Hamlet/Amleth

In the summer after my first year of college, I biked around Denmark and southern Sweden. A friend and I made a counterclockwise circuit around the Øresund, starting and ending in Copenhagen. About halfway, on completing the Swedish leg of the trip, we took the ferry from Helsingborg to Helsingør, crossing the narrowest part of the strait between the two countries. This small gap used to be a strategic point for control of the Baltic, so the Danish erected a fortress there in the late Middle Ages, which eventually got built and rebuilt into the Renaissance castle known as Kronborg.

I don’t know when I realized that Helsingør had been famously rendered in English as Elsinore. I may have had some guidebook that alerted me to the Shakespeare connection before I took a tour of the place. I only remember walking around Kronborg wondering whether Hamlet was a real historical figure and, if so, whether he had any relation to that particular building.

Danes like to play up the Elsinore legend. The castle hosts a production of Hamlet every summer. Shakespeare had clearly heard of Kronborg and chose it as a setting, so they are not wrong to do so. The story of Hamlet, though, long predates the castle.

The thirteenth century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus recounted the story of a prince Amleth of Jutland whose uncle killed his father and married his mother. Amleth pretends to be mad to avoid his uncle’s wrath, plotting his revenge in secret. Most scholars think Shakespeare encountered a French translation of Saxo’s tale, François de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques, which added the detail of the hero’s melancholy disposition. Shakespeare seems to have taken further inspiration from an Elizabethan medical treatise on melancholic humors for some of Hamlet’s psychology and motivation.

If Saxo is recounting Amleth’s story circa 1200, it is likely to be much older than that, based on oral tradition from centuries earlier. The tale of Amleth may or may not dovetail with the Icelandic legend of Amlodi, mentioned briefly in the medieval Icelandic text, the Prose Edda.

The conceit of the film The Northman is to imagine and flesh out the form this possibly apocryphal Icelandic tale might have taken, if it followed the basic outline of both the Amleth story and the typical Icelandic saga. The director Robert Eggers set out to create—and by all accounts succeeded in making—the most accurate Viking world ever captured on film. Eggers tapped experts on Viking archaeology, folklore, and history as consultants. As one might anticipate, thorough accuracy in depicting fratricide and violent raids and the taking of captives conjures up a bloody spectacle not for the faint of heart. If you can make it through the carnage, however, the great reward of Eggers’ and the poet Sjón’s script is the way it weaves the supernatural in with the mundane. It is an epic shot through with prophecy and the lure of Valhalla, since those aspects of conflict would have been entirely real to a Viking warrior, and an integral part of his outlook.

As I was watching The Northman, I kept thinking about a pair of books about saga Iceland by the historian and law professor William Ian Miller. Apparently Iceland was an interesting case study in the history of law because in its first several centuries it lacked a central government and could, from a certain point of view, represent a sort of Hobbesian experiment. The sagas are filled with feuds and fragile attempts at peace that continually fall apart. Honor dictated the society’s norms, making associations prickly. The heroes of the sagas strive to avoid humiliation or the perception that they are in any way inferior to any of their peers—even to the point of chasing after one another to give back any gifts that appear too extravagant, in violent fashion if necessary. The great remedy for humiliation of course being violence.

I had read Miller’s books over a decade ago, but they stayed with me, because they point out vestiges of this drive for reciprocity in more modern settings—such as children’s exchanges of Valentines. These days, the schools my kids attend enforce a strict Valentine policy. If you want to hand out Valentines, you have to bring enough for the whole class. The school authorities want to avoid the intense negative emotions associated with being the kid who only receives one or two cards in a class overflowing with little hearts. Miller used examples like this to show the same emotions ruling the Viking world are still present. We just tend not to express them via axe.

The theme of humiliation runs through The Northman. Amleth voluntarily puts himself in a lower position vis-à-vis his uncle. Rather than pretending to be mad, he pretends to be a Slavic captive, communicating in grunts so as not to give away his real identity. Because he is strong and good worker and protective of his captor’s son—his half brother—he gets rewards that other slaves do not. Yet if anything, these privileges increase his contempt and anger toward his uncle, because he feels them as deeply patronizing. The added emphasis on their captor-slave relationship fuels Amleth’s desire to overturn the status quo.

In this context, I remembered the theme of humiliation in Hamlet. The soliloquy in Act II, Scene ii, where Hamlet calls himself “a rogue and peasant slave,” is essentially him pointing out his own lowly state. Living in proximity to his uncle feels like receiving repeated physical slights:

In Hamlet’s case, the awareness of his degradation is not enough to stir him to action—unlike your average saga hero, or his Amleth alter ego. For him, the knowledge is separate from action. There is a space between the two. He does not immediately draw his sword to gain the upper hand. It’s notable to me, given Miller’s framework—marking the historical transition from blood feud to early modern law—that what Hamlet rouses himself to do at the end of this speech is gather evidence. He comes up with the idea of putting on a suggestive play for Claudius, to see how he reacts. “The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.”

Hamlet does bring himself to violence, by the end of the play. He and Laertes and Fortinbras are all sons of murdered fathers who feel compelled to keep the feud going. Yet the play is filled with the possibility of other choices, and other outcomes.

Even in The Northman, where the desire for revenge overflows to the point of blotting out other plot lines, the seer who sent Amleth on his revenge quest did propose it as a choice. And Amleth understands that he is losing the chance of a having a family, a future, as he follows his uncle into a landscape of volcanic doom. That other life calls out to him even as he rides to Valhalla.