HAMLET, the hero of Shakespeare's tragedy, a striking figure in Scandinavian romance. Saxo Grammaticus devotes parts of the third and fourth books of his Historia Danica, written at the beginning of the i3th tury, to the story of Hamlet, Amleth or Amlobi, which is posed to have been contained in the lost Skjoldunga saga. The close parallels between the tale of Hamlet and the English mances of Havelok, Horn and Bevis of Hampton make it conceivable that Hamlet is of ish rather than of Scandinavian origin. His name does in fact occur in the Irish Annals of the Four Masters (ed. O'Donovan 1851). Late in the loth century there is evidence of the existence of an Icelandic saga of Amlobi or Amleth in a passage from the poet Snaebjorn in the second part of the prose Edda: " 'Tis said that far out, off yonder ness, the Nine Maids of the Island Mill stir amain the host—cruel skerry-quern—they who in ages past ground Hamlet's meal." This passage may be compared with one of Hamlet's sayings quoted by Saxo : "As they passed the sand-hills, and bade him look at the meal, meaning the sand, he replied that it had been ground small by the hoary tempests of the ocean." According to Saxo (Books iii. and iv., chaps. Io6), Hamlet's history is briefly as follows. In the days of Rorik, king of Denmark, Gervendill was governor of Jutland, and was succeeded by his sons Horvendill and Feng. Horvendill married Gerutha, Rorik's daughter, who bore him a son Amleth. But Feng, out of jealousy, murdered Horvendill, and persuaded Gerutha to become his wife, on the plea that he had avenged her of a husband by whom she had been hated. Amleth, afraid of sharing his father's fate, pretended to be imbecile, but the suspicion of Feng put him to various tests. Among other things they sought to entangle him with a young girl, his foster-sister, but his cunning saved him. When, however, Amleth slew the eaves-dropper hidden, like Polonius, in his mother's room, Feng despatched him to England in company with two attendants, who bore a letter enjoining the king of the country to put him to death. Amleth secretly altered the message on their wooden tables to the effect that the king should put the attendants to death and give Amleth his daughter in marriage. After marrying the princess, Amleth returned to Denmark, taking with him tain hollow sticks filled with gold. He arrived in time for a funeral feast, held to celebrate his supposed death. At the feast he plied the courtiers with wine, and during their drunken sleep fastened down over them the woollen hangings of the hall with pegs he had sharpened during his feigned madness, and then set fire to the palace. Having slain Feng with his own sword, he was proclaimed king. Returning to England for his wife he found that his father-in-law and Feng had been pledged each to avenge the other's death. The English king, unwilling personally to carry out his pledge, sent Amleth as proxy wooer for the hand of a terrible Scottish queen Hermuthruda, who had put all former wooers to death, but fell in love with Amleth. On his return to England his first wife, whose love proved stronger than her re sentment, told him of her father's intended revenge. In the battle which followed Amleth won the day by setting up the dead men of the day before with stakes, and thus terrifying the enemy. He then returned with his two wives to Jutland, where he was slain in a battle against Wiglek, Rorik's successor.
The other Scandinavian versions of the tale are : the Hrolf s saga Kraba; the modern Icelandic Ambales Saga, a romantic tale the earliest ms. of which dates from the 17th century; and the folk-tale of Brjam which was put in writing in 1707. Saxo Gram maticus was certainly familiar with the Latin historians, and it is most probable that, recognizing the similarity between the northern Hamlet legend and the classical tale of Lucius Junius Brutus, he deliberately added circumstances from the classical story. Dr. O. L. Jiriczek first pointed out the striking similari ties existing between the story of Amleth and that of Kei Chosro in the Shahnama ("The Book of the Kings") of the Persian poet Firdousi, and R. Zenker (Boeve Amlethus, pp. 207-268, Berlin and Leipzig, 1904) even concluded that the northern saga rested on an earlier version of Firdousi's story. Further resemblances exist in the Ambales Saga to the tales of Bellerophon, of Heracles and of Servius Tullius. In The Classical Tradition in Poetry Prof. Gilbert Murray has drawn an interesting parallel between the story of Hamlet and the story of Orestes. The tale of Ham let's adventures in Britain forms an episode so distinct that it was at one time referred to a, separate hero.
The story of Hamlet was known to the Elizabethans in Francois de Belleforest's Histoires tragiques (1559), and as early as 1587 or 1589 Hamlet had appeared on the English stage, as is shown by Nash's preface to Greene's Menaphon: "He will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say, handfulls of tragical speeches." The Shakespearian Hamlet owes, however, little but the outline of his story to Saxo. For a discussion of Shakespeare's play and its immediate sources see SHAKESPEARE.
See an appendix to O. Elton's trans. of Saxo Grammaticus (1894) I. Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland (1898) ; H. L. Ward, Catalogue of Romances, under "Havelok," vol. i. pp. 423 seq.; English Historical Review, x. (1 895) ; F. Detter, "Die Hamletsage," Zeitschr. f. deut. Alter. vol. xxxvi. (1892) ; O. L. Jiriczek, "Die Amlethsage auf Island," in Germanistische Abhandlungen, vol. xii. (Breslau) and "Hamlet in Iran," in Zeitschr. des Vereins f iir Volkskunde, x. (1900) ; A. Olrik, Kilderne til Sakses Oldhistorie (2 vols., 1892-94).