Danish of his source materials. Consciously or unconsciously, however, Saxo had clearly apprehended that it was of the essence of his hero's character to inhabit simultaneously, and without logical contradiction, two opposing realms of value in thought and action. Amlethus must take care that his idlest jest and his wildest eccentricity have some foundations in truth lest his behavior should appear in any way inconsistent to the other characters in the story, and last but not least to the reader of it. “For desirous of being reputed a stranger to falsehood he mixed cleverness with candour, so that neither his words should lack truth, nor the measure of his acuteness be betrayed by a sign of the true facts.” 85 The curious moral earnestness of Amlethus' jesting, presumably, crept into the story through Saxo's manner of retelling it, which was prescribed not so much by the author's clerical education as by his ready apprehension of the two-sided trickster's character in Amlethus—its deadly seriousness and its capricious humorousness.

The first set of tests of Amlethus' madness climaxes with an attempted seduction of the young man by a foster sister of his whom Fengo's men sent into the forest to tempt him, on an outing, to throw off incriminatingly the lethargy that he affected by the fire at home. But his foster brother alerted him to the trap being set for him before he could be caught in the act, and the girl herself covered up for him too in the end. The outing starts off madly enough, with Amlethus riding his horse at break-neck speed into the woods, but seated on it backwards and guiding it by the tail. When a wolf loped across his horse's path, and someone told him it was a colt, he cast an aspersion on his stepfather's military resources with the dry remark that very few of that species of animal fought in Fengo's stable.86 Trotting out along the beaches of Jutland at a slower pace, he was prompted by his companions to two more witticisms, on the sea and its flotsam. The more commonplace one, viz., “the sea grinds sand like a flour mill,” was quoted in the first installment of this essay, in refutation of the mythological misconstructions of the authors of Hamlet's Mill.87 The other is poetically more recherché, asking for a closer reading. Matching wits with him over the rudder of a shipwrecked vessel which had washed up on the shore, his companions imagined it to be an enormous knife, but he at once thought up a use

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 11 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) for such an outsized instrument, saying that it was of a magnitude to carve the largest ham, by which he meant the sea in its immensity, Saxo tells us. There may be a paltry play on words in Old Danish under his Latin,88 or there may be some other innuendo in the Latin text—the fingerpoint of the joke is now lost on us.

After this repartee, the female decoy lured her lover away and his companions withdrew, to let nature take its course. But his foster brother, who was in the company, conveyed on parting a timely, if very veiled, warning to him by shooing a gadfly in his direction with a straw stuck in its tail, as a sign to beware of fraud. How possibly was Amlethus to take proper warning from this inscrutable sign? Scholars like Jörgen Olrik have seen in the gadfly with the straw in its tail a rebus for the Old Danish agnebag, or fraudulent gleaner of fields, to whose shoulders (bag) stray ears of barley or oats (agne—Eng. awns) would adhere.89 Whatever was in the wind, the message flew to Amlethus, who tugged his foster sister off to an impenetrable swamp inland where no one could witness his lovemaking. Then, having lain with her and sworn her by their common upbringing to silence, he rode on with her to Fengo's hall for a salacious reception by his eluded observers. Jeeringly they asked him whether he had had intercourse with the girl. He averred he had raped her. On what kind of pillow?, they asked. On a horse's hoof, a cock's comb, and a panelled ceiling, he replied in riddles, referring by these circumlocutions to Danish swamp flowers which (says Saxo) he had taken the precaution to gather and strew underneath himself and the girl before beginning intercourse.90 Still incredulous, his observers questioned their decoy as to what went on between the two of them in the swamp, but she, as true to him as her word, denied that anything had happened to her at all. His foster brother, in salutation, let on with a studied compliment what he had done for him, and Amlethus as deliberately thanked him with a hazy recollection that, yes, he did remember something flying past him with a bit of straw stuck to its tail—a funny idea of his which merely amused the company, who were none the wiser for that about his enigmatic sanity.

A privy counsellor of Fengo's—the of the story—took the initiative, with his lord's cooperation, in conducting a more searching test than a seduction to expose the feigned fool. Fengo was to depart from the hall as if going on a long journey, and thus extend Amlethus and his mother the opportunity to converse together in perfect intimacy. The counsellor was then to eavesdrop on them in her bower concealing himself in the bed-straw in a dark corner of the room, on the chance of overhearing a self-incriminating speech of Amlethus' to his mother, confiding his inmost thoughts and feelings. This astute counsel being adopted cost the counsellor his life, for Amlethus had a suspicion that he would be spied on in the bower, and with a grotesque show of madness there, crowing like a cock and waving his arms like wings, jumped up and down on the bed-straw till he lit upon the concealed counsellor's body, then thrust his sword in, impaling him. Having killed him, he cut up his body, boiled the pieces, and dropped them down a privy for the swine outside to eat. His crude savagery vented itself in words against his mother with a denunciation in clerical style of her incest and involuntary complicity in his surveillance by Fengo and his henchmen. His reproaches brought the horrified woman over to his side of the situation, but they sound as if they were rather written by Saxo, the cleric, than spoken by Amlethus, his pre-Christian hero. More like Amlethus' brand of lavatory humor is the bald statement from him to the returning Fengo that his counsellor went to the privy and “fell in” (“perque eius ima collapsum”), suffocated, and was eaten, dead, by the swine outside. 91

At this setback Fengo was now himself determined to do away with his stepson and nephew somehow, and hatched a plot to have his ally and blood-brother, the king of Britain, execute him on presentation of a letter of death-sentence. Through this episode, bk. III, vi, 16 ff., the story weaves in a world-wide motif—Schick's “child of fortune with the letter of death-sentence” 92—which patterns the narrative hereafter. The best known instance of one use of this motif in world literature is David's letter to Joab, in II Samuel, xi, vv. 14-17, commanding him to send the letter carrier, Uriah, into the thickest of the battle, that he might be killed in action. Hence Amlethus' letter, a wooden chip carved with , which, as Saxo says, “was formerly a common kind of document,” 93 is occasionally referred to by German scholars as a “Uriah letter,” though Uriah, to be sure, was not the child of fortune that Hamlet was, not escaping death on the field of battle.94 But on a turn of fortune's wheel Amlethus was to die by the sword eventually.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 12 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) With this runic letter and two travelling companions to safeguard it, the prince was dispatched to England. His plotting as usual kept one or two moves ahead of the counterplotting of Fengo and his faction. In taking leave of his mother he bade her hang the hall with net-like drapes against his return, but in a year hold funeral rites for him, as though he were quite dead by then. On the voyage out to England, he extracted the death letter from the baggage of his companions while they slept and rewrote the runes to read that not he, but the two of them were to be put to death, and moreover the king of Britain's daughter was to marry him. The hall drapes were with the wooden hooks he had fashioned (cf. above, p. 381) the stored implements of his final revenge, while the rewriting of the letter was dictated by Shick's motif.

His first official acts in England were hardly diplomatic but nonetheless predisposed the British king by overawing him to credit his version of the letter. To the surprise of the king and his court, the Danish prince was so unmannerly at a reception banquet for him and his companions as to eat none of the food before him—a discourtesy which the king had investigated later that night by a house spy, who brought back even more disquieting news of his guest. For he overheard him tell his companions in their sleeping quarters that the food had been unfit to eat because the bread had smacked of blood, the drink had tasted of iron, and the meat had reeked of rotting human flesh. Furthermore, on this guest's allegation, their hosts, the king and queen, were not of royal but humble birth. The king's eyes were those of a thrall, and the queen dressed and deported herself like a serving girl; she had even had the ill breeding to swallow the morsels of food that she picked from her teeth between courses. The prince's companions had loudly decried this gossip as the babbling of an idiot, but the king, mulling it over, considered that whoever would dare speak out thus under his roof must be an uncommon lunatic, or else more knowing than people believed, and so he investigated the substance of this gossip further for himself.

He soon learned that Amlethus, right in character as the trickster, had been speaking only the truth in his babbling. Under questioning, the king's steward conceded that the grain in the bread had grown in a former battlefield and might have soaked up the blood of the slain, and that the ham they had eaten was from hogs which had chanced to feed on the rotten corpse of a thief. The spring water in the mead was flecked with rust because it had flowed over some discarded old sword-blades.95 Finally, the king's mother confessed under threats that she had conceived him by one of her thralls, and Amlethus, substantiating his charge against the queen himself, informed him that her mother was a bondsmaid who had been captured in war. Far from being resentful at all these unsavory disclosures, the king revered Amlethus' clairvoyance as divinely inspired—a very medieval attitude towards fools,96 but, then, tricksters did have a prophetic uncanny streak in their personalities—and he gave him at once the hand of his daughter in marriage, as the rewritten letter requested. He had treated his two companions hospitably at first, but now he had them summarily hanged, according to the changed tenor of the letter. Since his new son-in-law acted convincingly as if he were pained by this execution, he indemnified him for their deaths with a wergeld payment in gold which Amlethus, somewhat as his Roman prototype, Lucius Junius Brutus, had once done with a pious offering to Apollo, privately melted down and poured into two hollow staves, to be transported into Jutland.97

This turning of the tables on his travelling companions, who were executed in his stead, was the prelude to his grand revenge on his uncle and the rest. In a year's period, when the had given him up for dead, he walked in the doors of Fengo's hall, in motley disarray, “unbraced” like Shakespeare's Hamlet, 98 with his British gold stashed away in the two staves. The household, in mourning for him on his mother's instructions, was greatly consternated at the sight of this scarecrow from the past, but he quickly put everybody in a good humor, as if his resurrection were but another jest of his. Where were his two travelling companions?, was the only question. Unruffled, he held up one stave and then the other to say that both of them were “here.” He seemed, indeed, never more his old self than in the accomplishment of his long-planned revenge. To amuse the housecarls more, and addle their wits, he clownishly helped the servants to dispense the mead among them. As his loose garments hampered his movements, he buckled a sword about his waist, ostentatiously unsheathing it a number of times to try the point and cutting his fingers on it. Members of the household took the weapon away from him, as being too dangerous for a fool to touch, and riveted it into its scabbard with a

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 13 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) bolt. But presently the carousing housecarls became sodden with drink, slid under tables, and fell to the floor in drunken slumbers, so that he could cover them at last with the netted wall-hangings, which he tightened fast about their bodies with the wooden hooks he had fashioned for this revenge and secreted in the folds of his garments. Then he set fire to the hall and stole off with his unusable sword to the nearby sleeping quarters of Fengo, where he confiscated a usable sword by the bed and put the other in its place before awakening him. At the words, “It is Amlethus, with his old hooks by him for his aid …,”99 Fengo grabbed for the bedside sword but could not draw that weapon, and was run through by his own sword in the hand of the avenger. Thus, at the end of book III, fire and sword consumed Fengo and his followers.

The remainder of the story, in book IV, is recapitulatory and repetitive in its variations on the theme of “the child of fortune with the letter of death-sentence.” Henceforth Amlethus assumes another, royal character as earl-king of Jutland, though without repressing entirely his sly character of the feigned fool. In point of character, one would say, he is inferably no less the trickster for being a ruler—there is no conversion from one character to the other, as though, in the cadre of Shakespeare's characterization, a Prince Hal must renounce Falstaff in order to be crowned King Henry V. Rather, another facet of the same trickster's character in Amlethus has revolved before us, an aspect which is as kingly and magnificent as his previous appearance was slovenly and boorish. If a coin or medallion were to be struck of his composite image, however, it should have at least both these faces engraved on it, in token of his fundamental character type, the trickster. In the story his superior role as the earl-king requires every now and then that he “stoop to conquer” and revert to the shady, inferior role of prince in disguise. In general, the split personality of the medieval Hamlet oscillates between kingliness and stealthiness, just as the Shakespearean Hamlet will vacillate between the moral imperative to act and an inhibition to do so in the psychological realm. For this reason Amlethus does not quite fulfill the classical formula for heroism—sapientia et fortitudo—either in his revenge or at his death in battle, fighting with a new Danish overlord. Saxo, rhetorically, is of two minds about his revenge, “whether he ought to be esteemed more bold [fortior], or more astute [sapientior]” in accomplishing it, 100 and unaccountably laments at his death only the “Herculean tasks” he might have performed in a longer reign. 101 We, however, may be assured that this ambivalence of character—sapience or Herculean strength?—in the medieval Hamlet is an authentic hallmark of the true trickster, whose character and behavior are, in function of his in-between state, irreducibly double, whichever side of him is outermost; and the trickster's double part, as said above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”} (p. 381), is to mediate extreme situation which call now for boldness, now for craft, or other such antithetical qualities.

Prudently avoiding the populace the night of his revenge, in the event of some reprisal, Amlethus then addressed on the morrow an appeal for sympathy and support to the Thing—a thoroughly Roman oration, this, in the pathetic style, which Saxo has imitated from the Roman historians of Antiquity and put into the mouth of his northern hero. The speech, as well as the tears shed over it (bk. IV, i, 2-8), would have been out of place in Scandinavian literature in even the more sensational genre of the Icelandic fornaldarsögur, which recount in the vernacular many of the Latinized stories in the first nine books of the Gesta Danorum. A few tears of grief were also shed over the destruction of Fengo and his men, but the Jutes were more moved by the justificatory arguments and emotive pleas of Horwendillus' avenger and son, and acclaimed him unanimously their “king,” as sole heir of the jarldom.

Once that was his, he took ship again for Britain with a well-equipped escort of Jutish warriors, on a triumphant revisit to his father-in-law and wife, which, for magnificence and sumptuousness, was as much unlike the first mission as possible. For himself he had emblazoned a shield with depictions of his whole revenge on it, to advertise himself as the doer of the deed. This painted scenario of the medieval Hamlet story (bk. IV, i, 10), which schematically, and pedantically, sums up the events of book III, resembles the shield descriptions of classical Antiquity,102 but it had good precedent in the earliest skaldic poetry,103 and probably was a native ingredient in the story which has been heavily stylized by Saxo. It is in context not only a stylistic device for narrative summation, but also content for the subject matter of the story in book IV, motivating the queen of Scotland to fall in love with Amlethus at the sight of his bold and crafty deed on the

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 14 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) shield.

The king of Britain could not admire the deed, for one, when his son-in-law admitted to the slaying of Fengo, his blood-brother and ally. The king was in a quandary, having sworn with Fengo a revenge pact if either of them should be killed by an assailant. Should he now abide by their agreement, to the detriment of his own daughter? He should and must, by the sacred duty of revenge.104 Stepping into Fengo's shoes, he chose to take his vengeance on Amlethus by sending him to his death on a second foreign embassy, with another lethal letter. The distant, but not too distant, nemesis this time was a lady—Herminthruda, queen of Scotland105—who had the asocial northen character of the “cruel maiden,” who murders her lovers and suitors, but may be gentled by anyone who can marry her. This character, then, like that of the “coal-biter,” is susceptible of sudden transformations and some improvement. The British king, being a widower, simulated a passion for the queen and sued for her hand in marriage by letter, trusting her to have the messenger, Amlethus, executed for his effrontery on presentation of the proposal. But fortune still favored its child on the match-making mission. For when, towards the end of his journey, he bivouacked in a meadow for a short nap, he piqued the curiosity of the queen, who had the approaching embassy scouted by her men, and one of them succeeded in removing the shield from under his head and the letter of the British king from his bagage while he lay sleeping. The message in the letter filled her with repugnance, but, contrary to plan, the depicted story on the shield enamoured her of the messenger, and accordingly she altered the letter to a request that she should marry him rather than the elderly British king.

The rewriting trick, which, in the tale, was copied by her from a depiction on the shield of Amlethus' alteration of Fengo's letter, may have been a separate variant of the old letter delivery motif, as exemplified in later medieval French literature.106 Structurally, however, there is no occasion for postulating an external source to the Herminthruda affair,107 which Saxo built up around the stock “cruel maiden” character from analogous incidents of the Hamlet story itself, in book III. One artistically inconvenient complication in Amlethus' family relations comes of this affair which neither Saxo nor his commentators, Paul Herrmann and Schick, have disentangled—namely, bigamy. As Herrmann notes, “It is patent that Saxo finds himself somewhat at a loss as to what to do with Amlethus' two wives.” 108 Nevertheless, since Saxo does not openly disapprove of his hero's bigamy, as he did of his mother's incest (cf. above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”], p. 380), Herrmann glosses over the irregularity as a peculiarity of North Germanic marital custom among the Danish kings, for which Schick can cite an Indian parallel, e.g., in a Sanskrit version of the Hamlet story, the Jaiminibharata.109 Now, inasmuch as the letter delivery in book IV of the Gesta was largely a reworking of that in book III, the simplest explanation of the matter is that the marriage of the messenger to a princess or a queen must have been an invariant of the motif of “the child of fortune with the letter of death-sentence”: i.e., twice told is twice married. In the reworking of the epistolary episode Saxo was unable either to end it differently or to assimilate the two endings completely, one to the other. Amlethus ultimately has to make his way home to Jutland with two wives in tow.

In the Scottish meadow, meanwhile, he had discovered, on waking, the theft of the letter and the shield, but, pretending to sleep again, he caught the queen's scout when he tried to replace them where he had stolen them from. He detained the man by him for no further purpose in the story than to exonerate himself in the eyes of his British father-in-law from any suspicion of treason—a scruple more attributable to Saxo's moralizing conception of Amlethus' double character of trickster (cf. above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”], p. 381 f.). The unblushing queen, by contrast, did not stand upon ceremony at the formal delivery of the letter, but presuming on her text of it, offered him at once her hand and therewith her kingdom. Amlethus, as if his response were a foregone conclusion, gladly accepted the offer, and they were married. Then, with his second wife and an extra troop of Scots in his escort, the Jutish Don Juan descended into England to meet with his first wife and the British king. The other wife—now with a new-born son in her arms—was willing to acquiesce in his bigamy, but not her father, as she warned, who had been cheated of a wife in his Scottish bride. Forewarned, Amlethus donned a byrnie of chain-mail under his tunic before attending the royal banquet spread for him.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 15 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) As was to be feared, the king had got into a real passion, of rage and jealousy, and jabbed a spear at him in welcome from the doorway of the hall; but the byrnie deflected the spear point, and the hero escaped unharmed to his military escort outside. He released the Scottish queen's scout to notify the king that he, Amlethus, was innocent of having intrigued with the queen against him—“to such extent he considered honor ought to be observed in all circumstances” 110—, but the king in a fury attacked him and his men with his housecarls, and would have massacred the whole Scottish-Jutish party, had not their leader reformed the broken ranks overnight with the bodies of the first slain, which he stood up in such lifelike postures of defence that (most improbably) the British housecarls took fright at these spectral reinforcements next morning and fled the field.111 In the rout the British king was killed, and without impediment the victorious Amlethus could sail home to his own kingdom with his two wives, the remnant of his Jutish warriors, and the exchequer of Britain.

The conclusion of the story is much like the beginning, with Amlethus' and Horwendillus' political roles transposed. Just as the latter had ingratiated himself with his Danish overlord, Roricus, by sharing the spoils of freebooting with him, so Amlethus shared some of his British booty with the new overlord, Viglekus,112 who in his absence had been harassing his mother by contesting the legitimacy of his title to the Jutish jarldom.113 Late medieval Danish history, which knows of Viglekus as a king of Norway, further reinforced the structural parallelism between the beginning and end of the story, to the point of making him out to be already married to Gerutha as the stepfather of Amlethus.114 But in Saxo's narrative Viglekus is the public enemy of Amlethus, his mother, his kingdom, and perhaps those of other jarls too.

When the homecoming Amlethus had appeased his tyrannical new overlord with deceitful gifts, he mustered his forces to be avenged in battle for the affront to him and his—apparently catching Viglekus off guard and conquering him, but then, through a series of reverses that have become disconnected in our text, being outmaneuvered by him and challenged to do battle again with a much larger army of his, levied in the provinces of Skane and . Where honor is at stake finally, cunning may play none of its tricks, and the hero must go unflinching into battle, to almost certain death, or forfeit the character of earl-king. Amlethus’ last thoughts in this dilemma were neither of his much abused mother, nor of his nameless first wife and child, the empty ciphers of the family group. Rather, they were all of Herminthruda, the one woman who counted in his affections. Rising to the occasion, she pledged herself to die with him, if he should die—a romantic gesture of hers towards the funerary practice of suttee in ancient Scandinavia. At his death, either on Ammelhede or in Øresund (cf. above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”], p. 378f.), she did not immolate herself, however, but instead married his slayer, Viglekus115, thus imitating Gerutha's unbecoming conduct at the death of his father.116 The moral to the tale is a piece of conventional wisdom from the clerical mind of Saxo: “donna è mobile,” and fortune is fickle, even with its favorites.

The elucidative paraphrase of the medieval Latin version of the Hamlet story in the foregoing pages will give readers its several themes and the overall structural configuration of its central epistolary motif. Saxo's narrative, divided between books III and IV of the Gesta Danorum into two parts, one a close variant of the other, intertwines their themes of incest and bigamy with the red thread of the revenge theme, continuing throughout the story. Since the incest was problematic to Saxo, the bigamy not, revenge in book III is a moral means of redeeming Amlethus' mother by the punishment of his stepfather, whereas in book IV it is ineffectual without a problem, and ex post facto his second wife is morally compromised by marriage to another man, i.e., the tyrant Viglekus. As in the classical incest myth of Oedipus,117 the problematic and incestuous levirate marriage of the first part of the Hamlet story both undervalues and overvalues blood relations in the fratricidal murder of Horwendillus and the marriage itself of his wife to his brother. In the murky atmosphere of double—entendres, riddles, and enigmas which generally envelops incest myths,118 the plot of Amlethus' revenge thickens, and a counterplot is laid—the first letter delivery mission—which, if successful, will finish off the line of Horwendillus. But since Amlethus foils Fengo's counterplot by the trick of rewriting the letter to the British king, this mission has the contrary effect of reversing, or chiastically restructuring the course of coming events, so that, instead of Horwendillus' line, Fengo's two followers and

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 16 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) then Fengo himself and his whole household are destroyed. The cooperation of Gerutha with Amlethus in his revenge guarantees her an honorable status as a widow. Thus the problem of incest is “solved” as in a myth through a reversal of events in one episode which gradually equalizes the disproportionate family relationships between the principal characters of the story: Amlethus marries advantageously out of the country, Fengo pays with his life for the murder of Horwendillus, and Gerutha is decently widowed. The mediation of the trickster's character in the avenger119 is in good measure responsible for the equableness of these results.

Marriage was the regular concomitant of letter delivery in stories of this kind, and a second such mission in book IV, to Scotland, would superadd a wife to the story, a second wife whose coexistence with the first may then have seemed customary to Saxo in comparison with the polygamous marriages of the pre-Christian Scandinavians. The unproblematic bigamy, on the other hand, was most inconvenient for an artistic handling of the second part of the story, in which the nameless and submissive first wife and her new-born child do not participate in the action, once she has warned Amlethus of her father's enmity to him, but hover around him in the background superfluously. There cannot be a final resolution of the tragedy under the circumstances. In book III the key incident in Britain initated a dramatic reversal of plot against counterplot; repeated in book IV with minor variations, it encumbers the action with supernumeraries. Revenge is suicidal under the tyranny of Viglekus, yet the beloved Herminthrudas throws herself, not on the funeral pyre, but into the arms of her husband's oppressor. The virtuous first wife and the son that might have revenged his father some day are heard of no more. So Amlethus dies a hero's death, but the story ending is inconclusive.

The supreme artistic form of the Hamlet story was to be achieved in Shakespeare's play, but only by eliminating the second Scottish embassy and severely restricting the scope of the first British mission, which in modern performances of Hamlet is often eliminated too for even greater economy of incident. Paradoxically, this Shakespearean achievement displaced once and for all the kernel of the story from the center of things to the periphery, thereby ruling out any happy solution of the incest problem, as in book III of the Gesta Danorum. In the murderous revenge tragedy of Hamlet even Gertrude perishes. By way of compensation for this bloodshed, the trickster character of Hamlet was ennobled and psychologically deepened in the play. With what a wealth of psyhcology the feigned “inertia” of Amlethus 120 has been transmuted by Shakespeare, through French and English translations, into the wholly convincing procrastination of Hamlet!

This was a literary peak in the structural evolution of the story which men of letters and scholars of our western culture have looked up to ever afterwards, but the direct inheritor of Saxo's version was, rather, an anonymous Icelandic contemporary of Shakespeare's, who wrote the fantastic sequel to a late medieval Latin epitome of the Gesta (bks. III-IV)—a sequel entitled in Icelandic, The Saga of Ambales or Amlóði the Fool.121 If, as is probable, the Hamlet story originated in Iceland (cf. above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”], p. 379), the round of Scandinavian story-telling has come full circle, and in this saga the Latin-Danish Hamlet and the Icelandic-Norse have at length been reunited in the folk figure of the fool—“hinn heimski,” Amlóði's byname. As a trickster, Ambales-Amlóði is crudely comic, and his saga, which reads like one of the surreal Hispano-French romances which drove Don Quijote mad, is so extravagant and inartistic that its first scholarly reader—an Icelander who had listened to humbler old wives' tales of Hamlet in his boyhood—pronounced it “anilem quippe nec tressis fabulam, nuperque confectam”—“an old wives' tale, not worth indeed three coppers, and but recently got up.” 122

The life of Ambales, the lubberly younger son of a king of Cimbria and a Burgundian lady (whose name, Amba, is a shortening of her son's), is a highly adventurous and a happy one, on the whole, though much too long to be condensed within the space of this essay installment. There is neither incest, nor bigamy in the family anymore, but a painful and barren ménage à trois, numbering his bereaved mother, the (unrelated) Sycthian butcherer of his father, and the childless wife of this man, may be regarded as vaguely bigamous. No special problem can be made of this triangle for the saga, really. A friendly witch who had been midwife to

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 17 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) Queen Amba at his birth put a hex on the Scythian so that he could not even look the queen in the eye, after having her husband hanged, without sensations of acute bodily distress. She never does sleep with him during her captivity (ch. ix), and he has to take another lady to wife, on whom he is unable to beget a child (chs. xii-xiii); “and people held this was the witch's magic, that she might have spellbound him, in intercourse with women.” 123 The one letter delivery episode in the saga, which sends Ambales to the Scythian court of Tamerlaus (= Tamberlaine, ch. xxiv ff), a “milder” (!) brother of his father's executioner, mechanically expedites his revenge, and a redundant rescue of his mother from a fate worse than death that never befalls her. Thus, for lack of a solution to the incest problem, the Hamlet story is unrelieved tragedy in Shakespeare's play, but for lack of a problem in bigamy (or a bigamous ménage à trois), it is an inconclusive tale of woe in the Gesta Danorum (bk. IV), or an artless extravaganza in the saga. In this literature, if the Hamlet trickster is not to mediate the action of the story—i.e., solve an incest problem—, he will either die a hero more or less tragically, or else dwindle to a fool, being halved, so to speak, in two roles between the tragic and the comic.

Notes

1. 1969. Creuzer, p. 285, and A. von Humboldt, Max Müller, Usener, Wissowa, Frazer, and Cumont, p. 326, are the authors' scholar-heroes. Useful reviews of Hamlet's Mill (hereafter HM) in the Scientific American, vol. 221 (Nov., 1969), p. 159, by P. Morrison, and in Isis, vol. 61 (Winter, 1970), pp. 540-1, by L. White, Jr. I owe these references to the kindness of the publishers, Gambit Inc., who sent them to me with others, at my request. 2. Myth. I (1964), p. 20. 3. Cf. with the just quoted passage, another on the Freudian “myth” of the Oedipus complex, in Structural Anthropology (I), trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (1963), p. 217. On this point, see my brief account of Lévi-Strauss's mythography in Occident magazine (Spring, 1974), pp. 159-71. 4. Snaebjörn's verse, in the Snorra Edda, Skáldskaparmál 33, ed. G. Jónsson (1959), p. 143: “Hvatt kveða hraera Grótta / hergrimmastan skerja / út fyrir jarðar skauti / eylúðrs níu brúðir, / þaer er, lungs, fyrir löngu, / líðmeldr, skipa hliðar / baugskerðir rístr barði / ból, Amlóða mólu.” Translation: “They tell that nine maids of the island-bed [= the sea] stir briskly the roughest Grótti-grinder of the skerries, at the outskirt of the earth—those ones who long ago ground Hamlet's alemash. The ring-shortener [i. e., the lord who dispenses ring-gold] cleaves the couch of the sides of ships [= the sea] with a ship's prow.” It was not to be expected that Santillana and Dechend, in appendix 5, would be able to find their way through this poetic maze with only the secondary literature of translations and commentaries at their command. In the kenning “eylúðr,” “island-bed,” the island is “embedded” in the surrounding water as the nether stone of Grótti, the mill, is embedded in an iron-bound emplacement. See, further on, p. 364 above [in “The Medieval Hamlet”], and footnote 18 below. 5. Gesta Danorum, eds. J. Olrik and H. Raeder (1931), p. 79: “Arenarum quoque praeteritis clivis, sabulum perinde ac farra aspicere jussus, eadem albicantis maris procellis permolita esse respondit. Laudato a comitibus responso, idem a se prudenter editum asseverabat.” 6. As owner of the mill, Hamlet becomes a giant among giants for several scholars. 7. HM, p. 87. 8. Ibid., p. 136. 9. Ibid., p. 147f. 10. Note in ibid., pp. 91 and 366, that the transfer of the names of Grótti and it prinders, Fenja and Menja, to places and things in the western islands largels gostdates the medieval poem (eleventh century); and is not a whirlpooly p. 208, but a well! 11. (1968), pp. 536-40. Texts of Gróttasöngr and Snorri's commentary in Eddu Kvaeði, ed. G. Jonsson (1959), II, pp. 505-13, and Snorra Edda, pp. 166-8, respectively; the Gróttasöngr was copied in with the MSS of the Snorra Edda, but it is quite misleading to refer to it as “Snorri's tale,” in HM, p. 90, where the authors also quote unwittingly from the translation of a faulty text of the song in Vigfússon/Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale (reprint, 1965), I, p. 188. 12. See Eddica Minora, eds. A. Heusler and W.Ranisch (reprint, 1974), pp. xxvi, 30, 32.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 18 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) 13. III, 15, cited in HM, p. 378. Otherwise Mýsingr is independently attested as a surname in Norway about a century later; see B. Sigfússon, “The Names of Sea Kings,” Modern Philology, 32 (Nov., 1934), p. 135. 14. In appendix 6 of HM. 15. HM, p. 50. 16. That these “readers” have no more than a dictionary knowledge of Old Icelandic is shown inter alia by their ignorance of ordinary double preposition constructions in the language, such as “fyr … neðan” and “út fyrir,” from which they think to isolate “fyr[ir]” in special meanings (HM, pp. 158, 363 f.). “It is hard to deny that translation from the dead tongues is an art that does not often go with a knowledge of positional astronomy,” Morrison opined in his review of Hamlet's Mill (loc. cit., fn. 1 above). It is impossible to deny, he should have said, that the knowledge of positional astronomy in this book does not often go with a reading of the texts in the dead languages. The knowledge is of little avail to its possessors without the art of translation. 17. HM, p. 389. 18. See the “hraungrýtiskvarnar” in his Íslenzkir þjóðhaettir (1961), pp. 53 and 98, and the medieval and early modern models in E. C. Curwen's paper, “Querns,” Antiquity 11 (June, 1937), pp. 135-51. On the troublesome word “lúðr,” which denotes basically a variety of containers, see also E. O. G. Turville-Petre's contribution to the Dumézil Festschrift in Latomus, 45 (1960), p. 209 ff. 19. M. Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, trans. J. E. Anderson (1967), p. 159. 20. So L. White Jr., in Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), fn. p. 109; but he dates Gróttasöngr too early, to the tenth century. 21. The statement in appendix 32 is characteristic: “Considering that removed posts or pegs, pulled-out pins, wrecked axles, and felled trees have accompanied this whole investigation as a kind of basso ostinato, we cannot pass in silence over these super-important posts …” (= the masts of the ark in the Gilgamesh epic), HM, p. 412 with reference to p. 197. 22. The cosmic myth seekers admit as much when they condescendingly say, “But one cannot expect the rough Norse mythography to follow it [i.e., the heavenly Mill] in these legends, which are centered upon storm and wreck …,” HM, p. 146. 23. W. Baetke's assertion in a review of the second edition of Jan de Vries's Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, reprinted in Baetke's Kleine Schriften (1973), p. 42 and footnote. Certainly, no one would have believed in medieval Scandinavia that the daughters of Aegir, god of the sea, were “only the agents of a shadowy controlling power” (Mundilfari) in grinding the rocks to an “ale-mash” of sand, the unhistorical “myth” of HM, p. 139. 24. Named in þórbjörn dísarskald's lines on , in E. A. Kock (ed.), Den Norsk-Isländska Skaldediktningen (1946), I, p. 74, as well as in Snorra Edda, p. 167, and Eddu Kvaeði, II, pp. 505-6. The Íslenzk Orðabók (1963) must be wrong, sub nom., to gloss this byname as an “Óðinsheiti.” 25. On this nineteenth century mythography, see W. Baetke's excellent critical essay, “Die Götterlieder der Edda und ihre Deutungen,” in Kleine Schriften, pp. 195-205. 26. HM, p. 111. No evidence is ever forthcoming for this so-called “etymology” after the warning words, “Now the discussion leaps, without apologies, over the impassable fence erected by modern philologists to protect the linguistic family of Indo-European languages from any improper dealings with strange outsiders,” p. 26. Perhaps the authors are unaware that the discussion is still astraddle the fence. 27. Hymn X, vii, 2, cited in HM, p. 233. 28. In the Finnish etymological dictionary of Itkonen and Joki, Suomen Kielen Etymologinen Sandkirja (1969), “sampo” is derived from “sammas,” “stake,” without recourse to exotic Oriental morphemes, which have been the favorite specialty of foreign scholars from Grimm to Santillana and Dechend. Although in the forties Uno Harva identified the pillared Sampo as a mythic mainstay of the universe with a leaning megalith carved with runes which existed in the eighteenth century in Thorsanger Fjord, and seemed to him to point to Lapp and Germanic beliefs in a world pillar, another Finnish scholar after him, Matti Kuusi, has broken the vicious circle of previous etymologizing and

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 19 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) sifted out of the Sampo story the historical and literary indices of its native and foreign origins, so that its composition can be accurately dated to the beginning of the Viking period. Historically, it may hark back earlier to a local river raid on Pohjola, but its nearest literary analogues are to the fabulous northern voyages in Scandinavian “tall stories” of the “troll song” and fornaldarsaga genres. See the resumé of Finnish scholarship on the Sampo by M. Haavio, in Vänämöinen, Folklore Fellows Communication, 144 (1952), p. 208 ff. 29. Reference is to R. B. Anderson's translation of his Teutonic Mythology (1907). 30. Cf. HM, p. 141. 31. Santillana and Dechend choose with Snorri to term Ragnarök, Ragnarökr (“twilight of the gods”), presumably because the latter has faintly pleasing astronomical overtones; cf. HM, fn. p. 156: “the one question never raised is whether the poets might not be dealing with hard scientific facts.” 32. See Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. W. Trask (1954). 33. Nonsensically translated “whirl-field” in HM, p. 154, since “iða” has the meaning of “eddy”; but the morpheme ið-, cognate with Lat. iterum, the suffixed form of the IE pronominal stem i, denotes primarily the continuity of the flow, the repetition of the motion in the water, and thus it connotes the eternity of the field. See the note to Sigurður Nordal's edition of Völuspá (2nd ed., 1952), p. 60. My references to the poem will be to this edition of it. 34. Cf. Mythe et Épopée, I, p. 186 ff. 35. Rectification in E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North (1964), p. 152. 36. In Snorra Edda, p. 44. 37. Völ. In Skamma, st. 8, from Hyndluljóð, in Eddu Kvaeði II, p. 501. 38. Needless to say, Fenja and Menja cannot be added to this list, as in HM, pp. 157-8, on mere suspicion of maternity. 39. Cited in Gylfaginning 27, of Snorra Edda, p. 43. 40. See E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion, p. 151f.; Dumézil's association of the ram with the ninth wave to shore in Welsh folklore, loc. cit., fn. 34 above, is definitely to be rejected. 41. So J. de Vries, Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1961), sub nom. 42. HM, pp. 158-9. 43. Teutonic Mythology, pp. 581 ff. and 595, quoted in HM, pp. 139 and 159. The most recent and most convincing etymological characterization of Heimdallr, by which he may be associated with the World Ash, involves a very different conception of his divine attributes—luxuriance, proliferation, etc. Cf. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion, p. 153. 44. Cited in Skáldskaparmál 15, of Snorra Edda, p. 125. 45. Eddu Kvaeði, ed. G. Jónsson (1959), I, p. 73. 46. Cf. sub “Mundill”/“Mundilfari,” B. Sigfusson, “Names,” loc. cit., fn. 13 above, J. de Vries, Wörterbuch, and Egilsson/Jónsson, Lexicon Poeticum (1913-16), as against Cleasby/Vigfússon/Craigie, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (1957), whose cross-reference to “möndull” is in error. 47. HM, p. 139; cf. also appendix 14, with this specimen of the authors' own etymologizing: “… mandull / möndull is not yet mundill, and mundus is not identical with mandala, yet the whole clan of words depends from a central conception sticking firmly to mnt/mnd, and these consonants connote a swirling, drilling motion throughout [!],” p. 379. 48. Skáldskaparmál 15, in Snorra Edda, p. 125. 49. Cf. their badly “improved” translation of st. 2, “Nine worlds I know, nine spaces of the measure-tree which is beyond the earth,” with the original text in Nordal's edition, p. 48, “níu man ek heima, / níu íviði, / mjötvið maeran / fyr mold neðan,” which should be translated, “I remember nine worlds, nine roots, the marvellous measure-tree down in the earth,” scil., whence Óðinn has raised the sibyl up to question her. 50. Dumézil's shrewd guess, op. cit., I, p. 185, to be weighed against the phrase, descriptive of Heimdallr, in Völuspá In Skamma st. 7, Eddu Kvaeði II, p. 501, “naddgöfugr maðr,” “spear-worthy man.” 51. Quoted by Jón Helgason in Handritaspjall (1958), pp. 112-13.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 20 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) 52. Bibliography in Kleine Schriften, p. 377 ff; the hypercriticism of his historical and literary studies in Old Icelandic literature and culture does not detract from his just criticism of Germanic mythography and Religionswissenschaft. 53. In Mythe et Épopée, 3 (1973), p. 14, Dumézil has denied he is a structuralist altogether. 54. Myth. I, p. 346. 55. See the suggestive passage on method in the 1744 version of the Princìpi di una Scienza Nuova I, 4, in Opere Filosofiche, eds. N. Badaloni and P. Cristofolini (1971), p. 467: “Anzi ci avvanciamo ad affermare ch'in tanto chi medita questa scienza egli narri a se stesso questa storia ideal eterna [scil., the universal history of mankind], in quanto, essendo questo mondo di nazioni stato certamente fatto dagli uomini …, e perciò dovendosene ritruovare la guisa dentro le modificazione [= potentialities] della nostra medesima mente umana, egli, in quella pruova fovette, deve, dovrà [the ‘proof’ for the logic of events in history], esso stesso sel daccia …” In E. Auerbach's words, Gesammelte Aufsätze (1967), p. 269, “it is sufficient to stress the fact that Vico had achieved by this theory the predominance of the historical sciences, based on the certitude that men can understand men, that all possible forms of human life and thinking, as created and experienced by men, must be found in the potentialities of the human mind; that, therefore, we are capable of re-evoking human history from the depth of our own consciousness.” Cf. now the full passage in Lévi-Strauss, loc. cit., fn. 54 above: “Et si l'on demande à quel ultime signifié renvoient ces significations [i.e., of the myths] qui se signifient l'une l'autre …, l'unique réponse que suggère ce livre [Le Cru et le Cuit] est que les mythes signifient l'esprit, qui les élabore au moyen du monde dont il fait lui-même partie. Ainsi peuvent être simultanément engendrés, les mythes eux-mêmes par l'esprit qui les cause, et par les mythes, une image du monde déjà inscrite dans l'architecture de l'esprit.” Vico is more introspective in his mentalism than Lévi-Strauss but the latter's is predicated on the Viconian certum that the positive meaning of myth is generated by the interaction of mind or imagination with a man-made world. For Santillana and Dechend, however, myth is simply the symbolic result of the interaction of mind with physical nature, as in outer space, among the stars … 56. In Structural Anthropology (I), pp. 206-31; on the discrepancies between the essay and the Mythologiques, see again my essay in the Spring, 1974 issue of Occident, passim. 57. His mot in Myth. I, p. 21. 58. Of Schick's four volume Corpus Hamleticum (1912-38), see especially the preface to volume I, pp. 8-14. This anthology, the omnium gatherum of an old-fashioned German scholar, cries out for some assessment, but Santillana and Dechend are unacquainted with his work. I take up in the second installment of this essay the structural pattern of the motif in Saxo's Hamlet story. 59. HM, p. 51. 60. “The Task of Cultural History,” in Men and Ideas, trans. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marle (1959), p. 61. 61. See above, p. 358 f. 62. Of the older philological studies I would cite: F. Detter, “Die Hamletsage,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum und deutsche Litteratur, 36 (1892), pp. 1-25; I. Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland (1898), Introduction—the same updated in The Sources of Hamlet (1926); A. Olrik, “Amletsagnet på Island” (review of Gollancz's Hamlet in Iceland), Arkiv för nordisk filologi, 15 (1899), pp. 360-76; K. Malone, The Literary History of Hamlet (1923); R. Meissner, “Der Name Hamlet,” Indogermanische Forschungen, 45 (1927), pp. 370-94; and F. R. Schröder, “Der Ursprung der Hamletsage,” GRM, 26 (1938), pp. 81-108. Schröder cites, p. 97, J. M. N. Kapteyn, “Zwei Runeninschriften aus der Terp von Westeremden,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 57 (1933), pp. 171-226, in reference to a runic inscription with Hamlet's name (“amluþ”) on it, dated 750, from a village in the province of Groningen. The line which Kapteyn translates, “Auf Opheim [a Jutish place-name?] nahm Stellung (nahm den Kampf auf) Amluþ,” p. 205, tells us little. 63. See the lines from the Swedish ballad quoted after Torfaeus in the Cleasby/Vigfússon/Craigie Icelandic-English Dictionary (1957), sub “Amlóði”: “Tha slog konungen handom samman / och log fast och gorde aff gamman / rett som han vore en Amblode / then sig intet godt forstode …”—“Then

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 21 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) the king clapped his hands together and laughed heartily and made merry, just as if he were a Hamlet who did not comprehend well …” (also quoted by Meissner, “Der Name Hamlet,” p. 375, in a dialectally different text). Already in the late Middle English romance of The Wars of Alexander (a fourteenth to fifteenth century work), the name was a borrowed term of abuse: “Ane amlaugh [Hamlet], ane asaleny [little donkey], ane ape of all othire, / A wirling [], a wayryngle [butcher bird], a wawil-eyid shrewe, / The caitifeste creatour that cried was evire …,” 11. 1704-7, quoted by Gollancz in The Sources of Hamlet, p. 59. And today there are three field-stones for weight-lifting contests in Iceland, with the names of Fullsterkur (Full-Strength), Hálfsterkur (Half-Strength), and Amlóði—the weakling's stone. 64. See Gollancz's note, Sources, p. 32: “… in all probability the ending of the word (óði = mad) helped to fix popular usage of the name ‘Amloði’.” 65. O. Elton, appendix 2 of The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus (London, etc., 1906), II, p. 599. 66. One of the philological conjectures of Gollancz on this name form, as emended in Sources, p. 49 ff., has been amply confirmed for me, in litt. 1. 13. ‘75, by John V. Kelleher of Harvard, the historian of medieval Ireland, who, with the Celticist Daniel F. Melia, of the University of California, Berkeley, has generously assisted me with the translation and interpretation of Old Irish materials relevant to the historical aspect of the Hamlet story. This Celtic-Scandinavian name was cursed in a tenth century quatrain in Old Irish as belonging to a foreigner (gáile) who had killed the king of Ireland, Niall Glúndubh, in 919, at Áth Cliath: “Orc ormsa cumaoin an dá ghall / Marbsat Niall 7 Cearbhall; / Cearbhall la hUlbh, comall ngle, / Niall Glúndubh la hAmhlaidhe”—“Evil to me is the company of the two foreigners who slew Niall and Cearbhall; Cearbhall [was slain] by Ulbh—a fine feat—[and] Niall Glúndubh by Amlaide.” The text, as quoted by Gollancz, p. 50, has recently been reedited by Joan Radner in a Harvard dissertation (which I have not seen). For the prepositional phrase “la hAmhlaidhe” in the text, the scribe of the Brussels MS. wrote “la Hómainde.” If he was transcribing “la hÓmainde” in the MSS., Kelleher goes on to argue, “there would be some evidence for an original unlenited ‘m’ in the ultimate source text—which, if true, would at least be a step nearer Amlódi. Of course …, the lenition of intervocalic ‘m’ and ‘d’ in a name like this would be almost automatic for an Irish scribe, if the name were unfamiliar and he wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it anyway. Like O'Donovan [the mid-nineteenth century Irish editor of the text] he would tend to equate it with or similate it to Amhlaeibh, a most familiar name.” Cf. the similar reasoning of K. Malone, The Literary History (cited fn. 62, above), p. 53 f. The text was thrice reproduced by J. O'Donovan with the wrong name, Amhlaeibh, for Amlaide, in The Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters (1851), II, sub annis 904 and 917 (= 919), and in Three Fragments of the Irish annals (1860), sub anno 909. 67. For this reason “the Scandinavian kingdom of Ireland” would not be “the locality where the northern tale of ‘Hamlet,’ as we know it from Saxo, was finally developed some time in the eleventh century”—an overstatement of Gollancz's in Sources, p. 55. Nor do the Irish connections of Snaebjörn galti, who first named Hamlet to the story in Iceland, have to be the intermediaries between the poet and the story earlier (so Gollancz, p. 56), when there is no evidence of Irish transmission of the Hamlet anecdote in his extant verse. But what about the thought, in Sources, p. 54, that the Norse name Amlóði might have been calqued on an Irish morpheme in a Celtic-Scandinavian community? Daniel Melia has kindly advised me that, according to the Royal Irish Academy dictionary (first fasc.), the nearest Irish word to the name would be the verb form “amlaid,” but that this verb was used only much later, and then very infrequently, in the meaning of “adorn.” It seems therefore best to treat Amlaide as a mostly Scandinavian morpheme which intruded itself into Old Irish without semantic admixtures of the Hamlet story, from wherever. Norse Amlóði or Jutish Amleðae was the formative of Amlaide, and not vice versa. Cf. P. Herrmann, Die Heldensagen des Saxo Grammaticus: Kommentar (1922), p. 262. 68. From his letter, cited fn. 66, above. 69. The obituary in Chronicon Scottorum, ed. W.M. Hennessy (1866), sub ann. 947 (= 948); other poems under her name in O. Bergin (ed.), Irish Bardic Poetry (1970), pp. 202-15, 308-15.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 22 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) 70. This discrepancy between local Irish and general British history has bothered Gollancz, Sources, p. 52, but it is just a wrinkle of style in the official historiography of Great Britain in the Middle Ages. “A normal way of abbreviating a once long and complicated entry on a battle like this,” Kelleher writes in his letter, “would be to say that Niall Glúndubh fell by Striuc caech.” 71. See the entry under 919 in The Annals … by the Four Masters, II (as in fn. 66). 72. See his obituary sub ann. in The Annals of Ulster, ed. W. M. Hennessy (1887), I. 73. From his letter again, ad fin. 74. Ammelhede < *Amlaeðae-heðae, the West Danish form of the place-name; see P. Herrmann, Kommentar (as in fn. 67), p. 252. 75. None, either, to the Middle English amlaugh (cf. fn. 63), from the Norse Amlóði. Herrmann's synthesis, Komm., p. 286 f., of the Irish and Scandinavian sources exceeds the given facts. 76. Cf. with Gest. Dan., eds. J. Olrik and H. Raeder (1931), IV, ii, 3, p. 92: “Insignis eius sepultura ac nomine campus apud Iutiam exstat,” the notice in those annals, Scriptores Rerum Danicarum Medii Aevi, ed. J. Langebek (1772), I, p. 152: “Hunc [scil. Ambletum] Wichlethus rex Norwegiae, vitricus eius, occidit in Oresund in praelio …” On variations of this sort in the story see R. Meissner, “Der Name Hamlet,” p. 392f, P. Herrmann, Komm., p. 294, and I. M. Boberg, “Saxo's Hamlet,” American-Scandinavian Review, 44 (1956), p. 53. 77. I follow Boberg in these details, p. 54; the Undensakre reference is in Gest. Dan. IV, ii, 1, p. 91. 78. So Boberg, p. 54. Scholars have also probed for Danicisms among the puns of Amlethus in Gest. Dan. III, vi, 10-11, and uncovered in one pun three Danish, and non-Icelandic, marsh flowers, tussilago or caltha palustris, rhinantus, and phragmites; see P. Herrmann, p. 253, and H. Sperber, “Conundrums in Saxo's Hamlet Episode,” PMLA, 64 (Sept., 1949), p. 865 ff. 79. See his “Praefatio,” i, 4, p. 5, with the handsome tribute to the Icelanders as students of world history: “Cunctarum quippe nationum res gestas cognosse memoriaeque mandare voluptatis loco reputant, non minoris gloriae iudicantes alienas virtutes disserere quam proprias exhibere.” According to A. Olrik, Kilderne til Sakses Oldhistorie (1894), II, pp. 280 and 290, his literary middlemen were either Icelandic travellers from western Norway, or Danish story-tellers. 80. The first name—Amlethus' father's—had the reflexes, Aurvandill, in Old Norse and Auriwandalo, in Gothic—see J. de Vries, Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1961), sub “Aurvandill.” J. Grimm and his trusting readers, Giorgio di Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, erred morphologically in correlating the initial syllable of the name, Hor-, with ON ör, “arrow,” so as to contrast with Ger- of Gerwendillus, a common Germanic word for “spear.” (See Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, trans. J. S. Stallybrass (reprint New York, 1966), I, p. 375 f., and their Hamlet's Mill (1969), appendix 2, p. 357.) The correlate of Hor- in Old Norse would have been aurr, which means, most unhelpfully, “mud.” The remaining -wendillus in both names might once have denominated Vandals, in Gothic (cf. the IE root of “Vandal,” *wendh-), but Horwendillus as a whole does not as yet permit of a meaningful etymology, despite Schröder's desperate conjecture of “Sumpf-Gerte” (!), in “Der Ursprung” (cited fn. 62, above), pp. 99-100. Horwendillus' mythological namesakes—the Eddic giant Aurvandill, whose toe was turned into a star (as in Skáldskaparmál 25 of Snorri's Edda), and the morning-star Earendel, hailed at the Nativity in the Anglo-Saxon poem, Christ (1. 104 ff., in The Exeter Book)—do not come into this context. On the metamorphoses of Horwendillus, see now G. Dumézil, “Horwendillus et Aurvandill,” in the Lévi-Strauss Festschrift, Échanges et Communications, eds. J. Pouillon and P. Maranda (1970), II, pp. 1171-9—a rather disappointing essay, but, still, ever so much better than the mythologizing of Santillana and Dechend (Hamlet's Mill, p. 151), who group, after Viktor Rydberg, “Orvandil the archer” with Völundr, Egill, and Slagfiðr of the Völundarkviða in one fraternity of the “sons of Ívaldi,” the black dwarf! 81. Saxo's disapproval of this marriage, bk. III, vi, 5, p. 77, seems to be specifically clerical, or even levitical (cf. Leviticus xx, v. 21) rather than commonly North Germanic. 82. Gest. Dan. III, vi, 6, p. 78. 83. On the trickster's double character and role, see J. de Vries, The Problem of Loki, in Folklore Fellows Communication 110 (1933), and C. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 23 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) Anthropology (I), trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (1963), pp. 207-31. 84. Cf. the same trickery of Refr (“Fox”) with King Harald Harðráði in the fictitious Króka-Refs Saga, ed. P. Pálsson (1883), ch. iv, p. 34 f. 85. Gest. Dan. III, vi, 9, p. 79. 86. Saxo slants this remark off to the riches of Amlethus' uncle—“patrui divitias,” loc. cit. fn. 85—but cf. Herrmann's commentary on the passage, p. 254 f., and note. 87. P. 359, above. 88. See, with Gest. Dan. III, vi, 10, p. 79, R. Meissner's over-ingenious explication, “Der Name,” p. 389: Old Dan. lar, “ham,” was pronounceable like la, the Old Danish word for waves, water. 89. See J. Olrik's contribution to the Festskrift til H. F. Feilberg (1911), pp. 98-100, and the above-cited article, “Conundrums,” of Sperber, in fn. 78. By Sperber's explication, p. 867 f., the straw chaff in the insect's tail would have had a verbal association not only with agnebag, but also with avn, “bait,” in Old Danish—the bait being the female decoy. But this is “to find quarrel in a straw” with Olrik. 90. Reference is, respectively, to tussilago or caltha palustris, rhinantus, and phragmites—cf. fn. 78, above. Saxo borrows an unnoted Vergilian phrase, “laquearia tecti” (Aen. VIII, 1. 25), in alluding to the phragmites (Gest. Dan. III, vi, 11, p. 79). Perhaps the only passage of Amlethus' double talk that has been entirely successfully explicated by modern scholars. 91. Gest. Dan. III, vi, 15, p. 81. This “low” incident should show that the oldest and fullest version of the Hamlet story is not to be sequestred from its much later seventeenth century analogues in Iceland by the moralistic distinctions of Herrmann, Komm., p. 273, between heroic saga and earthy folktale. 92. Corpus Hamleticum I (1912), pp. 8-14. 93. Gest. Dan. III, vi, 16, p. 81. A heap of some 600 such chips, dating from about 1200, was dug up along the old German bridges in Bergen (H. Kuhn, Das Alte Island (1971), p. 207). 94. Herrmann, Komm., p. 251, arbitrarily excludes a “Uriah letter” from the Ur-Hamlet saga before Saxo. 95. In a variant on this detail, bk. III, vi, 19, p. 82, the honey in the mead was foul-tasting because the honey bees had nourished themselves in the stomach cavity of a dead man. 96. Cf. the chapter, “The Fool as Poet and Clairvoyant,” in E. Welsford's fine study, The Fool (1935), pt. II, ch. iv, and M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (1965), chs. i and iii, passim. 97. The similarity between the tricks and revenges of Brutus and Hamlet, who were first explicitly compared by Belleforest in his free translation of the Gesta (Histoires Tragiques V, reprinted in Gollancz's Sources, p. 194 f.), was observable to Saxo in an epitome of Brutus' early career by Valerius Maximus, Memorabilia VII, 3, which he echoed in this passage of his history, bk. III, vi, 21, p. 83, and elsewhere, sec. 7, p. 78. It may be that he borrowed the gold-filled wand trick, in his version of the Hamlet story, from this meager Roman source, but he can hardly have been cognizant of much else in Brutus' career of similarity to Amlethus'. See P. Herrmann's commentary, pp. 270 f. and 277, on Saxo's adaptation of this source to the story. 98. Cf. with Hamlet, Act II, sc. i, l. 78, Gest. Dan. III, vi, 23, p. 83: “laxior vestis,” which went untranslated in either French or English at the Renaissance. 99. Gest. Dan. III, vi, 25, p. 84. 100. Ibid.; cf. the similar aporia as to how to praise his victory over the British in book IV, i, 20, p. 91: “Quae victoria nescio callidior an felicior existimanda sit.” On the formula, sapientia et fortitudo, see E. R.Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R.Trask (1953), p. 172 ff. 101. Gest. Dan. IV, ii, 4, p. 92—a debated passage in Herrmann's commentary, p. 295 f., but the expression may designate—again, rhetorically—the fortitudo of any and every hero. 102. Cf. with the retrospective biography on Amlethus' shield, the prospective history of Rome on Aeneas', Aen. VIII, ll. 626-731. 103. Cf. the poetic shield descriptions of Boddason and þjóðólfr ór Hvíni, in E. A.Kock's Den Norsk-Isländska Skaldediktningen (1946), I, pp. 1-3 and 9-12, respectively. 104. The stringency and solemnity of the pact—“ipsa … mutuae obtestationis religio, quam violare nefarium erat” (IV, i, 11, p. 88)—are overdone by Saxo. Not even a legendary king of Britain would have ever been under an obligation to act so unnaturally on his Germanic honor against his own family interests.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 24 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) In general, the more “sacred” the oath in North Germanic society, the greater, and not the less, the chances that it would be broken; “denn der Eid hatte mit der Ethik nichts zu tun” (E. Kuhn, Das Alte Island, as in fn. 93 above, p. 179). 105. The name Herminthruda < ON Jörmunþrúðor, and cf. Modþryð (Beowulf, l. 1931), is roughly translatable as “bad-tempered”; see Herrmann's note on her, Komm., p. 292 f. 106. Cf. the thirteenth century analogues, Li Contes dou Roi Coustant l'Empereur, in prose, and Li Dis de l'Empereour Coustant, in verse, reprinted in Schick's Corpus Hamleticum II (1932), pp. 9-18 and 25-43, respectively. 107. Contra Herrmann's source hypothesis, Komm., p. 289. 108. Ibid., p. 290. 109. Herrmann, loc. cit., and Schick, Corpus I, p. 11 f, cross-reference to Jaiminibharata, pp. 167-297; but the Indian Hamlet did not get his second wife on a letter delivery mission, p. 275. 110. Gest. Dan. IV, i, 19, p. 90. 111. This, the feeblest trick of Amlethus, was also practiced by Fridlevus in Britain, bk. IV, x, 4, p. 103. It is not elsewhere documented in medieval Scandinavian literature (A. Olrik, Danske Heltesagn (1891), II, p. 178 f), and has been uncritically historicized by Herrmann as a Celtic war-tactic (Komm., pp. 280 f. and 293), yet it may be no more than a dying echo of the northern myth of “the everlasting battle,” which Snorri retold from Bragi's Ragnarsdrápa (cited fn. 103, above), in Skáldskaparmál 62 of his Edda. In this mythic battle the dead rose every morning by power of enchantment to fight again; so Amlethus' slain are raised up by his trickery to defend him “the day after” the attack of the British (Gest. Dan. IV, i, 20, p. 91). 112. A fictional (Norwegian?) intruder in the genealogy of the Danish kings; see Herrmann, Komm., p. 294. Etymologically, Viglekus' Latinized name is more Old Norse than Anglo-Saxon in form—from ON Vígleikr rather than OE “Vihtläg” (?), which Herrmann posits. 113. The confusing power-struggles at the end of the story have been convincingly reconstituted by Herrmann, p. 293 f, as a league of the jarls, Amlethus of Jutland and Fiallerus of Skane, against their new overlord. Fiallerus (ON name?) is a phantom in the story, whose exile, to the unknown “Undensakre,” is as unmotivated as Amlethus' inroad on his jarldom (Gest. Dan. IV, ii, 1). Probably, as Herrmann says, Viglekus banished or killed him in imposing his overlordship on the jarls. It still is doubtful whether “Undensakre,” his place of exile, was a poor scribal rendering of ON Ódáinsakr, a topographical metaphor for death; cf. Boberg, “Saxo's Hamlet,” p. 54, as in fn. 77 above, against Herrmann, Komm., p. 252 f. If there is any historical reality behind Saxo's otherwise spurious representation of an antagonism between the Danish throne and the jarldoms, it may lurk in the stubborn political particularism of the provinces of Jutland, Skane, and Zealand, which lasted throughout the Middle Ages, according to H. Mitteis, Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters (8th ed., 1968), p. 406. 114. Rye Annals, loc. cit. in fn. 76, above. 115. In the Rye Annals, loc. cit., he divorces Gerutha to marry Herminthruda: “Iste accepit uxorem Ambleti, propria uxore [i.e., Gerutha] repudiata.” 116. Cf. with Saxo's closing words on her, Gest. Dan. IV, ii, 2, p. 92: “… ultro in victoris praedam amplexumque concessit,” Amlethus' reproach to her in bk. III, vi, 14, p. 80: “Ita nempe equae coniugum suorum victoribus maritantur.” 117. See, for what follows above, Lévi-Strauss's analysis in “The Structural Study of Myth” (op. cit. in fn. 83, above), p. 215. I eschew his algebraic formula for the universal structure of myth, p. 228, because of its internal contradictoriness and its empirical inutility; cf. the note on it to my essay, “Myth and Story,” in Occident (Spring, 1974), p. 171, as in fn. 3, above. 118. See likewise Lévi-Strauss's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, “The Scope of Anthropology,” trans. S. O. Paul and R. A. Paul (1967), pp. 36-9. 119. The functional character that mediates is distinguishable throughout from the vagaries of temperament in his behavior. 120. Gest. Dan. III, vi, 6, p. 78.

AMLETHUS DANICUS: SAXO'S HAMLET 25 Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) 121. Edited and translated by Gollancz in Hamlet in Iceland (as in fn. 62, above), pp. 2-91; “Ambales” < Ambletus, the Latin form of the name in Thomas Gheysmer's epitome, Compendium Historiae Danicae, ed. Langebek, Scrip. Rer. Dan. Med. Aevi (cited in fn. 76), II, pp. 301-4. 122. From the history of þormóður Torfason (Torfaeus), Series Dynastarum et Regum Daniae (1702), as quoted by Gollancz, Hamlet, p. lxiii—one of the rare critical outbursts of this ordinarily credulous Icelandic scholar. 123. “… og hjeldu menn þettað [= þetta] af brögðum vólfunnar, að hún mundi um hann til qvenn manna búið hafa,” in Hamlet in Iceland, p. 170.

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