Page 20 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

I N T R O D U C T I O N xiii

1
King Onela, mentioned in Beowulf . Whether or not, as
the same writer claims, the name be separable into the
components 'Anle,' a common Scandinavian name, and
'(5o"i,' a by-name meaning originally 'furious in battle'
and later 'mad,' there seems little doubt that feigned
madness was an important element in the saga and a high
probability thatsome folk-lore story of a hero who assumed
madness for the purpose of revenge became attached
to a historical or semi-historical figure, as apparently
happened in the case of David among the Israelites and
Lucius Junius Brutus among the Romans. It has even
been suggested by some scholars that the Hamlet saga
is nothing but a northern version of the tale of Brutus,
and there are certainly striking points of similarity
between the two, points which can however be explained
as embellishments borrowed from Livy by the earliest
writer to give the saga permanent literary form. This was
Saxo Grammaticus, who at the end of the twelfth century
compiled his Latin Wstoria Danica, the third book of
which contains that part of the Hamlet story which
Shakespeare later made famous. The following is a brief
abstract of it.
The father of Amleth, for such is the form of the
name in Saxo, a governor of Jutland, to whom the king
of Denmark had given his daughter Geruthain marriage,
won fame by slaying the king of Norway in single
combat, but encountered the jealousy of his brother
Feng, who assassinated him, seized his office and married
2
his wife, thus 'capping unnatural murder with incest .'
Young Amleth determined to avenge his father, but in
order to gain time and to allay the suspicions of his crafty

1
Kemp Malone, A Literary History of Hamlet, and
Etymologies for Hamlet (Review of English Studies, iii.
pp. 259-71).
2
The quotations are from the translation by Professor
Oliver Elton, The Tragical History of Amleth Prince of
Jutland by Saxo Grammaiicus.