Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) Saxo Grammaticus - Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) ©2010 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. Please see copyright information at the end of this document. Frederic Amory (essay date September 1977) SOURCE: Amory, Frederic. “The Medieval Hamlet: 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 Gesta Danorum.] 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 prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, 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 Jutland, 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 kenning 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 skalds 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 Norse mythology, 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.