A new look at the old sources of Hamlet 9783111391496, 9783111028996

Table of contents :
Introduction
I. The Varangians and Their Byzantine Influence on Saxo’s Historia Danica
II. The Varangian Elements in Saxo’s Tale of Hamlet
III. Hamlet’s Grandfather, the Great Rorik the Dane
IV. The Vilification of Gertrude
Appendix: Byzantium and Scandinavia
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

STUDIES IN ENGLISH Volume

XLII

LITERATURE

A NEW LOOK AT THE OLD SOURCES OF HAMLET

by M A R I O N A. T A Y L O R Southern Illinois University

CI 1968

MOUTON THE HAGUE PARIS

© Copyright 1968 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-17895

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

INTRODUCTION

As scholars know, the immediate source for Shakespeare's Hamlet was François de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (variously dated 1570, 1576, 1582), which was freely translated from the Historia Danica, written by the Danish monk Saxo Grammaticus between 1180 and 1208, at the behest of one Absalon, a Danish archbishop. Not satisfied with these sources, Shakespearian scholars have searched endlessly for the tale of Hamlet elsewhere in story and song. But they have seldom explored history. Furthermore thay have tended to seek out Hamlet in Scandinavia and Western Europe, turning their backs on Russia and the Near East. Yet a study of the history and literature of the early Russians, the Byzantines and above all the Varangians in the ninth century A. D. can produce some amazing results apparently never pointed out by English and American scholars. It is these results, which sent Dr. Marion Taylor searching in libraries in America and in museums in the capitals of Scandinavia, in Leningrad, Moscow, Novgorod, Kiev and Istanbul, that comprise the chapters of this book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction I.

5

The Varangians and Their Byzantine Influence on Saxo's Historia Dctnica

9

II.

The Varangian Elements in Saxo's Tale of Hamlet

.

25

III.

Hamlet's Grandfather, the Great Rorik the Dane .

.

33

IV.

The Vilification of Gertrude

47

Appendix: Byzantium and Scandinavia

56

Bibliography

74

Index

76

I THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE ON SAXO'S HISTORIA DANICA

Shakespearian scholars have searched endlessly for the sources of Hamlet in story and song. But they have seldom explored history. Yet history blent with these old stories can yield some amazing new results. And what are some of these results, which seem never to have been pointed out before by English or American Shakespearians? First, the source of Shakespeare's Hamlet, long thought to be the old Danish story which Shakespeare read in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (c. 1570), and which Belieforest borrowed from Saxo Grammaticus's Historia Danica (1180-1208),1 is not the source at all. Amleth-Hamlet's story is really a reworked version of the old story of Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman republic, blent with some Byzantine tales. This Brutus-Byzantine material was carried back to Nordic lands by the Scandinavian Varangians, who traded with Constantinople and other Eastern ports by means of a northern waterway which went through Russia. Since Hamlet's adventures and his character are therefore not only RomanByzantine, but his name Amleth means in his Scandinavian language what Brutus' name means in Roman - dull, foolish - we may assume that Hamlet was legendary. And now for my second point. If Hamlet was legendary, his grandfather, however, was very real. For his grandfather was none other than Rorik of Jutland, who harried Christendom for some forty years. Then he went to Russia at the invitation of the Slavs, who according to an old Russian chronicle, sent for a strong man 1

Hardin Craig (ed.), The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chicago, Scott,

Foresman and Co., 1961), p. 901.

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THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

to come across the seas to help straighten out their country. Here Rorik became Prince of Novgorod and consolidated his holdings to the point where he became none other than Rurik, the founder of Russia. You are wondering, of course, how Rorik-Rurik, whose tale precedes that of Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus, can turn out to be real and the founder of Russia, while his grandson is only a Roman-Byzantine concoction. The reason is that the great RorikRurik drew legends about him the way all great men do. And Amleth-Hamlet was one of these legends. Fantastic, unscholarly conclusions? Not at all. Because this study will prove all these things in the pages which follow. Before this study begins, however, it becomes necessary to review the old story of Amleth, the prototype of Hamlet, in Books III and IV of Saxo's Historia Danica. Much of Book III has to do with Rorik, King of Jutland, grandfather of Amleth-Hamlet, who appointed two brothers, Horwendil and Feng, to defend Jutland, in place of their father Gerwendil, who had been governor of the Jutes. But Horwendil (destined to be the father of Amleth) prevailed over his brother and became King of Jutland. Then, "to win the height of glory", Horwendil devoted himself to roving. So well did this roving pay off, that Horwendil, by handing over the best trophies and the pick of the plunder to Rorik, was able to woo and win in marriage Rorik's daughter Gerutha, who bore him a son Amleth. Horwendil's good fortune so greatly stung his brother with jealousy, however, that Feng murdered Horwendil and married Gerutha. To cover up his crime, Feng gave out that he had murdered his brother because Horwendil had maligned Gerutha, his innocent wife, and Feng was defending her honor. Amleth, Gerutha's grown son, was not fooled by any of this, but fearing that Feng might kill him too, pretended an utter lack of wits to save his life. Some people led by Feng, however, protested that Amleth only played the simpleton to cover up his wiliness, his answers often being too clever for madness. They would show, they said, that Amleth was sane by tempting him

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

11

with a woman (the prototype of Ophelia) in a remote part of the forest. But Amleth, warned by a foster-brother, evades this trap, set by his uncle to kill him. This plot failing, Feng set up another trap to best his nephew. So that Amleth would drop feigned madness and talk freely with his mother, Feng gave out that he was going on a long state journey, secretly leaving a man to eavesdrop on Amleth. Amleth, shut up with his mother, suspected foul play and acted the imbecile by crowing like a cock and jumping in the straw on the floor. Feeling a lump in the straw, Amleth struck Feng's eavesdropper through with a sword and fed his body to the pigs. Gerutha upbraided her son. But Amleth, relating to his mother how his father had been foully slain by his uncle and how he, Amleth, must have revenge, finally won his mother over to his side. After his return, Feng suspected his nephew of foul play, but did not dare openly to punish him because of Gerutha and grandfather Rorik. Therefore Feng sent Amleth off to England guarded by two of Feng's retainers, who carried a sealed letter to the English king to put the youth to death. Before he left Jutland, Amleth gave his mother secret orders to hang the hall with woven knots and to perform pretended funeral rites for her son a year thence, at which time Amleth promised to return. Aboard ship, Amleth suspected treachery on the part of Feng's retainers and while they were asleep, found the death letter they carried and changed it to read that the retainers were to be put to death instead of Amleth and that Amleth was to be married to the king's daughter. When they arrived in Britain, the envoys handed the king the letter, expecting Amleth to be killed. But the king temporized and served up a great feast, which Amleth disdained, telling the King of England strange truths about the food he served and the background of his own mother. Coming much to admire the wisdom of Amleth, the King of Britain had Feng's retainers killed, and gave Amleth his daughter in marriage, plus some gold, which Amleth melted in the fire and secretly caused to be poured into some hollowed sticks. Staying one year in England, Amleth received from the King of

12

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

Britain permission to return to Jutland, carrying with him only the hollowed sticks filled with gold. In Jutland Amleth, wearing his filthy rags, visited his own funeral, throwing the great hall into consternation. When asked where his companions were, Amleth pointed to his two sticks and said he had brought them with him. Then Amleth went about with the cupbearers, serving drinks. After Feng had retired and everyone else in the great hall was drunk, Amleth bound up the drunken nobles and set fire to the place, so that they all perished. Then he went to Feng's bedroom and killed him, thus avenging his father's murder. These episodes, ending with Saxo's Book III, constituted the old story that Shakespeare used. But since there is more of the tale in Saxo's Book IV, let us continue the rest of the story. After Amleth gathered together his confused and frightened people of Jutland and told them his story, about how he had avenged the murder of his gallant father, the people acclaimed Amleth and made him their king. Then Amleth had a shield made for himself, depicting all his exploits, and he fitted out his best warriors and sailed with them back to England to visit his wife and her father. The King of Britain greeted Amleth royally when he heard about his great deeds. But secretly he was aghast at the news of Feng's death, since he had once sworn to revenge Feng if he were ever killed. Therefore the King of Britain, who was a widower, sent Amleth off to Scotland to woo Queen Hermutrude for him. In this way the king hoped to get rid of Amleth because Hermutrude had the reputation of hating her suitors and killing them off. When he arrived in Scotland with his shield and the letter from his father-in-law, asking Queen Hermutrude to marry him, Amleth, appearing before her castle, felt tired and lay down to sleep. The queen sent her men out to search him and they brought back the letter Amleth carried from the King of Britain and the shield painted with his exploits. The queen, wishing to marry Amleth rather than the King of Britain, and learning from his shield the way he had changed the death letter when he first went to England, changed the letter he carried now to read that she was to

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

13

marry Amleth instead of Amleth's father-in-law. Then she sent her messengers to replace the changed letter and Amleth's shield while he was still asleep. Meanwhile, however, Amleth had awakened, and finding both the shield and letter gone, pretended to be asleep and grabbed the messengers when they arrived. He dragged them in to the queen. The queen then offered herself as his wife, and Amleth married her. When he took his new bride back to Britain, his father-in-law was furious, but his first wife still loved him. Amleth fought and destroyed his father-in-law, and took his two wives back to Jutland. Back in Jutland, Amleth learned that Rorik had died and one Wiglek had stripped Gerutha, Amleth's mother, of all her royal wealth. Amleth then had to fight Wiglek. Hermutrude, saying that she loved Amleth to the death, accompanied him to the field of battle. But when Wiglek killed Amleth in battle, Hermutrude gave herself up to be Wiglek's bride. Then Saxo says: So ended Amleth. Had fortune been as kind to him as nature, he would have equalled the gods in glory, and surpassed the labors of Hercules by his deeds of prowess. A plain in Jutland is to be found, famous for his name and burial place.2 Scholars like Sir Israel Gollancz, Oliver Elton, Kemp Malone, and others, have zealously gathered together sources and parallels for Saxo's story of Amleth (Hamlet) in the Historia Danica.3 I shall not attempt to summarize these accounts here. Rather let us turn to the Scandinavian people called the Varangians, their traffic with the Byzantines, and the literature these two 2

Saxo Grammaticus, The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans., Oliver Elton (London, the Norroena Society, 1905), Vol. I, p. 238. See pp. 204-238 for the entire Amleth story. 3 See Sir Israel Gollancz, The Sources of "Hamlet" (London, Oxford University Press, 1926). Oliver Elton, "Saxo's Hamlet", in his translation of Saxo Grammaticus, The Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, Vol. II, Appendix II. Kemp Malone, The Literary History of "Hamlet" (Heidelberg, 1923). Josef Schick, Corpus Hamleticum (Berlin), Vol. I, 1912, Vols. II and III, 1934, etc., etc.

14

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

strains produced during the Middle Ages. For it was this Byzantine-influenced literature that gave Saxo Grammaticus some centuries later the bulk of the tales he told in his Historia Danica. This Byzantine influence on early Scandinavian literature has already been pointed out by a Swedish scholar, Henrik SchUck, in an article 4 not only not listed in the usual bibliographies of the sources of Hamlet, but so far as I can learn, never before translated into English. Here Schiick first dismisses the influence of the Crusades on the eddas, the sagas and the rest of Scandinavian literature. It has been pointed out that the Orient and the Occident then for the first time came into really close contact with each other [during the Crusades], and scholars have observed a stream of Oriental saga subjects, which during the 12th and 13th centuries poured into European writing. But these scholars have, in my opinion, overemphasized the direct influence of the Orient, since this influence could hardly have been very great Only in a very limited region - the Holy Land - did the Moslems and the Franks come into direct contact with each other, and this contact was almost entirely through battles. There was no opportunity for a peaceful exchange of ideas, and the Arabic philosophy, which became known in the Occident and there gained great importance, reached Christendom not from Palestine, but from Spain. The Christians and the Moslems were of different faiths, and they shunned each other as unbelievers; they did not understand each other's language; their societies were completely different, and the spiritual exchange could therefore not have been great. . . . As a matter of fact, one only needs to read the literature of the Middle Ages to be struck by the incredible ignorance of the Westerners about the Orient.5 The Byzantine influence, according to SchUck, came much earlier than the Crusades. You will recall that the Danish Christian, Saxo Grammaticus, took up his pen to glorify his country in the Historia Danica, at the request of Absalon, Archbishop of Lund from 1179 to 1201 A.D., and set down among other accounts, the stark story of Amleth, the earliest full length portrait we have of the prototype 4

"Byzans och Norden: Foredrag vid nedlaggandet av rektoratet for Uppsala universitet 1918", Arsskrift, translated by Lillemor Saether (Scandinavian Department, The University of Minnesota, 1965). See Appendix, "Byzantium and Scandinavia". 5 Ibid., pp. 56-57.

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE 6

15

of Shakespeare's Hamlet the Dane. But even when Saxo wrote, the Byzantine influence on Scandinavian literature was very old.7 And since all of this had a direct bearing on the sources of Hamlet, we must trace all this out. Exactly how did this early Byzantine influence come about? Oriental stories, sagas and folk tales had no trouble at all getting to the Byzantine, along with merchandise, through well established trade routes. In this enterprise, the Greeks, both as merchants and sailors, acted as intermediaries who passed these orientalized tales on to the Vikings, who had penetrated through Russia to the East in some of the most daring feats of fighting, sailing and trading in all history.8 These Vikings and their waterways we shall enlarge upon later. Although almost all of this early Medieval Byzantine lay literature has been irretrievably lost, in all probability it was similar to the late Attic Greek romances, intermingled with strong oriental influences. Says Schiick, . . . when we today meet a similar piece of writing in French, German, or English literature of the 12th and 13th centuries, we also come to the conclusion that we have here rediscovered the lost Byzantine fiction in a Western version.9 This is why so many of the stories of Saxo in the Historia Danica have so many oriental motifs, even though they seem thoroughly localized in Denmark. When Saxo set them down around the year 1200 A.D., many of them had been carried to his land from the Near East at least a century or more before that. Such an assimilation does not occur all at once, but must be considered to require at least a century, but with that we have come to a period before the first crusade. In this case the Greek saga material, as far as can be proved, had come to Denmark with the Nordic Varangians.10 Exactly who where these Nordic Varangians and how did they come into contact with the Greeks and the Byzantines before the first Crusade? That is a fascinating story all by itself. 6

Saxo (Elton translation), Vol. I, p. 8. Schiick, p. 59. 8 Ibid., pp. 57-58. » Ibid., p. 58. 10 Ibid., p. 59. 7

16

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

The Varangians were a group of Scandinavian Vikings, who settled in Russia in the ninth or tenth century. According to that early source book of Russian history, The Ancient Chronicle, sometimes called The Chronicle of Nestor or the Chronography, the Varangians, although the term applied to all the Germanic races of Northern Europe, were particularly those bordering on the Baltic Sea. Since these were the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Angles, and the Goths, they would, of course, be the Scandinavians.11 Possible sources of the word Varangian give us some clues to the nature of these early people. The word varjagi, says T. D. Kendrick, was a synonym in Russia and Greece for Northerners, Scandinavians in other words. And the term was the equivalent of the Old Norse vaeringi or vaeringr and the Anglo-Saxon waergenga, which probably meant originally "sworn men" or "men of brotherhood". Var in old Norse meant fidelity, surety, vow.12 A modern Russian, writing in 1911, says that to this day the word variag means a pedlar or a retail trader, while the verb variazhit signifies to engage in retail trade. Since it is probable that these words came from the word Varangian and not the other way around, we can assume that the outstanding characteristic of these people was that they were traders.13 The next question that arises is this. If these Scandinavian Vikings were traders, with exactly whom did they trade? And how did they reach the Byzantine? 11

See La Chronique de Nestor, traduite en Français d'après l'édition impériale de Pétersbourg (manuscrit de Koenigsberg) par Louis Paris (Paris, Heideloffe et Campe, 1834), p. 20. George Vernadsky, The Origins of Russia (Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 205, calls this old book the CIsonography, and refers to the Hypathian version, of which more later in Chapter 3. Vernadsky insists Scandinavians settled in Russia earlier than the 8th century (See ibid., pp. 176-177). For an excellent discussion of the Varangians, also see Gerald T. Cuny, The Varangian Water-Way as an Eastern Commercial Route in the Early Middle Ages, Master's Thesis, St. Louis University (St. Louis, 1937), Chapter III, and passim. 12 See T. D. Kendrick, A History of the Vikings (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1930), p. 145, fn. 2; and Vernadsky, p. 131. 19 See V. O. Kluchevsky, A History of Russia, trans, from the Russian by C. J. Hogarth (London, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911), Vol. I, p. 58.

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

17

Thus we come to one of the most fascinating trade routes in history, a backdoor waterway of the early Medieval period leading through a series of lakes and rivers from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south of Russia. This water road, known far and wide as the Varangian Route, led from the Baltic to the Gulf of Finland, then over the short Neva River to Lake Ladoga, then down the Volkhov River to Lake Ilmen, near where the city of Novgorod now stands. Continuing downward on the Lovat River from Lake Ilmen, these Vikings, by making use of portages from the southern termination of the Lovat to the Dvina, then to the Dnieper River, could find their way to the Black Sea and Byzantium. While this water road was the main route from Viking land through Russia to the Byzantine and was therefore literally the Varangian Road, there was yet another trade route these Northmen could use. Back at Lake Ilmen, they could and did manage to put themselves on a source of the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. Since this second water road led to the markets of the Arabs, the Bulgars, and the Khazars, it was as important economically as the Dnieper waterway and was also known as the Varangian Route. Why didn't these tradesmen use the older, easier, warmer Mediterranian route during this Varangian period between 800 A.D. to 1100 A.D.? After all, these rivers of the north were cold, and sometimes turbulent, sometimes slow and meandering. And they necessitated portages. It is not enough to argue that the Varangians were primarily Vikings and the Northland was their realm. There was a sterner reason - the encroachment of the Saracens. From earliest times, the East and West had traded with each other, largely through the Mediterranean. And the silks and spices and other products of the East, as early as the time of the Roman Empire, had become necessities to the West. But the advance of the Mohammedans closed the usual, southern route over the Mediterranean, and it was then that the Vikings opened these Varangian routes through Russia. On the route which the Vikings took by way of the Volga down to the Caspian Sea the trade must have been especially heavy. This is shown by the large quantity of

18

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

so-called coins from Kufa discovered in Sweden. This currency must have been accepted as payment for goods, especially furs, which were very popular in the Orient. But the Vikings didn't just return with money in empty ships. They must have come back with Oriental goods for the Occident since in this same Swedish soil men have dug up an extremely large number of Anglo-Saxon and German coins along with the Levantine money. To be sure, the English coins could, in part, have gotten there as payment of the Danegeld, the tax levied on the British by the Danes. But how did the German coins get there? Most of this money must have been payment for goods which were sold to England and Germany. O n the other hand, these goods weren't only Swedish but were to a large extent Levantine, which were shipped to Western Europe by way of Gottland and Oland. 14 As for that other even more important Varangian trade route, that water road by way of the Dnieper down to the Black Sea and Byzantium, we still have left to us some trade agreements between the Greeks and the Russ or Rhos, a Viking tribe believed to be the founders of modern Russia and the ones that gave her her name. That the Russ or Rhos were Viking has been hotly debated mostly by Russians, who would like to argue that this group which founded their country were not Scandinavian foreigners, but their own native Slavs. 15 Among the most eloquent of those upholding the Slav theory of the founding of Russia is George Vernadsky, who says in his The Origins of Russia (pp. 198-199): As regards the ethnic composition of the Russ people in the ninth and tenth centuries, while the extreme 'Normanists' consider the Russes pure Norsemen, the extreme 'Antinormanists' consider them pure Slavs. Both sides neglect the early Alanic background of the Russes. The extreme 'Normanists' even disregard or deny the existence of the name Rus (Ros) in south Russia centuries before the coming of the Varangians. In the opinion of some of them, the 14 15

Schuck, pp. 60-61.

See S. Platonov, The History of Russia, trans., E. Aronsberg (New York, the Macmillan Company, 1929), pp. 22-23, fn. Alfred Rambaud, The History of Russia, trans., L. B. Lang, from the French (Boston, Estes and Lauriat, 1886), Vol. I, pp. 60-62. B. Pares, The History of Russia (New York, Knopf, 1926), p. 17, fn.

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

19

Russes received their name from the Finnish Ruotsi, the Finnish name of the Swedes, in the middle of the ninth century. From the linguistic point of view the derivation of Rus' from the Finnish Ruotsi is theoretically possible. From the historical point of view, however, the hypothesis in untenable. The name 'Rus' ('Ros') is an old name as is well certified by our sources. More likely than not it derives from the Alanic 'Ruxs'. Personally I have no doubt about it. Certainly, Vernadsky may well be right. On the other hand, according to other scholars, the Scandinavian origin of the Russ has now been more or less established, as we shall see later.18 As for the trade agreements between the Greeks and the Russ or Rhos, the Rhos were received by the Greek emperor as so-called guests and found themselves assigned to a special quarter near the monastery of the Holy Mama*, outside the walls of Constantinople. They received provisions from the government every month, and they imported merchandise free of customs duty. That they were quite numerous, is shown by the fact that they were not allowed to enter the city in a group exceeding fifty men - a condition which suggests that they as a rule entered in a group of about two hundred men. At the beginning of the winter they were obliged to return home.17 Another important evidence of the Viking penetration to the Near East was the existence of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople. Around the year 860, the Scandinavian Varangians had pushed to Novgorod and had begun to establish themselves in Russia with an empire, their chief city becoming Kiev. They still continued to think of themselves as Nordic; their ruler even seems to have kept on paying taxes to a king at Uppsala. Then as warriors and as merchants they began to attract the Byzantines and taking service with the Greek sovereign at Constantinople, they 16 See V. Thomsen, The Relations Between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia, and the Origin of the Russian State (London, James Parker and Company, 1877), pp. 36-86. Also Schuck, p. 60, who says that Rhos is the same word that appears in the Swedish word Roslagen. Throughout his article he argues that the Russ were Swedes. 17 Schuck, p. 61. * Vernadsky, p. 260, translates Holy Mama as St. Mamas. This district is probably now the modern Be$ikta$ in Istanbul (See ibid., p. 226).

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THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

and he organized the famous Varangian Guard. Byzantine authors first mention the Guard in 1034, but they seem to be well established by then and well might be a half century older. According to Schiick, the recruits were chiefly Swedish, but there were probably a large number of Danes and Norsemen in the Guard as well. And after the defeat of Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, many Englishmen came to join it, trying to escape persecution by the Normans back home. This strong connection between Byzantium and Scandinavia must have persisted up to the beginning of the thirteenth century.18 How can all this Varangian activity have anything to do with Greek and Oriental literature, when these Scandinavian merchant sailors probably couldn't read anything but their Nordic runes, if they could read at all? Don't forget that stories, especially in the old days were largely passed along by word of mouth. When men spend days and nights together on ships, when they live side by side in foreign harbors, when they marry women of the land they spend so much time in, they learn rudiments of the language of the new country. And through their ears, if not through their eyes, they also learn its stories. And so the Varangians regaled themselves with Byzantine sagas, which also meant they learned the Oriental sagas, the Greek and the Roman sagas. And once having learned them, they carried them back to their Northland. Also one more word about those Nordic runes mentioned above. Don't forget that scholars have seen in the Nordic rune letters themselves a classical origin. In the Viking Age letters were runes, as in north Germany and Anglo-Saxon England; these twenty-four symbols (literally, "mysteries") constituted an alphabet roughly formed on Greek and Latin cursive scripts. Literature, however, could in that age dispense with letters; minstrel skalds composed, memorized, recited, and orally transmitted their lays of the Teutonic gods, and of that "Heroic Age" . . . when the Germanic peoples spread their power over Europe.19

And now let us get back to Saxo Grammaticus and his Historia 18

See Schiick, pp. 59-60. Will Durant, The Age of Faith: The Story of Civilization: Part IV, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1950), p. 509. See also Otto Von Friesen, "Runes", Encyclopedia Britannica, 1949, Vol. 19, 659-664. 19

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

21

Danica. Because even though Saxo probably never dreamed that he wasn't writing pure Danish history, his stories are so full of Byzantine influence we could easily add Varangia et Byzantium to his title. Take Saxo's account of Ragnar Lodbrok, for example. Ragnar's son Ivar, on coming to England, asks for only as much land as he can enclose in a horsehide. The English king gladly grants this trivial request. But Ivar cuts the hide into thin strips and charts out enough land for a whole city. How like the classical tale of Dido this is, Dido who on coming to Africa, was told by the monarch she could have only as much land as fitted into an oxhide. But when she cut the oxhide into thin strips, she laid out enough acreage for the whole city of Carthage. Reflected in Saxo, too, are the tales of the Greek Theseus. The first is the one about how Theseus overcame Sinnis, a bandit who looted travellers on the Isthmus of Corinth. Theseus, with his enormous strength, bent over two trees, tied one foot of the bandit to the top of one tree-top and the other to the other treetop. Then releasing the trees, he split the bandit in two. Saxo's version tells about how Rotho, a Ruthenian or Russian bandit, (note the Russian touch here), used the same tree-top method to slice his victims in two until along came Halfdan, the doughty Dane, who used the same slicing method on the bandit. Another Theseus story reflected in Saxo involves the wellknown Prokrustes and his bed. Prokustes, you will recall, either pared down his victims or stretched them out to fit his bed. In Saxo we have the tale of Ebbo and his followers, who accept what sounds like a kind invitation from two farmers in Halland to spend the night. But when their guests are asleep, the farmers murder them by lowering a beam, sharp as an axe, which they had hung earlier in the roof. This sharp beam cuts off the heads of their sleeping victims. Ebbo is the only one who escapes. Even more Oriental in origin, apparently, is Saxo's saga about Hagbard and Signe, so old that some of the events in it were reflected in Scandinavian ballads from the tenth century, possibly even in some ballads from the ninth century. As for the story itself, Hagbard, in order to meet his beloved

22

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

Signe, dresses up like a maid and at night gets into the ladies' chamber. But Hagbard is discovered and taken to be executed. Signe, seeing the fate of her lover from the women's quarters, sets fire to the building and dies in the flames. We also meet a similar situation in a poem of the later Middle Ages, "Flores and Blanzeflor", which without any doubt was originally a Greek novel. Blanzeflor has been sold to the King of Babylonia, and there confined in a tower together with the king's other women, who are guarded by eunuchs. But Flores, who had traveled to Babylonia to free her, is hoisted up to the tower in a basket covered with flowers, and there meets his love. In both cases the situation is completely Oriental. Hagbard enters a harem. In order to enter he must dress like a maid, but the other women of the harem suspect his disguise and betray him. The situation is, in any case, not Scandinavian, because in Scandinavia the women were not kept in seclusion at all, and the whole motif does not rest on Scandinavian, but on Oriental conditions.20 According to Schück, even the ancient adventures of Odysseus and Aeneas are reflected by Saxo Grammaticus in the eighth book of Histórica Danica. This book describes the adventurous trip which one Torkel and his Danes make to Geruth's land. Point by point, Schück shows how most of the episodes could go back to the Odyssey and the Aeneid-, and some, which are not found there, he argues, could be traced back to Byzantine folk tales which were created with the Homeric poems as their starting point. 21 Let us now consider some of these parellel tales. Odysseus' trip to Hades presents the same kind of geography which Torkel goes through to get to his destination. Torkel crosses an ocean which surrounds the world, leaves the sun and stars behind him, then passes through chaos and a land of darkness. But once Torkel and his Danes arrive in their land of Hades, we see more similarities to geography found in the Aeneid than in the Odyssey. The Danes cross a river, just as Aeneas goes over the River Styx to get to the land of the dead. On the other side, Torkel and his men find a gruesome black town, whose gates are 20

For this and all the other Saxo tales summarized here from Ragnar Lodbrok on, see Schück, pp. 63-64. 21

Ibid., pp. 68-71.

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

23

guarded by dangerous wild dogs. Torkel, however, throws a horn covered with fat down to the dogs and licking it, they quiet down. This entire scene is found in the Aeneid. When Aeneas, in the company of the Sibyl has crossed the Styx, he is met by the triple-jawed hell dog Cerberus, whose mane of snakes is raised up against the strangers. But the Sibyl throws a cake spiced with magic art to him, and when the monster has swallowed it, he collapses and leaves the road free. The town to which Aeneas and the Sibyl thereafter arrive, is described in about the same manner as by Saxo. Therein, according to Saxo, dwells a bloodless, awful shadow-being, and among other things the Danes see on an elevated place an old man whose body has a hole in it, leaning with his back against a shattered rock. The details in the Aeneid are, however, not the same - they might have been, if this had been a question of an educated, literary imitation by Saxo - but the motifs are the same: Tityon, who is picked by a vulture; Ixion, over whose head a rock hovers; Sisyphus, who pushes a giant stone up a hill, etc. It is clearly these motifs which have stirred the Nordic imagination.22 But when Torkel and his men run short of food, we go back to Odysseus and his crew for parallels. Torkel and his Danes find an island, where large herds are grazing. Torkel commands his men not to slaughter more animals than they need to satisfy their hunger, or the local gods will take vengeance on them. How similar this episode is to the arrival of Odysseus and his men on the Island of Helios, where they are hungry and find oxen. They slaughter the oxen and eat, but are severely punished. As soon as they go back to sea again, a raging storm comes up and Odysseus' ships flounder. The song of the sirens episode in the Odyssey, where Odysseus plugs his sailors' ears with wax so that they won't hear the sirens singing is probably also obliquely reflected in Saxo. When Torkel and his men come to Bjarmia, Torkel forbids them to talk to anyone. "Silence will be safest for them". Odysseus' land of the lotus adventure is parelleled in a Torkel episode, too, probably coupled with Odysseus' Circe adventures. When Torkel and his men reach their destination, Torkel com22

Ibid., pp. 70-71.

24

THE VARANGIANS AND THEIR BYZANTINE INFLUENCE

mands his Danes not to eat any of the food the natives offer them. Two things will happen if the men do. They will lose their memories (the Odyssey land of the lotus motif). Furthermore if they eat, they will in the future always be in the "dirty company of the monster's ghastly herds", as Saxo says, (the Odyssey Circe motif) because they will be "turned into swine", for there can be no other interpretation of Saxo's flowery revision.23 In Saxo's Hading (or Hadding) saga we find another classical Hades motif. One evening as he was at supper Hading saw a woman rise up out of the earth. On her head she wore a bundle of hemlock and tucked in her cloak she had, in spite of the winter time, a collection of green herbs. Thereafter she wrapped the king in her cloak and sank with him down through the earth. But in this woman we quite clearly recognize Demeter by the way she is presented in antique statues and reliefs. Demeter, the underworld goddess of fertility, is usually presented as a woman with a wreath of ripe grain around her head together with a basket filled with sheaves - thus with the same attributes as the subterranean creature who appears in Saxo's saga. Down in the underworld, the Danes first come to a dark, misty area and from there to an open field, where they saw some noble men, impressively dressed in purple. But here we probably have a recollection of the Elysian fields, as these are described by Vergil, and where Aeneas meets the heroes and singers of ancient times. Aeneas sees how a large number of them practice war games, and in the same manner, Hading sees how two groups fight each other - those who fell in battle, and who in this place continued their heroic lives.24 We could go on with more parallels. But with all these GreekRoman-Byzantine motifs clearly reflected in the stories of Saxo Grammaticus, let us now turn to what is probably the most famous of them all — the Amleth-Hamlet saga — and see what our examination brings us. But that will fill another chapter.

23 24

Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 71.

II THE VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

As I said before, scholars like Sir Israel Gollancz, Oliver Elton, Kemp Malone, and others, have zealously gathered together sources and parallels for Saxo's story of Amleth (Hamlet) in the Histórica Dánica Three interesting facts emerge when one threads through this old Hamlet source material. Some two hundred years before Saxo wrote his tale of Amleth as sober history for the Historia Danica, a verse uttered by the tenth century poet-adventurer, Snaebiorn, in the Prose Edda mentioned Hamlet. "Men say that the nine maidens of the island-mill (the ocean) are working hard at the host-devouring skerry-quern (the sea), out beyond the skirts of the earth; yea, they have for ages past been grinding at Amlódi's meal-bin (the sea)." This is apparently the earliest allusion to Amlódi (the same as Amleth, or Hamlet) by name earlier than Saxo. And furthermore, it points to Iceland.2 Other stories, such as the folk-tale of Brjám, which show striking parallels to the Hamlet story have been found in Iceland. The Brjám parallels are (1) a need for revenge, (2) Brjám's

1

See Sir Israel Gollancz, The Sources of "Hamlet" (London, Oxford University Press, 1926). Oliver Elton, "Saxo's Hamlet" in his translation of Saxo Grammaticus, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus (London, the Norroena Society, 1905), Vol. II, Appendix II. Kemp Malone, The Literary History of "Hamlet" (Heidelberg, 1923). Josef Schick, Corpus Hamleticum, Berlin, Vol. I, 1912, Vols. II and III, 1934. Etc., etc. 2 Elton, Vol. II, Appendix II, p. 592.

26

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

feigned madness to save his life and accomplish the revenge of his father, (3) the use of wooden pegs like Amleth's crooks, etc. 3 But even more startling is the resemblance between Saxo's tale of Amleth and the old Roman story of Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman republic, written long before Saxo. Livy tells this story, as do Valerius Maximus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The points in the highly popular old Roman tale which parallel the Saxo-Amleth story, and which are more or less the same in all three Roman authors, may be illustrated by summarizing the story as told by Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Here, Brutus' father and brother have been murdered by Tarquin [Brutus' uncle]. "Brutus being young and wholly without support, undertook the wisest possible project: he libelled himself with an assumption of folly; and he from that time forth continually kept up the pretence of being stupid, whence he received this surname, and this saved him from suffering any harm at the hands of the tyrant, while many good men perished." Tarquin then takes away his goods, and keeps him with his children to be their butt. They visit Delphi, and after hearing the oracle "they presented offerings to the god, and mocked much at Brutus because he offered to Apollo a wooden stick; but he had bored it through like a flute, and put in a rod of gold, without any man knowing".4 But Brutus outwits his companions, overcomes the tyrant Tarquin, sets up a republic at Rome, and is elected one of the first consuls. As consul, he harangues the Roman people, as Amleth does in Saxo's story, telling them why he had pretended to be a mad fool. Another parallel exists between the Amleth and old Brutus stories, whether told by Livy, Valerius Maximus or Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The name Brutus means dull or foolish in Latin. Likewise Amleth and Amlodi mean stupid or foolish in the Scandinavian languages. Vigfusson (Icel. Diet, s.v.) conjecturally connects it with an AngloSaxon word homola, which occurs once in the laws of Alfred, and which he translates "fool". But Bosworth and Toller give up the meaning of homola. Vigfusson gives as a secondary modern meaning, "an imbecile, weak person, one of weak bodily frame, unable to do work, not up to the mark. 'You are a great Amlodi, that is, a weak 3 4

Ibid., p. 595. Ibid., pp. 597-8.

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

27

fellow, poor fool'." Compounds carry out his idea, amloda-skapr, for instance, meaning imbecility. Aasen (Norsk Ordbog, 1877) gives amlod in a modern Norwegian dialect as a pestering fool, amlode to pester foolishly.8 Some scholars like to suggest that Saxo read the old tale of Brutus in Valerius Maximus and thus worked it up for his Historia Danica,6 But if this is true what do we make of Snaebiorn's allusion to Amlodi in the tenth century when Saxo wrote in the twelfth? Also why do we find parellels similar to the Hamlet story in Iceland? For answers to these questions, let us turn to that article written by Henrik Schiick I referred to in Chapter I, the article which somehow never seems to have gotten into the Shakespeare bibliographies. . . . the [Hamlet] saga is much older than Saxo's [rendition] and is referred to in poetic ballads from the 10th century. The saga itself is woven together from a great number of different motifs, but most of these point to Greece and the Orient. The main content is that the tyrant Fengo killed his brother and took possession of his throne. In order to escape his father's fate, Amblethus, the son of the murdered man, pretends to be a fool, and consequently is considered harmless and gets thereby an opportunity at last to kill the tyrant. In perhaps the best known Roman saga of ancient times, we find the same type of plot in the saga about the founder of the Roman republic, Junius Brutus. His uncle, the tyrant Tarquinius, had earlier killed one of his sister's sons, and in order to escape the same fate, Brutus pretends to be a fool. Even the conclusion is the same: Brutus overthrows the tyrant and in his place steps into the leadership of the Roman state.7 Schiick goes on to point out the same significance of the names Brutus and Amleth-Amlodi and their meaning fool, witless, stupid, in their own languages, as I have discussed above. This 5

Ibid., p. 598. See ibid., pp. 596-601. 7 Henrik Schiick, Byzantium and Scandinavia: Lecture upon Resignation from the Presidency of the University of Uppsala in 1918 (Byzans och Norden: Foredrag vid nedlaggandet av rektoratet for Uppsala universitet 1918 Arsskrift), translated by Lillemor Saether, Scandinavian Department, University of Minnesota. See Appendix, "Byzantium and Scandinavia", pp. 64-65.

8

28

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

similarity and the pretence of madness on the part of both Brutus and Amleth-Amlodi to help them accomplish their revenges on the tyrants Tarquin and Fengo, (or Feng), might well be coincidences, however, Schiick adds. Then he says, But in the continuation we meet another motif, which is so special that it cannot be explained away in this manner. The fool Brutus is sent on a journey to the oracle in Delphi, but he carries with him there a hollow cane, filled with gold, which he gives to the oracle. Just like Brutus, Hamlet is also sent on a journey, to England, and like Brutus he fills a pair of hollow canes with gold before the journey to England. And this conformity cannot be a coincidence, but clearly shows that the Scandinavian saga is borrowed f r o m the Roman saga, which of course was well known in Byzantium, the capital of "the Roman Empire" - since it dealt with one of the most important events in the saga history of the Roman Empire. 8

But the Roman Brutus story is not the only Varangian-transported tale Saxo seems to have made use of in his old story of Hamlet. In Byzantine literature, we find a poem about the wise Ptocholeon, who is a slave to a king. First Ptocholeon tells the king that a precious stone which the sovereign prizes highly has a flaw. Close examination proves the slave to be right. Next Ptocholeon informs the king that his bride is of low birth, and this also proves to be true. Third, the slave tells the king that he himself is not the son of the noble line, but of a slave, and when the king's mother is crossquestioned about all this, she confesses that this, also, is true. This old story must have been a favorite, because in "another form this saga is told about the Greek king Heraklios, and as Axel Olrik has shown, this comes from Arabia". In Saxo, says Schiick, T h e same wonderful sagacity is also revealed by the hero in the Hamlet saga. When the King of England invites him to a banquet, Hamlet notices that the bread tastes of blood, the drink of iron, and the pork of human flesh. It turns out that the bread was baked f r o m grain grown on a battle field; the water mixed in the drink had been brought f r o m a well, where digging disclosed rusty swords; the pork was taken from pigs that had eaten f r o m the corpse of a dead robber, and all the statements thus proved to be true. Furthermore, Hamlet remarked that the Queen had a slave's behaviour, and by making an 8

Ibid., p. 65.

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

29

investigation, it was established that she really was the daughter of a slave. Finally Hamlet commented that the king himself had slave eyes, and also now the Queen Mother had to admit that she had committed adultery with one of the slaves. The comparisons are thus considerable.9 Nor is this the end of parallels between Saxo's Amleth adventures and the Byzantine. The third episode in Saxo about the letter Amleth carries from his father-in-law, the King of England, to the Scottish Queen Hermutrude, when Hamlet goes a-wooing for his royal father-in-law, goes back to a Greek romance. The Byzantine version is lost, but a French adaptation of the Middle Ages gives us the story. One King Florian learns that a child just born will one day marry his daughter and become King of Byzantium. Furious, Florian commands that the child be killed, but the person who is to murder the child finds he cannot do the deed. Instead he leaves the child outside a monastery, where it is found and named Constant or Constantios and is brought up by the monks. When Constant becomes fifteen years old, the king learns who he is. Still wanting Constant dead, the king this time sends Constant to the constable of the castle with a letter which says the constable is to kill the bearer of the letter. Constant, however, grows weary, and lies down to sleep just before he gets to the castle. The king's daughter comes by, and thinks the young man very handsome. She sees the letter in his belt, takes it and reads it. Horrified, she rewrites the letter so that instead of its being a death certificate for Constant, it now reads that the bearer of the letter should marry the king's daughter. Thus, the king's wicked plans come to nothing, and fate and the old prophecy win out. Although these death letters and their reversal are so frequent in old stories that one scholar has gathered a whole book of them, 10 we have to admit that the same motif as we find in the King Florian saga noted above, is reflected in the Hamlet saga. The letter Amleth carries from his father-in-law, the King of » Ibid., p. 66. 10 Schick, Corpus Hamleticum,

Vol. II, passim.

30

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

England, to the Scottish Queen Hermutrude, when the king sends Amleth north to woo the queen for him, is really a death letter. Because the king knows the queen has the reputation of killing everyone who comes to propose to her, he expects that she will kill Amleth too. But the rest of the Amleth episode here is even more like the King Florian tale than the letter business. A distance from the castle of Queen Hermutrude, Amleth-Hamlet, like Constant, lies down to sleep. The queen's people come by and, without waking Amleth, take both the letter and his shield on which, Danelike, all of his feats of strength are pictured. When they take these to the queen, and she learns what a hero Amleth-Hamlet is, she falls in love with him. Thus she rewrites the letter so that instead of meaning death it praises Amleth, and so in the end the queen marries him. The episode that follows, after Amleth has married the Scotch queen, probably touches on more oriental saga material. When Amleth returns to Britain and his first wife, the Princess of Britain, he has, of course his second wife, Hermutrude, the Scotch Queen, in tow. One would expect, naturally, that the first wife would upbraid Amleth for taking a second wife, but she doesn't. She not only welcomes her rival, but she helps Amleth against her father. Polygamy did occur in Scandinavia also, but the Scandinavian poems never praise passive submission. This motif is Oriental and not European. The same story which we find in Hamlet was also, of course, borrowed from the Orient by the French and German literature of the Middle Ages, but the writer always felt strangely towards the motif, and in one version the story ends with all three contracting parties taking up monastic vows. [This is not true of Saxo's Amleth story however].11 If we follow Schiick then, we come to the conclusion that there is scarcely anything in the old tale of Saxo's Amleth that is truly Danish, except Amleth's name and his locality. Virtually all the 11 Schiick, p. 6 7 . 1 discuss this Hermutrude episode in Chapter IV, pointing out that Saxo's Amleth is not only not blamed for his polygamy, but all the responsibility is put on Hermutrude for seducing him. Gerutha-Gertrude, Amleth's mother, is similarly treated. Saxo has Amleth upbraid her for her "incestuous marriage" to Amleth's uncle, even though Amleth later takes two wives, with no adverse comments from Saxo.

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

31

rest of the story, as we have seen, is Roman-Byzantine, carried by way of Russia to Scandinavia, for the most part, by the Varangians. And how do we explain the early references to Amlodi in poetry in Iceland and the Amleth parallels in other Icelandic stories? These too must have been carried back by the old Varangians from the East, since they also penetrated to Iceland as well as to England and to Ireland and all the other Nordic lands. And once the Varangians had carried their Byzantine tales to Iceland, the stories simply stayed there, as things have a way of doing on an island. In fact, Iceland becomes one of the best repositories of the old Varangian-Byzantine literature we have except for old stories left in pictures on shields and in old runes, and in those tales collected by Saxo in the Historia Danica. . . . Saxo himself does not suspect that he deals with subjects borrowed from ancient times, and so far as the Odyssey is concerned, he was not acquainted with it. Instead he believes that he is reproducing Danish sagas of kings and Danish folk tradition. The allusions to many of these sagas, which occurred in Norwegian poetic songs from the 9th to the 10th century, also show that they were already known in Scandinavia during those centuries, although still perhaps not in the same form as by Saxo. But this fact - a Byzantine influence on the Nordic literature as early as the 10th century - changes our whole previous understanding of this literature. As is known, this literature is, with two important exceptions - Saxo and the Icelandic literature - as good as lost completely. Of Swedish literature from this period, there is nothing left except for some scarce, uninformative rune inscriptions. Of pure Norwegian literature there remain hardly more than a few fragments of ancient poetic ballads, which have been included as quotations in later Icelandic works. Saxo's chronicles in Latin were hardly taken notice of in older times, and the conclusion was therefore clear: the whole ancient Scandinavian literature was Icelandic, and in this literature the other Nordic peoples had no part. However, it is easy to see that this conclusion has been too hasty. The ancient Scandinavian literature has been preserved on this remote island in the Arctic Ocean, which was less frequently touched by the great streams of European culture that washed away the old, partly heathen cultures in the main countries of Scandinavia at the beginning of the true Middle Ages. But the question where this literature has originated and developed, is something else which can-

32

VARANGIAN ELEMENTS IN SAXO'S TALE OF HAMLET

not be solved by a simple reference to the fact that this literature now exists only in Icelandic. . . . Bugge hypothesized that the Icelandic Eddie poetry in a considerable part had originated in the West. With an image borrowed from Homeric research, he called the British Isles the Eolia of ancient Scandinavian poetry. . . . Bugge's hypothesis . .. suffered from considerable weaknesses firstly, he greatly overestimated the importance of this British influence, and secondly, his study was much too philological. He constantly experimented with a learned influence from Irish monks, while any exchange of ideas between Nordic vikings and Irish monks surely never took place. The investigation whose main characteristics I have now presented, however, shows that the Nordic poetry had still another Eolia - the Swedish Varangian Empire in Russia, and this has been, in a literary sense, of greater importance than Britain. From the Swedish Varangians, Scandinavia received in the first place the Gothic saga materials, poetically so important, and later a stream of Byzantine and Oriental material. If we investigate the Icelandic prehistoric sagas, we also find that these much more often were localized in the region extending to the Baltic, especially to Gardarike [the ancient Swedish Viking Empire in Russia] than to Britain, and this fact alone speaks for assigning that area as the original home of the Nordic saga poetry - the home where saga poetry originated and developed, and later was recorded in Iceland and is repeated in Saxo's Danish Chronicles.12 And now, with all this in mind, let us go back to Prince Hamlet. Must we leave Saxo's Amleth-Hamlet so stripped down that he is a Dane only in name and place? Must all his actions, even his character be Roman, Greek or Byzantine? And fable at that, with probably not a word of Danish history in it? The answer is, astonishingly, yes. But there is still a way in which Amleth-Hamlet is not only a Dane, but one of the most famous Danes in all history. And that way is through his grandfather, the subject of the next chapter.

12

Schtick, pp. 71-73.

Ill HAMLET'S GRANDFATHER, T H E G R E A T RORIK T H E D A N E

Hamlet's grandfather, the great Rorik the Dane, is mentioned in Book III of Saxo's Historia Danica, just before Saxo's tale of Amleth, the prototype of Shakespeare's Hamlet. At this time Horwendil and Feng, whose father Gerwendil had been governor of the Jutes, were appointed in his place by Rorik to defend Jutland. But Horwendil held the monarchy for three years, and then, to win the height of glory, devoted himself to roving.1 The roving of Horwendil, destined to become the father of Amleth, paid off handsomely. For Horwendil's prowess in arms attracted the attention of one Koller of Norway, who deemed it would be a handsome deed if by his greater strength in arms he could bedim the far-famed glory of the rover; and cruising about the sea, he watched for Horwendil's fleet and came up with it. There was an island lying in the middle of the sea, which each of the rovers, bringing his ships up on either side, was holding. The captains were tempted by the pleasant look of the beach, and the comeliness of the shores led them to look through the interior of the springtide woods . . . It was here that the advance of Koller and Horwendil brought them face to face without any witness.2 Horowendil and Koller chat for awhile about glory, fighting, victory and fine funerals, then begin fighting. The fray is bloody, but Horwendil finally slays both Koller and his sister Sela, "who was a skilled warrior and experienced in roving". 1

Saxo Grammaticus, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans, by Oliver Elton (London, the Norroena Society, 1905), Vol. I, p. 204. 2 Ibid., p. 204.

34

HAMLET'S GRANDFATHER

He [Horwendil] had now passed three years in valiant deeds of war; and, in order to win higher rank in Rorik's favor, he assigned to him the best trophies and the pick of the plunder. His friendship with Rorik enabled him to woo and win in marriage his daughter Gerutha, who bore him a son Amleth. Such great good fortune stung Feng with jealousy, so that he resolved treacherously to waylay his brother, thus showing that goodness is not safe even from those of a man's own house. And behold, when such a chance came to murder him, his bloody hand sated the deadly passion of his soul. Then he took the wife of the brother he had butchered, capping unnatural murder with incest.3 As we have seen in Chapter I, with that start, the old bloody, violent Danish tale of Amleth, practically all borrowed from the Byzantine, by way of the Varangians, is well on its way. But let us go back to the long tale of Rorik, which precedes the story of Amleth in Saxo, and have a good look at Amleth's grandfather. Rorik, Amleth-Hamlet's grandfather, is the hero of a long list of valiant incidents in Saxo's account, all passed off as being sober Danish history, whether they are drawn from the Byzantine or not. Rorik in Saxo appears as the son of the great Hother, who in order to win Nanna, the mother of Rorik, has to fight and slay the god, Balder, son of Odin, King of the Gods "whose chief seat was Byzantium", right in line with the Byzantine flavor apparent in so many of Saxo's tales.4 Hother, however, is finally killed by one Boe, another son of Odin, since Odin must have revenge on Hother for having killed his son Balder. But Hother, having heard the prophesies in which he has been fated to die in this coming encounter with Boe, tries to put his affairs in order by having his sons succeed him properly and keep the land he has won. Already having established his son Herlek and Gerit as rulers of Norway, he takes care of his other son Rorik, who is here mentioned for the first time, in the following manner: Then he [Hother] summoned the elders to assembly, and told them that he would perish in the war wherein he was bound to meet Boe, 3 4

Ibid., pp. 204-207. See ibid., pp. 178-190, p. 196.

HAMLET'S GRANDFATHER

35

and said that he knew this by no doubtful guesswork, but by sure prophecies of seers. So he besought them to make his son RORIK king, so that the judgment of wicked men should not transfer the royalty to strange and unknown houses; averring that he would reap more joy from the succession of his son than bitterness from his own impending death. This request was speedily granted.5 Hother meets Boe in battle, of course, and Hother fights so bravely Boe leaves the field of battle with his death upon him. But Hother didn't leave at all; he died on the battle field. Immediately after Hother died, the Kurlanders and the Swedes, who usually had to pay homage to Denmark with a yearly tax, determined to attack Denmark instead of paying the money. Then By this the Slavs [note the Russian touch] also were emboldened to revolt, and a number of others were turned from subjects into foes. Rorik, in order to check this wrongdoing, summoned his country to arms, recounted the deeds of his forefathers, and urged them in a passionate harangue unto valorous deeds. But the barbarians, loth to engage without a general, and seeing that they needed a head, appointed a king over them; and, displaying all the rest of their military force, hid two companies of armed men in a dark spot. But Rorik saw the trap; and perceiving that his fleet was wedged in a certain narrow creek among the shoal water, took it out from the sands where it was lying, and brought it forth to sea; lest it should strike on the oozy swamps, and be attacked by the foe on different sides. Also, he resolved that his men should go into hiding during the day, where they could stay and suddenly fall on the invaders of his ships. He said that perchance the guile might in the end recoil on the heads of its devisers.6 Rorik finally won this engagement by a series of clever devices. The barbarians, who knew nothing of the wariness of the Danes, dashed out to fight them and were all killed. After that, the rest of the Slavs, not knowing of the destruction of their friends, decided to attack Rorik with their fleet. One of the enemy, "a wizard by calling", suggested that the sea battle be settled by single combat. One of the Danes undertook to answer the challenge and was slain. 5

•

Ibid., pp. 198-199. Ibid., pp. 199-200.

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Thus he was a sorry sight unto the Danes, but the Slavs granted their triumphant comrade [the one who had slain the Dane in single combat] a great procession, and received him with splendid dances. On the morrow the same man, whether he was elated with the good fortune of his late victory, or was fired with the wish to win another, came close to the enemy, and set to girding at them in the words of his former challenge. . . . So Rorik was vexed that the general courage should be sapped by the impudence of one man; and that the Danes, with their roll of victories, should be met presumptuously by those whom they had beaten of old. . . . It was the high-hearted Ubbe who first wiped off this infamous reproach upon the hesitating Danes. For he was of great bodily strength and powerful in incantations. He also purposely asked the prize of the combat, and the king [Rorik] tempted by avarice, . . . so, being stationed on his vessel, he resolved to shake off the bracelets, and with a mighty swing send them to the asker. B u t . . . the bracelets fell short of the intended spot . . . and were reft away by the waters. For this nickname of Slyngebond, (swingbracelet) clung to Rorik.7 Even though Rorik's chain of six bracelets "which were so entwined that they could not be parted from one another, the chain of knots being inextricably laced", was lost forever in the waters, Ubbe fought bravely and tried to win the encounter. As Saxo says, . . . the champions engage; a din arises; the crowd of onlookers shouts in discord, each backing his own. And so the valour of the champions blazes to white-heat; falling dead under the wounds dealt by one another, they end together the combat and their lives. I think that it was a provision of fortune that neither of them should reap joy and honour by the other's death. This event won back to Rorik the hearts of the insurgents and regained him the tribute.8 The rest of Saxo's Book III on into Book IV is Amleth's story, concluding with, as we have mentioned before, So ended Amleth [slain by one Wiglek, who had challenged him to a war] . . . A plain in Jutland is to be found, famous for his name and burial place." A few pages before the death of Amleth, however, we hear of the end of Rorik. Ibid., pp. 202-203. Ibid., p. 204. » Ibid., p. 238.

7

9

HAMLET S GRANDFATHER

37

Amleth, triumphant, made a great plundering, seized the spoils of Britain, and went back with his wives to his own land. [Jutland]. Meanwhile, Rorik had died, and Wiglek, who had come to the throne, had harassed Amleth's mother with all manner of insolence and stripped her of her royal wealth. . . , 10

Thus passes from Saxo's history, both Hamlet the Dane and Rorik the Dane. Nor need we ask ourselves, incident by incident, whether Rorik's escapades were Roman or Byzantine as were Hamlet's. Because Rorik, unlike Hamlet, turns up in history. Genuine Danish history, this time. Furthermore, as we follow Rorik through the adventurous life that historians have discovered for us, we find a tale as romantic and imaginative as any told by the Romans, the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Varangians, or Saxo. A tale as worthy of the great Shakespeare as that of Prince Hamlet. The devoutly Christian Saxo, writing for a Danish archbishop, glorifies Rorik as a famous Dane. Great Dane Rorik was, but not in a way Saxo ever speaks of. The fact is that Rorik seems to have been a frequent harrier of Christendom from 835 A.D. until the middle 870's. 11 Allen Mawrer in the Cambridge Medieval History says of Rorik, The leaders change continually and almost the only constant figure is that Roric, brother of Harold, who was settled in Friesland. For some forty years he remained there, now in friendly, now in hostile relations with both Charles the Bald and Louis the German, and he does not disappear from our records until after 873. 12

Still another historian calls Rorik the bane of Christendom. 13 Saxo, however, never mentions Rorik's anti-Christianity and describes his raiding adventures with the patriotic pride of a Dane. But we get the fullest and most exciting account of Rorik when we turn to Russian history. Around 1110 A.D., in the reign of one Prince Sviatopolk II of 10

11

Ibid., p. 236.

T. D. Kendrick, A History of the Vikings (New York, Charles Scribner's, 1930), p. 6, p. 206 fn. 12 Allen Mawrer, "Germany and the Western Empire", The Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press, 1957), Vol. Ill, pp. 320-321. 18 C. F. Keary, The Vikings (New York, Putnam, 1891), pp. 304ff.

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Kiev, the monks of the Crypt Monastery, one of whom probably was Nestor, started compiling a History or Chronography of Russia on the basis of previous records. This early project, which now tends to be known as The Ancient Chronicle or The Chronicle of Nestor, as well as the Chronography, has under the date of A.D. 862 the following entry: The Rus, the Chud, the Slovene, the Krivichi, and the Ves, said [to the Varangians]: our land is great and abundant but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us. And three brothers chose to come with their clan. . . . The oldest, Rurik, located himself in Novgorod; the second, Sineus, in Beloozero; and the third, Truvor, in Izborsk [a town near Pskov]. After two years, Sineus and his brother, Truvor, died, and Rurik assumed the sole authority. He assigned cities to his followers, Polotsk to one, Rostov to another, and to another Beloozero. In these cities there are thus Varangian colonists, but the first settlers were, in Novgorod, Slovene; in Polotsk, Krivichi; at Beloozero, Ves; in Rostov, the Meria; and in Murom, the Muroma [a Finnish tribe].14 One pricks up his ears at once, for the Rurik sounds suspiciously like Rorik. Furthermore, these Slavs wouldn't send over the seas for a weak man to come and straighten them out; they would send for a strong man. And that, too, sounds like Rorik. If so, this becomes important. For Rurik is known far and wide as the founder of modern Russia, since he is described as the leader of the tribe known as the Russ or the Rhos, who gave their name to Russia.15 But let us first have a look at those people Rurik came to help - the Slavs. The original home of all Slavs is not to be sought in the steppe, but in the forest. Prof. Niederle states that, originating in the marshy land between the Vistula and Dnieper, the southern Slavs (Serbs and Bulgarians) descended to the Danube as early as the first century A.D. The first federation of eastern Slav tribes (Russians) appears in the 3rd-4th centuries A.D. as a powerful and numerous people called 14

George Vernadsky, The Origins of Russia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 205. See Paul Milyukov, "Russia: History: Origin of the 'Russ' ", Encyclopedia Britannica (1949), V o l . 19, p. 7 1 2 ; Vernadsky, pp. 204-205, pp. 174176, and passim.

15

HAMLET'S GRANDFATHER

39

Antae, living between the Dnieper and Dniester. They were involved in the wars of the Goths and Huns and were defeated by the Avars in the 6th-7th centuries. . . . Arabian writers represent the original seat of the "Russ" as an island covered with woods and marshes: this brings us to the source of the waterway mentioned: the sea of Umen near the ancient town Novgorod and Ladoga sea, where the river Neva has its origin. Excavations of 9th-10th century tumuli confirm the presence of northern warriors buried (or burnt) with their horses and arms, in that very tableland where four chief waterways of Russia, the Neva basin, Volga, Dnieper and Dvina converge and form outlets to the Baltic, the Caspian and the Black seas and thus determine the direction of ancient trade-routes. Numerous finds of Arabian, Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon coins (9th-11th centuries) along all these routes testify to a flourishing trade which corresponds exactly to the period of foundation of new states by northern Vikings at the one end and the florescence of Arabian and Persian Caliphates before the Mongol invasion at the other end of these trade-routes.16 Once in N o v g o r o d , Rurik became the leader, as the old chronicle says, not only being called Prince of N o v g o r o d , but leader of all the Russes. It is noteworthy that in the list of the Varangian tribes, inserted into the Chronography on the occasion of the 'Calling of the Varangians', we find no Danes but instead (in the Laurentian version) the Rus. Rurik must have been a Dane.17 Y e s , Rurik must not only have been a Dane, but a most outstanding Dane, if the Slavs invited him over to straighten out their country. A n d if we look through the annals of the Danes during these early years of the ninth century A . D . , we can find no one more eminent than Rorik, as I have just pointed out - Amleth's grandfather, celebrated in Saxo. Rorik-Rurik - it is a short phonetic step. In fact, it can be regarded as no step at all. A n d we have a competent Russian historian to say so, George Vernadsky. Rurik may be identified with Roric of Jutland of Western annals. Such identification was first suggested by Friedrich Kruse in 1836, but not then accepted. In 1929 the late N . T . Belaiew approached the problem once more and with the use of some new materials and 18 17

Milyukov, "Russia", Britannica, Vernadsky, p. 207.

Vol. 19, p. 712.

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certain new arguments fully confirmed Kruse's theory. In my opinion the identification is valid.18 With Rorik and Rurik identified as the same person, historians could then set themselves the task of charting out the life of Rorik-Rurik. . . . His father, of the clan of Skjoldung, had been ousted from Jutland and had pledged allegiance to Charlemagne, from whom around 782 he received Friesland as a fief. Rurik was born about the year 800. His childhood was passed in turbulent surroundings since his father and, after the latter's death, his elder brother were constantly at war with the usurping rulers of Jutland. In 826, or thereabouts, Rurik's elder brother Harald, who had succeeded in seizing part of Jutland but was later expelled from it, placed himself under the protection of Emperor Louis the Pious and was baptized at Ingelheim, near Mainz. As Harald came thither with all his family we may surmise that Rurik was baptized as well. If so, he can hardly have taken his conversion seriously, for he later returned to paganism. After Harald's conversion the emperor granted him as his fief the district of Rustringen in Friesland. Rurik received his share in it and after his brother's death became lord of the whole fief. Even before Harald's death the two brothers had to fight stubbornly to protect their lands from attack on the part of the king of Denmark, and after the death of Emperor Louis Rurik's position became quite precarious. According to the Treaty of Verdun (843) Friesland was included in Lothaire's portion of the empire and it appears that Rurik lost his fief.1» It was in the period that followed that Rorik set himself to roving, as Saxo calls it, and took part in several raids on England and the Continent. It was in the annals of these years that he is referred to as fel Christianitatis, the bane or gall of Christendom. In 845 his boats sailed up the river Elbe, and in the same year he raided northern France. In 850 Rurik launched a fleet of 350 boats with which he looted the coastal district of England. In the next years he turned his attention to the mouth of the Rhine and to Friesland. Lothaire was compelled to compromise and returned Friesland to Rurik on condition that he would defend the shores of the empire from the attacks of other vikings. Since Rurik was now prevented from looting the shores of the North Sea he must have thenceforth 18 19

Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., pp. 207-208.

HAMLET'S GRANDFATHER

41

shifted his attention to the Baltic, being probably well informed of the Danes' raid on Novgorod of 852.20 But Lothaire made Rurik give up Friesland once more and gave him instead another fief in Jutland in 854. Rurik thereby became master of southern Jutland and had direct access to the Baltic Sea. Thus he was in an even better "position than before to take active part in Baltic affairs". And when did Rorik-Rurik set out for Russia? Probably in 855 or 856. Now let us take another look at the old chronicle, which states that Rurik came to Russia with two brothers, Sineus and Truvor. Rurik, of course, settled himself in Novgorod, Sineus in Beloozero, and Truvor in Izborsk, that town near Pskov. But according to Vernadsksy, no such names are recorded in Western annals. According to N. T. Belaiew, Sineus and Truvor must be interpreted not as personal names but as epithets for Rurik himself. In Norse 'Signjotr' means 'victorius' [sic] and 'Thruvar' 'trustworthy'. In medieval storytelling the legend of three brothers founding a city or a state was a popular motif.21 Thus it seems entirely likely that Rurik did all this settling himself, with the help of his retainers. Rurik seems to have stayed in and around Novgorod for about thirteen years, putting his new possessions in order. He continued, however, to watch the development of events in the west, and in 867 made a vain attempt to regain Friesland with the help of the Danes. The death in 869 of Lothaire, king of Lotharingia, who had in 854 received Friesland as a fief from his father the emperor Lothaire, called for a general redivision of all the holdings in the Frankish empire, and Rurik decided that the moment was propitious for presenting his claims as well. He went, accordingly, to Nimwegen for an interview with Charles the Bald, a brother of the Emperor Lothaire, and promised to support him in return for his backing. In 873 Rurik received Friesland back, and thereafter his name receives no further mention in the Frankish annals. Presumably he died not long after regaining his old fief.22 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 208-209.

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But we have not yet done with the life of Rurik, because we have not yet measured the height of this man's greatness. The Kievan chronicler who, in the early twelfth century, set down the fact that the internal disorders of the Slavs of north Russia caused them to call upon Rurik and the Varangians to come help them indicated that a kind of civil war had broken out. It cannot be denied that north Russia was at that time in the grip of a serious political and economic crisis. But the causes of this crisis were not local. Besides the invasions of the Varangian bands from overseas, the main cause of the crisis was the severing of the roads between north and south Russia by the Khazars and the Magyars, as we shall presently see. The clogging of the lines of communications between Tmutorokan and Rusa resulted in the disintegration of the whole mechanism of the oriental trade of the Russ kaganate. In view of this, restoration of order in administration would not, in itself, be sufficient for restoring prosperity in north Russia. It was only part of the task for which Rurik was called to Novgorod. The other part, which was more difficult, was to clear the roads to the south and to re-establish the communications between north and south Russia. For this the forces of the northern tribes alone had proved to be insufficient, and this may have been one of the main reasons for their 'Calling the Varangians'. They needed more troops for an expedition to the south.23 Rurik's must have been a master mind. For with the help of his Danish retinue, and the leadership of Rurik, the Russes of north Russia were apparently able to extend their control over north Russia, including the Rostov area, within a few years. Even before that task had been completed, Rurik encouraged a group of his followers to go south. According to the chronicler, Rurik 'had two men [Askold and Dir], not of his own kin, but boyars, and they asked his permission to go to Constantinople with their kin, and they went, accordingly, down the Dnieper River'. This story is inserted in the Chronography under the same date as the 'Calling of the Varangians' (862). We may tentatively refer Askold's departure to 856. The chronicler's statement that the aim of Askold's campaign was Constantinople deserves special attention. Apparently the Russes contemplated at this time not merely clearing the road to Tmutorokan, but opening a new road - to Byzantium.24 23 24

Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., pp. 209-210.

HAMLET S GRANDFATHER

43

Constantinople, of course, was the pride of the Near East at this time. Constantinople, the Imperial City (in Norse 'Miklagard'; in Slavic 'Tsargrad'), lured by its wealth and splendour many would-be invaders, including the Huns, the Avars, the Bulgars, and the Arabs. While the Russes, at the time of their raid on Amastris, did not dare to enter the Bosporus and to attack Constantinople, their Amastris expedition showed the feasibility of reaching the heart of the Byzantine empire. Since Tmutorokan was a Russian stronghold, and since a number of Russes settled in the Crimea in the late eighth and the early ninth centuries, the Russes were in a position to obtain, through the Crimean Greeks, reliable information on Byzantine affairs. They must have watched closely the course of events in Byzantium and the intricate moves of Byzantine diplomacy. Through the Russes the Varangians could easily get information about Constantinople.25 With the rising power of the Russes as middle men between the East and the West at this time, we especially see the rising power and the skill of Rurik, their leader. With Rurik's coming to Novgorod and with his assuming leadership over the northern group of the Russes, relations between the Russes and the Varangians, in other words between the eastern and the western Norsemen, became even closer. Rurik himself had been a leading figure in the western expansion of the Norsemen, and now when he had associated himself with the Russes he was in the pivotal position of a middleman between the east and the west. The eastern and the western Norsemen could now think of co-ordinating their efforts for reaching Constantinople. In view of this we may think that Rurik attributed great importance to Askold and Dir's expedition even though he was not able to give them more troops.26 Askold and Dir did not win this Russian attack on Constantinople in 860-861, which lasted almost a year. The pious old writer of the Chronography, under the year 866 A.D. has this to say: Askold and Dir went against the Greeks and came [to Constantinople] in the fourteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Michael. At that time the emperor had set forth against the Agariane [i.e. Arabs]. 25

Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 210. Here Vernadsky negates an opposite view, saying, "I cannot accept Baron Michael de Taube's theory, proposed by him in 1947, according to which Askold acted entirely on his own and independently of Rurik". 28

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When he had reached the Black River [in Asia Minor], the eparch [prefect of Constantinople], sent him word that the Russes were approaching Tsargrad [Constantinople], and the emperor turned back. Meanwhile the Russes entered the Bosporus, made a great massacre of the Christians, and besieged Tsargrad in two hundred boats. The emperor succeeded but with difficulty in entering the city. The people prayed all night with the Patriarch Photius at the church of the Holy Virgin in Blachernae. With hymns they carried the sacred garment of the Virgin and dipped it in the sea. The weather was still and the sea was calm, but lo! a gale came up, and great waves rose straightway, smashing the boats of the godless Russes. It threw them upon the shore and broke them up, so that few escaped such disaster and returned to their native land. 27 As we have said before, Rurik probably did not accompany Askold and Dir to Constantinople, but he did apparently mastermind the campaign. . . . While Askold and Dir did not belong to Rurik's clan, it was Rurik who, according to the chronicler, had authorized them to attack Constantinople.28 One other important fact emerges. Even if the Russes lost their campaign, they did hold out for almost a year, and their prowess in battle was so impressive that in a treaty not long after, the treaty of 911 A.D., . . . it was also stipulated that whenever the Byzantine emperor conducted a campaign and needed additional troops, those Russes who 'are desirous to honour' the emperor may come at any time to Byzantium; if they wish to remain in the emperor's service, they are allowed to do so. Vasiliev is 'inclined to believe' that the right of the Russians to serve the emperor as mercenaries goes back to the treaties of the 860's. Vasiliev's surmise is quite plausible. The Byzantines must have been duly impressed by the fighting qualities displayed by the Russes in 860-1 and, because of this, eager to employ their former enemies for strengthening their own army and navy. It thus seems that one of the results of the war of 860-1 was the creation of a corps of Varango-Russian guards (in Russian druzhina, in Greek hetaireia) in Byzantine service.29 Since Rurik authorized this war of 860-1, might we not attribute to him, at least in part, the founding of this famous Guard? A 27 28 29

See the Chronography passage in ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 226.

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truly exciting Dane, this Rorik-Rurik. A great seaman, a great fighter, a great strategist, a great organizer, a great statesman. For this Viking not only made his name ring through Denmark and Western Christendom, but he also went to Russia and initiated a very nearly successful campaign against Constantinople. So valorous was the fighting of the Varangians in this war, it led to the formation of the famous Varangian Guard, which stayed in Constantinople for over three hundred years. But most of all RorikRurik and his retainers straightened out the Slavs and took over Novgorod. As Prince of Novgorod he founded modern Russia. One more link we have to forge in this long chain of events, exploring the sources of Hamlet however. If Amleth-Hamlet's story has proved to be a Roman-GreekByzantine tale that localized in Denmark and fastened itself to Rorik's daughter Gerutha and her son, Amleth, how can we say that Rorik-Rurik was Amleth-Hamlet's grandfather? We can, I believe, because Saxo points this out in his Historia Danica and plays up Rorik the Dane, who really existed in history. It may well also be true that this historical Rorik gave his daughter named Gerutha to one Horwendil, just as Saxo's tale says, because Horwendil spent three years helping Rorik with valiant deeds of war and assigned to Rorik "the best trophies and the pick of the plunder".30 If so, Gerutha and Horwendil might well have had a son, even if his name wasn't Amleth, and he didn't do all these deeds Amleth-Hamlet has been credited with for well over seven hundred years. But what if Gerutha and Horwendil never existed, along with Amleth-Hamlet, since we can't prove that they did? My point, I believe, still remains the same. Rorik the Dane was so great he collected legends about him the way Mt. Fuji and Mt. Everest collect clouds about them, the way all great men collect legends about them, even men like Abraham Lincoln in our own age. Therefore even if Hamlet is probably mythical, Rorik is very real. One of the greatest Northmen of them all, in his true experiences Rorik-Rurik blent the Varangian, the Russian, the Greek, the Roman and the Byzantine with his Danish origins in »» See Saxo, Vol. I, p. 207.

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a series of adventures that sound stranger and more exciting than fiction. And Rorik still remains Rorik and Hamlet's grandfather, even if his grandson is a legend, and Saxo, apparently, never knew Rorik finally got to Russia. I find, as I have mentioned before, only one sorrow in tracing out this exciting life of Hamlet's grandfather, which as far as I can learn, Shakespearean scholars never have succeeded in doing before. If Shakespeare was inspired to write one of his greatest plays by reading the fictitious source material on Hamlet he found in Belleforest, based on Saxo, how much more he might have been inspired had he had access to the true history of Rorik-Rurik. But there is one chuckle in all this too. If this perhaps dull, scholarly paper should ever happen to fall into the hands of the leaders of modern Russia, I can just hear them saying, "So, you Shakespearean scholars, what have you found out about your English Hamlet the Dane? He is ours. Because his grandfather was the founder of Russia."

IV THE VILIFICATION OF GERTRUDE

Gertude, like her son Hamlet, is a nebulous figure. In Chapter III, we have already pointed out that Saxo mentions her as Rorik's daughter Gerutha, wooed and won by Horwendil [the elder Hamlet], a friend and prized warrior of Rorik's. Whether or not Gertrude-Gerutha belongs to Viking history or Byzantine legend no one has yet discovered. But if we are going to take a new look at the old sources of Hamlet, we should consider Gertrude from another standpoint. Gertrude, whether historical like her father Rorik, or legendary like her son Hamlet, needs to be defended. For Gertrude, I maintain, has been turned from a good pagan woman into a criminal by the Christians, "guilty of [incest], a sin that blots out the stars".1 And since no one, to my knowledge, has ever come to Gertrude's defense, I shall here attempt to do so. Shakespeare, of course, was not the first to vilify Gertrude. What was probably his most immediate source, Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques, printed in Paris c. 1570 and reissued as The Hystorie of Hamblet in London in 1608, after saying Geruth [Gertrude] was wed to Horvendile [the elder Hamlet] in a ceremony celebrated "according to the ancient manner", describes her as an unfortunate and wicked woman, that had receaved the honour to bee the wife of one of the valiantest and wiseth princes in the north, imbased her selfe in such vile sort, as to falsifie her faith unto him, 1

J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 39. The substance of this chapter has been read as a paper: Marion Taylor, "A Note on the Sources of Hamlet: the Vilification of Gertrude", at the Midwest Modern Language Association, held at Normal (Illinois, May 8, 1964).

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and which is worse to marrie him, that had bin the tyranous murtherer of her lawfull husband; which made divers men thinke that she had been the causer of the murther, thereby to live in her adultery without controle.2 Later, of course, Hamblet goes to Geruth's bedroom, in which Fengon [Claudius], unknown to Geruth, has planted a spy. Hamblet discovers and kills the spy, then turns on his mother in a longer harangue than any of those uttered by that arch-windbag, old Polonius, in Shakespeare's play. What treason is this, O most infamous woman! of all that ever prostrated themselves to the will of an abhominable whore monger, who, under the vail of a dissembling creature, covereth the most wicked and detestable crime that man could ever imagine, or was committed. Now may I be assured to trust you, that like a vile wanton adultresse, altogether impudent and given over to her pleasure, runnes spreading forth her armes joyfully to imbrace the trayterous villanous tyrant that murthered my father, and most incestuously receivest the villain into the lawfull bed of your loyall spouse, imprudently entertaining him in steede of the deare father of your miserable and discomforted soone. . . . Is this the part of a queene, and daughter to a king? to live like a brute beast (and like a mare that yieldeth her bodie to the horse that hath beaten hir companion awaye), to followe the pleasure of an abhominable king. . . ,3 That other known source of the Hamlet story, the Historia Danica, written by Saxo Grammaticus over four hundred years before Shakespeare wrote his Hamlet, treated Gertrude only a little more gently than Belleforest. Saxo, as noted earlier, was pressed into the service of Absalon, a Danish archbishop from 1179 to 1201, to write a history of Denmark, so that it "might record its glories like other nations". 4 In Book III, Saxo precedes the tale of Amleth [Hamlet] with a glowing account of Gertrude's father, Rorik, King of Denmark, and his prowess in battles. 5 Although Saxo shows his devout 2

Sir Israel Gollancz, The Sources of "Hamlet" (London, Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 185, 189. 3 Ibid., p. 211. 4 Saxo Grammaticus, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans, Oliver Elton (London, The Norroena Society, 1905), V o l . I, intro, p. 8. 5 Ibid., p. 199ff. For other accounts of Rorik and his bravery, see T. D .

THE VILIFICATION OF GERTRUDE

49

Christianity throughout his works, as we have noted in Chapter III, Rorik seems to have been a frequent harrier of Christendom from 835 A.D. until his death in 876.« Saxo, however, never mentions Rorik's anti-Christianity and describes his raiding adventures with the patriotic pride of a Dane. As was pointed out earlier, after the account of Rorik, Saxo goes on to tell how Horwendil [the elder Hamlet] was murdered by Feng [Claudius] in this fashion: . . . when a chance came to murder him, his [Feng's] bloody hand sated the deadly passion of his soul. Then he took the wife of the brother he had butchered, capping unnatural murder with incest.7 Thus far, as the reader can see, Saxo let the blame fall almost entirely on Feng-Claudius, Gerutha-Gertrude's only fault being that she entered into a marriage with a brother-in-law, which the Christians deemed incestuous. But later in the scene in Gerutha's bedroom, where Amleth (like Hamlet) finds a spy planted by Feng and kills him, Saxo has Amleth turn on his mother, and the vilification of Gerutha begins. "Most infamous of women! dost thou seek with such lying lamentations to hide thy most heavy guilt? Wantoning like a harlot, thou hast entered a wicked and abominable state of wedlock, embracing with incestuous bosom thy husband's slayer and wheedling with filthy lures of blandishment him who had slain the father of thy son. This, forsooth, is the way that the mares couple with the vanquishers of their mates; for brute beasts are naturally incited to pair indiscriminately; and it would seem that thou, like them, hast clean forgot thy first husband. . . . Thou shouldst weep for the blemish in thine own mind, not for that in another's. On the rest see thou keep silence."8 With such reproaches he rent the heart of his mother. . . .e Kendrick, A History of the Vikings (New York, Charles Scribner's, 1930), passim; Allen Mawrer, "Germany and the Western Empire", The Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press, 1957), Vol. Ill, pp. 309-338, passim; George Vernadsky, The Origins of Russia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959), passim. 6 Kendrick, p. 6, p. 206 fn. ' Saxo, p. 207. 8 Note the startling resemblance of this sentence to Hamlet's dying. "The rest is silence". ' Ibid., pp. 213-214.

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Of course Amleth, who has affected "dullness" because his life is in danger from Feng, desperately needs the help of his mother and probably harangues her with special severity in order to win her over. But Saxo has Amleth use a deeply Christian tone in upbraiding his mother and goes on to describe in missionary terms that Amleth has thus "redeemed her [Geruth] to walk in the ways of virtue".10 The Christians, of course, both in Saxo's time and in Shakespeare's, would have considered Gertrude vile for marrying her brother-in-law. According to canon law, she has . . . committed incest, for in early Christian times the command that man and wife should be one flesh was taken so literally that all the wife's relations became the husband's and vice versa.11 Not so, however, according to the pagan Danes, of which not only Gerutha-Gertrude was one, along with her great father, King Rorik, but probably also Horwendil-elder Hamlet, Feng-Claudius, and above all, Amleth-Hamlet, even though Saxo has here made him talk like a Christian. What was the attitude of the pagan Danes toward marriage? For one thing, they practised polygamy, especially among their chieftains, which among the Danes led to rapid increase of population, which made men seek fresh lands elsewhere. . . . Polygamy as it prevailed in the North means a large number of younger sons for whom provision must be made.12 What is even more interesting, Amleth practises polygamy in Saxo's own tale, and the devoutly Christian Saxo doesn't have an adverse word to say about it. First recall that Amleth marries the daughter of the King of Britain.13 Then he goes home to Jutland, kills Feng, and returns to Britain to join his wife. But his fatherin-law sends him up north to woo the Queen of Scotland for him. 10

Ibid., p. 214. G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare: Major Plays and the Sonnets (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1948), p. 603. 12 Mawrer, p. 311. Also see Kendrick, p. 37. 18 Saxo, Vol. I, p. 219.

11

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51

However Amleth falls in love with the Scotch Queen Hermutrude and forgetting his father-in-law, marries her himself. But what does Amleth's first wife, the Princess of Britain, say about her husband's polygamous marriage? According to Saxo, Though she complained that she was slighted by the wrong of having a paramour put over her, yet, she said, it would be unworthy for her to hate him as an adulterer more than she loved him as a husband; nor would she so far shrink from her lord as to bring herself to hide in silence the guile [from her father] which was intended against him [Amleth].14 Belleforest, it is interesting to note, goes Saxo one better by having the first wife put all the blame on the second wife: I know well, my Lord, that the allurements and perswasions of a bold and altogether shameles woman, being more lascivious than the chast embracements of a lawful and modest wife, are of more force to intice and charm the sences of young men;18 Another attitude the pagan Danes must have had toward marriage was that it was not only proper for a widow to marry her dead husband's brother, but usually compulsory for her to do so. This practise was as widespread among early peoples as the blood feud,16 which furnishes the play Hamlet with its central theme. Anthropologists even have a name for a widow's marrying her dead husband's brother — the levirate. Marriage of a woman to her brother-in-law, known as the levirate (L. levir, brother-in-law) is the most popular affinal marriage form among the peoples of the world. Under the simple levirate the marriage occurs only after the death of the husband, when the widow is inherited by the dead man's brother. . . . This handy practice occurs in all parts of the world, among peoples of the most diverse levels of cultural development. The rude Australians made it a rule; the Biblical Hebrews approved of it; and the civilized Incas provided for the inheritance of all a man's secondary wives by his younger brother, or perhaps his sons. . . . The purpose of the levirate is not hard to discern. It effects a continuation of the link between the two kin groups that was established »

Ibid., p. 234. Gollancz, p. 295. 18 See F. T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Smith, 1959), pp. 4, 13, and passim. 15

Tragedy

(Gloucester, Peter

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through the original marriage. It is a manifestation of the intergroup character of marriage in that the defunct husband's kin have the privilege and right to prevent the widow from leaving their group. Her obligation is not alone to the man she married but also to his kin. Of equally great importance, in view of the fact that in primitive society the children usually follow the mother when a home is broken, the children are not lost to the father's group.17 Even closer, in some ancient societies, were the ties of blood between people permitted to marry, especially among royalty. No society permits marriage between mother and son, although a few societies have permitted marriage between full brothers and sisters of certain categories. For example, the later Inca emperors married their full sisters, and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, is said to have been the product of fourteen generations of marriages between close blood relatives.18 Since we seem to have no record that Rorik, Gertrude's father, ever permanently embraced Christianity, and there are definite records that he harried the Christians (who would have been only too glad to record his conversion), we may assume that he was blithely pagan and his daughter with him, along with Saxo's Horwendil, Amleth, and Feng. This being the case, Gertude's society would not only be used to polygamy, but most likely the levirate and close marriages among royalty. The pagan Gerutha, then, duped by Feng into believing that he had to kill Horwendil, her first husband, because the latter was slandering her, went ahead and dutifully married Feng according to what must have been the custom of her country. It was only the early Christians who considered her marriage with her brother-in-law incestuous. 17 E. Adamson Hoebel, Man in the Primitive World (New York, McGrawHill, 1949), pp. 198-199. See also John Gillin, The Ways of Men (Appleton, Century-Crofts, 1948), pp. 424-425; and the Bible, which says: If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger; her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her. Deuteronomy 25:5. Of course, Gertrude had Hamlet, but see Hoebel, above, where in most ancient societies the widow married her dead husband's brother so that the children were not lost to the father's group. 18 Gillin, p. 424.

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53

But why did Saxo and later Belleforest blacken Gertrude with incest and adultery and forgive Hamlet his polygamy? Mostly, I believe, because Gertrude was caught up in a violent wave of Christian hatred of women, which has already been pointed out in connection with The Wife of Bath in Chaucer. The Wife of Bath is the remarkable culmination of many centuries of an antifeminism that was particularly nurtured by the medieval church. In their eagerness to exalt the spiritual ideal of chastity, certain theologians developed an idea of womankind that was nothing less than monstrous. According to these, insatiable lecherousness and indomitable shrewishness (plus a host of attendant vices) were characteristic of women. This notion was given most eloquent expression by St. Jerome in his attack (written about A.D. 400) on the monk Jovinian, who had uttered some good words for matrimony.19 But since there are other stories and parallels brought forth in connection with the Hamlet plot, let us examine the main ones for a prototype of Gertrude. As we have seen earlier, Oliver Elton in "Saxo's Hamlet",20 outlines the Roman tale of Lucius Junius Brutus, found in Livy, Valerius Maximus (which he says Saxo read) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a tale in which an uncle, a usurper, who has already killed a son of the old king, then kills a nephew and persecutes another nephew, who escapes by seeming doltish. This nephew, Brutus, finally gets his revenge and succeeds to power, but without the help of a mother.21 In the Icelandic tale of Brjdm, also noted earlier, a king covets the cow of a poor man, and his servants kill the man and the two elder sons to get it. Then they question the rest of the children and kill all but Brjam, who acts witless. Brjam's mother helps her son by making him a sorcorer and Brjam gets his revenge and marries a princess.22 (Note that the mother is a good woman on the hero's side.) 19 E. T. Donaldson, "The Middle Ages", The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York, W. W. Norton, 1962), Vol. I, p. 103, fn. 2 ° See Saxo, Vol. II, pp. 596ff. 21 Incidentally, remember that the names Amleth, Amlothi, and Brutus, as we have shown earlier, all mean dull or foolish in their languages, ¡bid., p. 598. 22 Ibid., p. 595.

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The Havelock the Dane story, which has some similarities to Hamlet, has no mother in it. Nor does the Anlaf story.23 But Saxo's retelling of the tale of Rolf (or Hrolfr Kraki) does. Rolf is a Danish prince whose mother Urse has married the covetous Swedish King Athisl and is now trying to get his money, and be rid of him. But she uses guile, and knowing that her husband wants his native Sweden to break away from Norwegian rule, she feigns to be unmotherly and, tempting Athisl to insurrection, causes her son Rolf to be called to Sweden with a promise of many gifts. Rolf comes, lured by the bounty, and endures great trials. Athisl showers Rolf with gifts, but Rolf and his mother steal the king's money and leave. Then seeing Athisl in pursuit, Urse and Rolf have to abandon the loot and escape in ships. While Saxo depicts Urse as a dissembling woman, she is solidly in league with her son.24 One can only infer from the lack of mothers in most of the Hamlet parallels and the presence of mothers who league themselves with their sons in others, that Saxo and Belleforest were excessively hard on Gertrude, who does league herself with her son, but tardily, and unlike the others becomes fouled with incest. And why? Because Gertrude was the daughter of a great pagan raider and therefore was added to a long line of ladies who found themselves victims of Christian antifeminism, whereas the other mothers were not. And, why was Gertrude singled out for vilification in her own story? Rorik and Amleth-Hamlet, I believe, escaped Saxo's ire because he needed great Danes to glorify the history of his country, even if they were pagans. But Gertrude, being a woman, became in Saxo's tale a scapegoat for her great father and son. Whether Gertrude was real or legendary is beside the point here. What is important is that the Christians turned her from a good pagan woman to an incestuous, criminal adulteress. Thus we come to the end of a new look at the old sources of Shakespeare's Hamlet, having pointed out some things never be23 24

See Gollancz, pp. 38ff, and 43ff. Saxo, Vol. I, pp. 154-158.

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55

fore noted by Shakespearean scholars. Goethe was said to have been so fond of Saxo's tale of Amleth that he thought about bypassing Shakespeare and treating it freely in its own right. But Saxo's old Viking tale holds something even greater than the story itself. For it blends ancient Danish literature and culture with the Roman-Byzantine and the Russian-Varangian, overlaid with a strange veneer of Christianity. Behind this veneer shines out a chapter from a great literature which hitherto has been all but lost to the world because it was carried back from the Near East to the Western world almost entirely by word of mouth. This, of course, was the literature of the Varangians. But to paraphrase the words of the great Swedish scholar, Henrik Schiick, there is no age so fast asleep that another age cannot waken it. And Schuck and others in our own age have begun to rouse the Varangian age from its slumbers. To sum things up, then, Gertude may have been vilified and the old Roman-Byzantine-Varangian tale of Hamlet may well be a myth. But history shows us Hamlet's grandfather was not only very real but an illustrious Dane who was the founder of Russia. Certainly he was a man worthy of being subject matter for the great poet who put the tale of his grandson into a play called Hamlet.

APPENDIX

BYZANTIUM A N D S C A N D I N A V I A

Lecture upon Resignation from the Presidency of the University of Uppsala in 1918 By Henrik Schiick (Translated from "Byzans och Norden: Foredag vid nedlaggandet av rektoratet for Uppsala universitet 1918", Arsskrift, University of Uppsala) *

In accordance with old traditions it is the duty of the resigning university president to relinquish his position with a public lecture, and according to this custom I shall hereby try to give a condensed presentation of a question that I have been occupied with for a long time, even though I still have not had the opportunity to present my investigations. But the short time that I now have at my disposal does not allow any possibility of mentioning more than the general viewpoints. It is, however, just these, which may be of some interest to a broader audience. The subject is the influence of Byzantine literature upon the Scandinavian during the early Middle Ages. The Crusades, as you know, have had a very great influence not only on Western culture as a whole, but also especially on its literature. But in one area I believe that this influence has not been correctly understood. It has been pointed out that the Orient and the Occident then for the first time came into really close contact * Translated by Lillemor Saether, Scandinavian Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1965.

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with each other, and scholars have observed a stream of Oriental saga subjects, which, during the 12th and 13th centuries poured into European writing. But these scholars have, in my opinion, overemphasized the direct influence of the Orient, since this influence could hardly have been very great. Only in a very limited region - the Holy Land - did the Moslems and the Franks come into direct contact with each other, and this contact was almost entirely through battles. There was no opportunity for a peaceful exchange of ideas, and the Arabic philosophy, which became known in the Occident and there gained great importance, reached Christendom not from Palestine, but from Spain. The Christians and the Moslems were of different faiths, and they shunned each other as unbelievers; they did not understand each other's language; their societies were completely different, and the spiritual exchange could therefore not have been great. Even in Spain, where Christians and Moslems had been neighbors for centuries, a similar exchange of ideas did not take place directly, but rather indirectly - through the intermediaryship of the Jews, who in a sense belonged both to the Orient and the Occident. As a matter of fact, one only needs to read the literature of the Middle Ages to be struck by the incredible ignorance of the Westerners about the Orient. The geography is completely fantastic and it is believed that the unbelievers prayed to pictures of Mohammed, even to those of Apollo and other Roman gods, and one has no idea about their government and so forth. The crusader's relations with the Greeks were different. They were at least Christians, and their kingdom a direct descendant of the former Roman Empire; their social structures were at least similar to those in the West, and the Western upper class could therefore without difficulty come into contact with the Byzantine. The crusades passed mainly through Greek territory; the passage to Palestine, when it was by sea, was as a rule arranged by Greek seafarers or by Southern Italians who were half Greeks, for we ought to remember that in Bari, Amalfi, and other Southern Italian seaports Greek was still spoken in the 12th century. This influence, which has been classified as Oriental has therefore, in my opinion, been mainly Greek, but the Greeks, who for centuries

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had been neighbors to the Moslems, had an entirely different relationship with them than the crusaders. They had extensive mercantile connections with the Orientals, and the Greek merchants were not prejudiced by the Frankish crusaders' religious contempt for the unbelievers. Oriental sagas could therefore easily have been spread to the Byzantine, and in my opinion it was mainly through this Greek intermediation that the sagas of the East become known in Europe - not only the sagas of the East, but also the literature which at the time of the crusades, was fashionable among the Byzantines. To prove this Byzantine influence in detail is, however, extremely difficult, since all this literature has been lost. The Italian humanists, who visited Constantinople during the later years of the Greek Empire, acquired there manuscripts of ancient works, since they considered the purely Byzantine literature as barbaric and inferior. Those manuscripts, which found sanctuary in the Greek monasteries after the Turkish conquest, and which in our time had been resurrected, are almost solely theological and historical. The pious monks naturally had unconcealed contempt for fiction and sagas, and consequently, the literature that had been admired by the Byzantine laymen, has been almost completely lost. However, it is obvious that the Byzantine lay literature had almost the same character as the late-ancient Greek fiction, supposedly with a more or less strong influence from the Orient; and when we today meet a similar piece of writing in French, German or English literature of the 12th and 13th centuries, we also come to the conclusion that we have here rediscovered the lost Byzantine fiction in a Western version. But what I now want to point out is that the same literary currents also reached Europe in another way. The crusades had opened one connecting link between Western Europe and Byzantium. Another - through Russia had already been opened by the Northerners, mainly by Swedes, and this way was perhaps as important in a literary respect as the other. To prove this, however, involves especially great difficulties, since the Swedish literature from this period is not available in manuscripts, and one might add quite certainly that no such manu-

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scripts ever existed, for those tales, fictions, and sagas which 1 here refer to were related only orally and were never written down in manuscripts. The rich Icelandic, the so-called medieval saga material, which without doubt contains a quantity of Byzantine and Oriental saga material, is unfortunately not a good source either. The manuscripts are, as a rule, not older than from the 15th century, and the possibility therefore always exists that this material came to Iceland from Western Europe, mostly from England and not through Russia and Sweden with the Nordic Varangians. In several cases the originals of these manuscripts certainly go back to the 13th century, and before the written sagas there were of course the oral ones. But to determine the chronology in detail is difficult, and the dangers of errors are therefore not few. Fortunately we do have a much better source, namely Saxo's Danish Saga Chronicle. It was written down around the year of 1200. But even at that time those sagas were clearly very old in Scandinavia. They had already had time to be localized in Denmark and be combined with Danish history. Such an assimilation does not occur all at once, but must be considered to require at least a century, but with that we have come to a period before the first crusade. In this case the Greek saga material, as far as can be proved, had come to Denmark with the Nordic Varangians. But before we proceed it might be necessary to add a few words regarding the Northerners' connections with Byzantium. Both as warriors and as merchants they engaged in a very lively contact with the Greek imperial city. As you know, Swedish warriors, the so-called Varangians, had established an empire in Russia about the year of 860, and Kiev soon became its capital. This empire continued to be Swedish, and it even appears that the prince paid tax to the Uppsala king. The ruling warrior and merchant class was in any case Swedish, and only gradually was this class, in addition to the royal family itself, assimilated by the Slavs though not until the 11th century. Toward the end of the 10th century Swedish warriors also began to serve in the army of the Greek emperor, and thus established the famous Varangian Guards. The guard was first mentioned by Byzantine authors in

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1034, but it could be more than half a century older. The recruits were mainly Swedes, but in addition to them, there was certainly a large number of Danes and Norwegians in the corps. Shortly after 1066, when the decisive battle of Hastings took place, even Englishmen - at first anglicized Norwegians from Danelaw began to sign up in what was the Imperial Swiss Guard of that period in order to avoid persecution by the Normans in their homeland, and toward the end of the 12th century, it appears that the English constituted the main contingent of the Guard. But the fact that Swedes still enlisted in Constantinople in the beginning of the 13th century, is shown in the law of Vestergotland, which has a special inheritance section for those men living in Greece. As these warriors, as a rule, enlisted only for a certain number of years and later returned to Scandinavia, it is obvious that even up to the beginning of the 13th century there was a relatively lively contact between Greece and Scandinavia. Even more important was the mercantile traffic with the imperial city on the Bosporus. Our archeologists have proved that a cultural stream existed from Southern Russia as early as during the general migration period, but I do not wish to go into this, because the saga material which we encounter during this period was mainly Gothic and not Greek. Instead I wish to confine myself to the Viking period. In the year of 839, messengers arrived from the Greek emperor Theophilos to Ingelheim, where Karl the Great's son Ludvig the Pious, then was residing. Among them were some men, who, according to the statement of the Greek emperor, "that they, meaning their nation, were called Rhos, and that their king had sent them to him for the sake of friendship, of which they assured him". When King Ludvig examined them more closely, he discovered that they were Swedes - Rhos is indeed the same word that appears in our Roslagen.1 Even at that time there was thus a connection between Sweden and the Byzantine empire, and in all likelihood the Swedish messengers had been sent to the Bosporus in order to work out some trade advantages for the Nordic merchants, who journeyed to Greece on the Russian rivers. This trade route - by way of the Russian rivers - had become 1

An ancient settlement north of Stockholm.

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one of the most important in Europe at that time. The products of the Orient, especially its silks and spices, had become necessities in Europe during the period of the Roman Empire. But due to the advance of Mohammedanism, the Southern route across the Mediterranean was almost closed, and it was then that the Swedes opened the new route through Russia. One route followed the Volga down to the Caspian Sea, where Swedes and Orientals met along the coast. It is obvious from the amazing quantities of socalled coins from Kufa, found in Swedish soil, that trade on this route was extremely important. These coins were without doubt accepted as payment for goods sold, mainly furs, which were in heavy demand in the Orient. But the Swedes certainly did not return with coins only and otherwise empty ships. An extremely large quantity of Anglo-Saxon and especially German coins has been found in Swedish soil. Some undoubtedly came from the English war retributions to the Danes. But the German coins could not have gotten here the same way, and besides, English coins are found in larger numbers in Sweden than in Denmark, whose warriors collected the lion's share of the Danegeld. Instead these coin treasures certainly must have been in payment of goods, which were sold to England and Germany. On the other hand these goods could not have been Swedish only, but to a large extent Levantine goods shipped to Western Europe by way of Gottland and Oland. Another route went by way of the Dnieper down to the Black Sea and Byzantium, and from the beginning of the 10th century, we still have some trade agreements between Greeks and „rhos" left. The latter were received by the Greek emperor as so-called guests and found themselves assigned to a special quarter near the monastery of the Holy Mama, outside the walls of Constantinople. They received provisions from the government every month, and they imported merchandise free of customs duty. That they were quite numerous, is shown by the fact that they were not allowed to enter the city in a group exceeding fifty men - a condition which suggests that they as a rule entered in a group of about two hundred men. At the beginning of the winter they were obliged to return home.

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One may then ask what importance these journeys have had in a literary sense. The Scandinavian merchants and warriors surely made no acquaintance with any written Greek literature, due to the simple fact that they could not read anything but the Nordic rune script, at best. They did not establish contact with literate Byzantine monks either, because the monks apparently regarded the Nordic barbarians as some kind of wild animals, - but the Varangian associated with others: mercenaries, seamen, tradesmen and such people, and from them he learned quite a bit. And the language need not necessarily have created any insurmountable obstacles. The Swedish warrior, who often belonged to the Varangian guard for a decade and was garrisoned in Byzantium, Athens, and other Greek cities, had of course a rudimentary understanding of the inhabitants of the country; many of them apparently had Greek wives, and even the merchants, who returned to Constantinople annually, should have acquired an elementary knowledge of the language. It is therefore quite certain that these people, while in the South, had heard quite a few of the Greek sagas and tales, because the Greeks and the Orientals had always enjoyed sagas. During the ancient period there were professional storytellers both in Greece and in the Orient; they were also mentioned in The Thousand and One Nights, and as you know, they still exist in the Orient today; I have seen a number of them myself. The sagas which they related to their interested audiences of seamen and mercenaries were almost of the same character as the Greek folk sagas even of today, and these very often represent purely ancient traditions, sometimes independent of the literary sources, and sometimes of an older type than those. In the same maimer, one may assume that Greek sagas in this case were mixed with Roman ones, because the Greek empire was indeed a direct continuation of the Roman Empire, and the people were known to call themselves Romans. After this introduction, we should then turn to some of Saxo's sagas of Danish kings and point out their ancient parallels. Of course, time does not allow me to present more than a few examples.

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Most of us certainly remember the ancient saga about Queen Dido. When she arrived in Africa, she was told by the ruler of the country that she could have as much land as she could enclose in an oxhide. She then cut the oxhide into thin strips, and with these she encircled such a large area, she could found on it the city of Carthage. But this saga, obviously very popular during ancient times, is also found in the writing of Saxo, in the story of Ragnar Lodbrok, which in many other ways takes up traditions from the Swedish Vikings in Russia. When Ragnar's son Ivar came to England, he first asked for only so much land as he could encircle with a horsehide. The English king found no difficulty in granting this, which he considered to be a very modest request. But Ivar cut the hide in thin strips and thus received such a large area, he could found a city on it. The similarity is indeed palpable. Another group of sagas, still very popular today in Greece, goes back to Theseus, and we find some of them in Saxo. Theseus began his heroic career with several victorious battles against giants, beasts, and similar creatures. Among them was Sinnis, a robber, who operated on the isthmus of Corinth, where he attacked all travelers. With his immense strength he bent two pine trees to the ground, tied his victim's one foot to one of the treetops, the other foot to the next tree, and then he let both tree trunks snap, so that the victim split in two. But Saxo has a story completely similar in character. He tells about Rotho, a Ruthenian, that is, a Russian robber - the nationality suggests how the saga came to Denmark - and he dealt with his victims by fastening the prisoner's right foot to the ground and the left one to a branch of a tree, which he then let go so that it flew up, and the victim was cut in two. This robber was killed by Halfdan, just as Sinnis was by Theseus. Another well-known Theuseus story is about Prokrustes. He laid his victims in a bed; if they were so long that their legs reached beyond the edge of the bed, he cut them off; if the unhappy victims were so small that they did not reach the end, he stretched their limbs. Saxo tells a somewhat similar story about Ebbo, who came with his followers to a farm in Halland, where he stayed with two farmers. But under the guise of hospitality, they murdered their guests. In the roof over the bed, they had hung up

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a beam that was as sharp as a broad-axe, and when they pulled a rope, it fell and chopped off the head of the sleeping person. Ebbo himself escaped the plot, but his friends were killed. I now wish to choose another example, which points to the Orient. We all know Saxo's famous saga about Hagbard and Signe; but this saga was already known in Scandinavia long before the time of the Danish historian, because allusions to this saga were made in Norwegian poetic ballads from the 10th century; possibly they already existed in ballads from the 9th century. However, we need only to pay attention to the situation, upon which the whole saga is based, in order to discover that it could not have originated in Scandinavia. In order to meet his love Hagbard dresses up as a maid and is shown into the ladies' chamber at night. However, he is discovered and taken to be executed. But Signe, who sees this from the maiden's chamber, sets fire to it and dies in the flames. We also meet a similar situation in a poem of the later Middle Ages, "Flores and Blanzeflor", which without any doubt was originally a Greek novel. Blanzeflor has been sold to the King of Babylonia, and there confined in a tower together with the king's other women, who are guarded by eunuchs. But Flores, who had traveled to Babylonia to free her, is hoisted up to the tower in a basket covered with flowers, and there meets his love. In both cases the situation is completely Oriental. Hagbard enters a harem. In order to enter he must dress like a maid, but the other women of the harem suspect his disguise and betray him. This situation is, in any case, not Scandinavian, because in Scandinavia the women were not kept in seclusion at all, and the whole motif does not rest on Scandinavian, but on Oriental conditions. But we could examine another well-known saga, the Hamlet saga, which in Saxo's writing is certainly different from the contents in Shakespeare's famous tragedy. Here too, the saga is much older than Saxo's and is referred to in poetic ballads from the 10th century. The saga itself is woven together from a great number of different motifs, but most of these point to Greece and the Orient.

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The main content is that the tyrant Fengo killed his brother and took possession of his throne. In order to escape his father's fate, Amblethus, the son of the murdered man, pretends to be a fool, and consequently, is considered harmless and gets thereby an opportunity at last to kill the tyrant. In perhaps the best known Roman saga of ancient times, we find the same type of plot in the saga about the founder of the Roman republic, Junius Brutus. His uncle, the tyrant Tarquinius, had earlier killed one of his sister's sons, and in order to escape the same fate, Brutus pretended to be a fool. Even the conclusion is the same: Brutus overthrows the tyrant and in his place steps into the leadership of the Roman state. The similarity between the two sagas, however, does not end there. Hamlet's name in Icelandic is Amlodi. In all probability this is an appellative which means fool, and Brutus is actually also an appellative which means dense, stupid, irrational. Amlodi can thus be a pure translation of Brutus. One may now perhaps object and say that this is based on a coincidence and that the similarity between the two sagas is so general that a direct loan may not necessarily be considered. But in the continuation we meet another motif, which is so special that it cannot be explained away in this manner. The fool Brutus is sent on a journey to the oracle in Delphi, but he carries with him there a hollow cane, filled with gold, which he gives to the oracle. Just like Brutus, Hamlet is also sent on a journey, to England, and like Brutus he fills a pair of hollow canes with gold before the journey to England. And this conformity cannot be a coincidence, but clearly shows that the Scandinavian saga is borrowed from the Roman saga, which of course was well known in Byzantium, the capital of "the Roman Empire" - since it dealt with one of the most important events in the saga history of the Roman Empire. But the other episodes in the saga also go back to Byzantine motifs. In the Byzantine literature there is a poem about the wise Ptocholeon. He is a slave to a prince and reports first of all that a precious stone, which the prince considers to be very valuable, has a flaw in it, and a closer examination proves this information to be correct. Secondly, he mentions that the prince's bride is of low birth, and even this turns out to be true. Thirdly, he says that the

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prince himself is not the son of his supposed father, but of a slave, and when she is interrogated, the Queen Mother admits to the truth of the wise man's assertions. In another form, this saga tells about the Greek emperor Heraklios, and as Axel Olrik has shown, this saga originates in Arabia. But the same wonderful sagacity is also revealed by the hero in the Hamlet Saga. When the King of England invites him to a banquet, Hamlet notices that the bread tastes of blood, the drink of iron, and the pork of human flesh. It turns out that the bread was baked from grain grown on a battle field; the water mixed in the drink had been brought from a well, where digging disclosed rusty swords; the pork was taken from pigs that had eaten from the corpse of a dead robber, and all the statements thus proved to be true. Furthermore, Hamlet remarked that the Queen had a slave's behaviour, and by making an investigation, it was established that she really was the daughter of a slave. Finally Hamlet commented that the king himself had slave eyes, and also now the Queen Mother had to admit that she had committed adultery with one of her slaves. The comparisons are thus considerable. Even a third episode in the Hamlet saga goes back to a Greek novel. The motif is certainly very common in the realm of the saga - it is the same one that we know from the folk tale Rike Per (Peter the Rich), the shopkeeper, and deals with the futility in trying to alter the implacable ways of destiny. But this motif exists here in a special shape, which is peculiar to the Hamlet saga and the Greek novel. The latter is, of course, not available now in its Byzantine version, but we know it through a French revision from the Middle Ages. The contents are as follows: Emperor Florian learns that a newborn child first is going to marry his daughter and later become emperor of Byzantium. In order to prevent this he orders the child killed, but the one who is to carry out the murder, backs out of the task and leaves the child outside a monastery, where it is reared and is named Constant or Constantios. When Constant is fifteen years old, the emperor comes there and discovers what had happened. He then sends Constant to the castellan with a letter, in which the castellan is ordered to kill the bearer of the letter. But Constant lies down to sleep out-

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side the castle, the princess comes there, is taken in by the beautiful youth, takes the letter that he has in his belt and reads it. When she has done that, she rewrites it, so that instead it contains an order to marry the bearer of the letter to the emperor's daughter. This happens, and the emperor must admit to being beaten by destiny. But the same motif, treated in about the same manner, is found in the Hamlet saga. Hamlet is sent to the Queen of Scotland with a similar letter. In the letter the King of Britain proposes marriage to the Scottish queen, but the king knows that the queen usually kills everyone who comes to her with marriage proposals, and he hopes that she will kill Hamlet too. But in the saga it happens the way as in the above-mentioned novel. At a distance from the castle Hamlet lies down to sleep, and some of the queen's messengers come there, and without waking up Hamlet, take both the letter and his shield, on which all his exploits are described. When the queen, through them, finds out what a hero Hamlet is, her heart softens, and under the influence of these feelings, she rewrites the letter so that it contains a recommendation for Hamlet, and in the end the queen gives him her hand. But even the continuation deals with Oriental saga material. Namely that Hamlet is already married - with the daughter of the British king, and he thus commits bigamy, but this does not disturb his relationship with his first wife. When he returns to England, his wife there is not bitter about his new marriage at all, but welcomes her rival and helps Hamlet against her father. Polygamy did occur in Scandinavia also, but the Scandinavian poems never praise passive submission. This motif is Oriental and not European. The same story which we find in Hamlet was also, of course, borrowed from the Orient by the French and German literature of the Middle Ages, but the writer always felt strangely towards the motif, and in one version the story ends with all three contracting parties taking up monastic vows. Now let us turn to another group of sagas. The sagas, which in old Greece were incontestibly the most popular, the seamen's stories. The inhabitants of Hellas had been seafaring people even during the Mycenaean period, and they remained such throughout

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ancient times. Especially renowned were naturally the roving expeditions of Odysseus, and the fact that these sagas were still in existence during the Middle Ages can be taken for granted. The upper classes knew them quite certainly from Homer; to the less educated they were known as folk tales, which means that they were in many ways remoulded and mixed in with other elements, such as the sagas about the march of the Argonauts, with all the fantastic travel adventures, which, especially during the Hellenistic period were perhaps the most popular reading for entertainment, and finally with Vergil's well-known adventure stories in the Aeneid, first of all, of course, the portrayal of Aeneas' journey to Hades. But exactly in this less educated and less true form, the Scandinavian Varangians may have heard these tales from those soldiers, sailors, and merchants, with whom they got acquainted in the emperor's city, and in my opinion, it is the Odyssey in a coarse form, which also lies behind one of the sagas of Saxo. This occurs in the eighth book and deals with the adventurous journey which Torkel undertook to Geruth's land. Most of the episodes in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and some, which cannot be found again there, could very well be thought of as going to the Byzantine folk saga, which was created with the Homeric poem as a starting point. Still others have clearly been added by the Nordic sagatellers themselves. The most striking point in the journey of Odysseus was, of course, his journey to Hades, and in the imagination of the people, Hades was understood as the destination of the journey. It was located, according to the Odyssey by the "swirling rivers of Okeanos" near the land and city of the Cimmerians, "which lay swathed in clouds and fog, while the shining Helios above it never looked with its shining eye, but an oppressive night always rested over the mortal unfortunates". But the country to which Torkel traveled was also described in the same way. In order to get there one had to cross the ocean, which surrounds the earth, leave sun and stars behind him, travel through chaos, and at last travel through an area perpetually afflicted with darkness. But this is indeed an almost similar description word for word.

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Torkel's journey is at first aided by favorable winds, but then a shortage of food develops, and the crew begins to suffer from hunger. Then they discover an island, where fine herds are grazing. But Torkel forbids his men to kill more animals than are needed to avoid the worst hunger, because otherwise the gods protecting the place would come and prevent their departure. But this episode is most certainly borrowed from the Odyssey. During his wanderings Odysseus and his comrades come to the Island of Helios. Odysseus strictly forbids his men to touch the herd of oxen, but their hunger overpowers them. "Death in any form is terrible"; one of them says, "nevertheless to die of hunger is the worst"; and then they start to slaughter the oxen. But the punishment cannot be avoided, and as soon as the ships are at sea, a raging storm begins, in which they are shipwrecked. Next Torkel and his followers arrive in Bjarmia, and Torkel forbids his men to talk to anyone: "Silence will be the safest for them." But even this episode has a certain counterpart in the Odyssey. When the Greeks pass the island of the sirens, there is a danger that the men might hear their songs, and Odysseus therefore plugs their ears with wax. When they reach their destination, Torkel encourages his comrades not to eat any of the food that they are offered. The one who did so would "lose his memory" and in the future "remain forever with the ghastly herds of the monsters and in their dirty company", that is, to be turned into swine, for there can be no other way to interpret the flowery revision of Saxo. Here two episodes in the Odyssey are combined into one. At the start of the journey the Greeks come to the land of the lotus eaters. They were met in a friendly manner and given lotus fruits to eat, but the one who ate "From the delightful honeyed lotus, Had no mind of returning with messages or thoughts of home, But there they wanted to remain with the lotus eaters, Always picking the lotus fruits, and forgetting their homeward journey." The similarity is clear. The Greeks who ate the food which the lotus eaters offered them lost their memory, and in the same

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manner Torkel warns his comrades against eating the food which was offered them, because then they would lose their memory. But even the second warning alludes to an episode in the Odyssey, the adventure with Circe. The sorceress Circe namely invites the Greeks to a party, but mixes a juice in the drink and touches them afterwards with her wand, whereby they turn into swine. Without doubt this is the same transformation which is referred to by Saxo's words that they would "remain forever with the ghastly herds of the monsters and in their dirty company". In the underworld the Danes ran into another temptation, under which four of them break down. They give themselves up to some women and thereby become insane and lose their memories. Behind this episode lies another Greek seamen's story, even though it is not included in the Odyssey, but one which we know from Lukianos. About "the wine women" it is thus related in this novel, "they kissed us then on the mouth, but those who were kissed became all of a sudden dizzy and staggered like drunkards". And an even worse fate came upon those who ran into the "donkey women". They lived on strangers, and after they had gotten them intoxicated, they killed them. The land of Hades, to which the Danes came, is related most closely to the reminiscences from the Aeneid. The Danes got there by crossing a river, just as Aeneas is rowed to the kingdom of the dead across the river Styx. After having crossed over, the Danes notice a black, awful city, where horrible, wild dogs guard the gates. Torkel, however, throws a horn covered with fat to the dogs, and when they lick it they calm down. This entire scene is found in the Aeneid. When Aeneas, in the company of the Sibyl has crossed the Styx, he is met by the triple-jawed hell dog Cerberus, whose mane of snakes is raised up against the strangers. But the Sibyl throws a cake spiced with magic art to him, and when the monster has swallowed it, he collapses and leaves the road free. The town to which Aeneas ana the Sibyl thereafter arrive, is described in about the same manner as by Saxo. Therein, according to Saxo, dwells a bloodless, awful shadow-being, and among other things the Danes see on an elevated place an old man, whose body has a hole in it, leaning

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with his back against a shattered rock. The details in the Aeneid are, however, not the same - they might have been, if this had been a question of an educated, literary imitation by Saxo - but the motifs are the same: Tityon, who is picked by a vulture; Ixion, over whose head a rock hovers; Sisyphus, who pushes a giant stone up a hill, etc. It is clearly these motifs which have stirred the Nordic imagination. Also in another place, Saxo uses an odd Hades saga, clearly originating from ancient times. It is thus told about Hading that one evening he saw a woman rise out of the earth. On her head she wore a bundle of hemlock and tucked in her cloak she had, in spite of the winter time, a collection of green herbs. Thereafter she wrapped the king in her cloak and sank with him down through the earth. But in this woman we quite clearly recognize Demeter by the way she is presented in antique statues and reliefs. Demeter, the underworld goddess of fertility, is usually presented as a woman with a wreath of ripe grain around her head together with a basket filled with sheaves - thus with the same attributes as the subterranean creature who appears in Saxo's saga. Down in the underworld the Danes come to a dark, misty area and from there to an open field, where they saw some noble men, impressively dressed in purple. But here we probably have a recollection of the Elysian fields, as these are described by Vergil, and where Aeneas meets the heroes and singers of ancient times. Aeneas sees how a large number of them practice war games, and in the same manner Hading sees how two groups fight each other - those who fell in battle, and who in this place continued their heroic lives. More parellels could be added, but the ones mentioned should be sufficient to show how the Byzantine folk sagas, as we have to assume, are repeated in Saxo's Danish chronicles. And here clearly one cannot talk about any learned influence, because Saxo himself does not suspect that he deals with subjects borrowed from ancient times, and so far as the Odyssey is concerned, he was not acquainted with it. Instead he believes that he is reproducing Danish sagas of kings and Danish folk tradition. The allusions to many of these sagas, which occurred in Norwegian poetic songs from the 9th and the 10th centuries, also show that they were already

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known in Scandinavia during those centuries, although still perhaps not in the same form as by Saxo. But this fact - a Byzantine influence on the Nordic literature as early as the 10th century - changes our whole previous understanding of this literature. As is known, this literature is, with two important exceptions - Saxo and the Icelandic literature - as good as lost completely. Of Swedish literature from this period, there is nothing left except for some scarce, uniformative rune inscriptions. Of pure Norwegian literature there remains hardly more than a few fragments of ancient poetic ballads, which have been included as quotations in later Icelandic works. Saxo's chronicles in Latin were hardly taken notice of in older times, and the conclusion was therefore clear: the whole ancient Scandinavian literature was Icelandic, and in this literature the other Nordic peoples had no part. However, it is easy to see that this conclusion has been too hasty. The ancient Scandinavian literature has been preserved on this remote island in the Arctic Ocean, which was less frequently touched by the great streams of European culture that washed away the old, partly heathen cultures in the main countries of Scandinavia at the beginning of the true Middle Ages. But the question where this literature has originated and developed, is something else which cannot be solved by a simple reference to the fact that this literature now exists only in Icelandic. When scholars first began to investigate the Icelandic literature from the viewpoints mentioned here, it was natural that attention was first focused on the British Isles, and Bugge hypothesized that the Icelandic Eddie poetry in a considerable part had originated in the West. With an image borrowed from Homeric research, he called these British Isles the Eolia of ancient Scandinavian poetry. Although Bugge's hypothesis was without a doubt correct in certain parts, it suffered from considerable weaknesses - firstly, he greatly overestimated the importance of this British influence, and secondly, his study was much too philological. He constantly experimented with a learned influence from Irish monks, while any exchange of ideas between Nordic vikings and Irish monks surely never took place.

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The investigation whose main characteristics I have now presented, however, shows, that the Nordic poetry had still another Eolia - the Swedish Varangian Empire in Russia, and this has been, in a literary sense, of greater importance than Britain. From the Swedish Varangians, Scandinavia received in the first place the Gothic saga materials, poetically so important, and later a stream of Byzantine and Oriental material. If we investigate the Icelandic prehistoric sagas, we also find that these much more often were localized in the region extending to the Baltic, especially to Gardarike,3 than to Britain, and this fact alone speaks for assigning that area as the original home of the Nordic saga poetry - the home where saga poetry originated and developed, and later was recorded in Iceland and is repeated in Saxo's Danish Chronicles. But if this is true, then Sweden also takes an entirely different position within the Nordic literature group. Behind the rich Icelandic folk poetry lies an old Swedish Varangian poetry, which certainly has been lost, but which we should just as well be able to trace, not only in Saxo's sagas of kings and in the Icelandic Eddie poetry and prehistoric sagas, but also in the Finnish Kalevala runes borrowed from Sweden, and in the Russian Byliner 4 in the old Varangian Empire. It is in this way that I hope a future investigation will be able to spread light over the period before the year of 1200, which up until now has been regarded as being completely without literature, for even within the history of literature the saying is true that no ancient time sleeps so deeply that a future cannot wake it up from the grave.

3 4

The ancient Scandinavian name for the Swedish Viking Empire in Russia. Russian folk-hero songs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS Bowers, F.T., Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Gloucester, Peter Smith, 1959). Craig, Hardin, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chicago, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1961). Durant, Will, The Age of Faith: The Age of Civilization, IV (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1950). Gillin, John, The Ways of Men (New York, Appleton-Century, 1948). Gollancz, Sir Israel, The Sources of "Hamlet" (London, Oxford University Press, 1926). Harrison, G. B., Shakespeare: Major Plays and Sonnets (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1948). Hoebel, E. Adamson, Man in the Primitive World (New York, McGrawHill, 1949). Keary, C. F., The Vikings (New York, Putnam, 1891). Kendrick, T. D., A History of the Vikings (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1930). Kluchevsky, V. O., A History of Russia, trans, from the Russian by C. J. Hogarth (London, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911). La Chronique de Nestor, Traduite en Français d'après l'édition impériale de Petersbourg (manuscrit de Koenigsberg) par Louis Paris (Paris, Heideloffe et Campe, 1834). Malone, Kemp, The Literary History of "Hamlet" (Heidelberg, 1923). Pares, B., The History of Russia (New York, Knopf, 1926). Platonov, S., The History of Russia, trans. E. Aronsberg (New York, the Macmillan Company, 1929). Rambaud, Alfred, The History of Russia, trans. L. B. Lang, from the French (Boston, Estes and Lauriat, 1886). Saxo Grammaticus, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, trans. Oliver Elton (London, the Norroena Society, 1905), 2 vols. Schick, Josef, Corpus Hamleticum (Berlin), Vol. I, 1912, Vols. II and III, 1934. Thomsen, V., The Relations Between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia, and the Origin of the Russian State (London, James Parker and Company, 1877).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Vernadsky, George, The Origins of Russia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959). Wilson, J. Dover, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 1961).

ARTICLES Donaldson, E. T., "The Middle Ages", The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I (New York, W. W. Norton, 1962). Mawrer, Allen, "Germany and the Western Empire", The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. Ill (Cambridge University Press, 1957). Schuck, Henrik, "Byzans och Norden: Föredrag vid nedläggandet av rektoratet for Uppsala universitet 1918", Ärsskrift, University of Uppsala, translated by Lillemor Saether, "Byzantium and Scandinavia: Lecture upon resignation from the Presidency of the University of Uppsala in 1918". See Appendix.

ENCYCLOPEDIAS Milyukov, Paul, "Russia: History: Origin of the 'Russ'", Encyclopedia Britannica, (1949), Vol. 19, p. 712. Von Friesen, Otto, "Runes", Encyclopedia Britannica, (1949), Vol. 19, pp. 659-664.

THESIS Cuny, Gerald T., The Varangian Water-Way as an Eastern Commercial Route in the Early Middle Ages. Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Saint Louis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, St. Louis University (St. Louis, Missouri, 1937).

INDEX

Aeneid, Vergil, 22, 23, 24, 68, 70, 71 Aeneus, see Aeneid Amleth (prototype of Hamlet), 914 passim, 24-34 passim, 36, 37, 48-55 passim; see also Amlôdi, Hamlet, Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica Amlödi, Amblethus, 25, 26, 27, 31, 53 fn., 65; see also Amleth, Hamlet Anglo-Saxon, 26, 61; see also England Anlaf the Dane story, 54 Antifeminism, 53, 54 Askold, 42-44 passim; see also Dir, Chronicle of Nestor Belleforest, François de, Histoires Tragiques, 9, 47, 48, 51, 54 Bowers, Fredson T. (Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy), 51 Brjâm, Icelandic tale of, 25, 26, 53 Brutus, Junius, founder of the Roman republic, 9, 26-28, 53, 65; see also Tarquin, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Elton, Schlick Bugge, Icelandic scholar, 32, 72 Byzantine, Byzantines, Byzantium, 9, 10, 13-22 passim, 24, 28-32 passim, 34, 37, 39, 42-45 passim, 47, 55-62 passim, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73; see also Constantinople

"Byzantium and Scandinavia", 5673; see also Schiick, Saether Christianity, Christendom, see Christians, Crusades Christians, 9, 14, 37, 40, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52-55 passim, 57 Chronicle of Nestor (also known as The Ancient Chronicle and Chronography of Russia), 9, 16, 38, 39, 41-44 passim Circe, 23, 24, 70; see also Odysseus Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, 48-49; see also Feng Constantinople, 9, 19, 42-45, 58, 60, 61, 62; see also Byzantine, Byzantines, Byzantium Constant, Constantios, 29-30, 6667 Craig, Hardin, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 9 fn. Crusades, Crusaders, 14, 15, 56, 57, 58; see also Christians Cuny, Gerald T., The Varangian Water-Way as an Eastern Commercial Route in the Early Middle Ages, 16 fn. Dane, Danes, Danish, 9, 15, 18, 20-24 passim, 30-37 passim, 39, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48-51 passim, 54, 55, 59-62 passim, 70, 71; see also Danish literature, Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica, Danegeld

INDEX Danegeld, 18, 61 Danish literature, 31, 32, 55, 59, 62; see also Saxo, Historia Danica Demeter, 24, 71 Denmark, 15, 35, 40, 45, 48, 59, 61, 63 Dido, 21, 63 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 26, 53; see also Brutus Dir, 42-44 passim-, see also Askold, Chronicle of Nestor Donaldson, E. T„ 53 Ebbo, 21, 63-64 Elton, Oliver, 13, 15 fn„ 25, 53; see also Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica England, English, Britain, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 28-32 passim, 37, 40, 50, 51, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 72, 73; see also AngloSaxon Feng, uncle of Amleth-Hamlet, 10-12, 27, 28, 33, 34, 48, 49, 50, 52, 65; see also Amleth, Saxo, Historia Danica, Elton, Schiick Florian, king, 29-30, 66-67. See Constant Flores and Blanzeflor, 22, 64 Friesland, 37, 40, 41; see also Rorik Gardarike, Swedish Viking Empire in Russia, 32, 73 Gertrude, 30 fn., 47-50 passim, 52-55 passim; see also Gerutha Gerutha, Geruth, mother of Amleth-Hamlet, 10-11, 30 fn., 34, 45, 47-50 passim, 52; see also Gertrude Gerwendil, grandfather of Amleth-Hamlet on his father's side, 10, 33 Gollancz, Sir Israel, 13, 25, 48 fn., 51 fn., 54 fn. Greek, Greeks, Greece, 15, 16,

77 18-24 passim, 27, 28, 29, 32, 37, 43, 44, 45, 57-64 passim, 66-71 passim; see also Constantinople, Byzantine

Hades, 22, 23, 24, 68, 70, 71 Hading saga, 24, 71 Hagbard and Signe, 21-22, 64 Halfdan, 21, 63 Hamblet, 47-48; see also Hamlet, Amleth Hamlet, 9, 10, 14, 15, 24, 25, 27-30 passim, 32, 33, 37, 4555 passim, 64-67 passim; see also Hamblet, Amleth, Amlödi, Elton, Schiick Harald, brother of Rorik, 37, 40 Harrison, G. B., 50 fn. Havelock the Dane, 54 Heraklios, 28, 66 Hermutrude, Queen of Scotland, 12-13, 29, 30, 50-51, 67; see also Scotland Histoires Tragiques, see Belleforest Historia Danica, 9-15 passim, 2027 passim, 31-37 passim, 45, 48-51 passim, 53-55 passim, 59, 62-73 passim; see also Saxo, Elton, Hamlet, Jutland, Danes Hoebel, E. Adamson, 52 Horwendil, Horvendile, father of Amleth-Hamlet, 10, 33-34, 45, 47, 49-50, 52; see also Hamlet, Saxo, Historia Danica, Elton, Schiick Hystorie of Hamblet, 47. see Gollancz, Hamlet, Hamblet Iceland, 25, 27, 31, 32, 59, 65, 72, 73; see also Brjam Incest, 30 fn., 47, 49, 50, 52, 54 Ivar, 21, 63 Jerusalem, Holy Land, Palestine, 57 Jutland, 10-13 passim, 33, 36, 37, 39-41 passim, 50; see also Denmark

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INDEX

Kendrick, T. D„ 16, 48-49 fn., 50 fn. Kiev, 19, 38, 42, 59 Levirate, 51-52 Livy, 26, 53; see also Brutus Malone, Kemp, 13, 25 Mawrer, Allen, 37, 49 fn., 50 fn. Mohammedans, Moslems, 14, 17, 57, 58, 61; see also Schück Nestor, 16, 38. See Chronicle of Nestor Novgorod, 10, 17, 38, 39, 41, 45 Odysseus, 22, 23, 24, 31, 68, 69, 70, 71 Odyssey, see Odysseus Polygamy, among the Danes, 30, 50-53 passim, 67 Prokrustes, 21, 63 Ptocholeon, 28, 65-66 Ragnar Lodbrok, 21, 63 Rhos. See Rus, Russia, Vernadsky, Schiick Rolf (Hrolfr Kraki), 54 Roman, Roman Empire, 9, 10, 17, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 37, 45, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65; see also Brutus, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Valerius Maximus, Schück, Elton Rorik, grandfather of AmlethHamlet, founder of Russia, 9, 10, 11, 34-41 passim, 45-50 passim, 52, 54; see also Rurik Rotho, 21, 63 Rurik, founder of Russia, 10, 3846; see also Rorik, Vernadsky Rus, Russ, Rhos, Russes, 18, 19, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 60, 61; see also Russia Russia, Russian, 9-10, 15-19 passim, 31, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 58-61 passim, 63, 73; see also Rus,

Varangian, Rurik, Vernadsky, Schück Saether, Lillemor, translator "Byzantium and Scandinavia", 56; see Schück, Appendix Saxo Grammaticus, 9-10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20-37 passim, 39, 40, 45, 48-55 passim, 59, 62-73 passim; see also Historia Danica, Elton, Amleth, Rorik, Danes Scandinavian^), 9, 13-16 passim, 18, 19, 20, 31, 32, 56, 62, 64, 65, 67, 72, 73; see Scandinavian literature, Rhos, Russes, Russia, Varangians Scandinavian literature, 14, 15, 21, 31, 32, 56, 64, 65, 67, 72-73 passim-, see also Scandinavians), Sweden, Danish literature, Varangians, Vikings, Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica, Amleth, Rorik, Rurik, Schück, Elton, Vernadsky Schick, Josef, Corpus Hamleticum, 13 fn., 25 fn., 29 fn. Schück, Henrik, 14-15, 18 fn., 19 fn., 20 fn., 22, 23, 24, 2732 passim, 55-73; see also "Byzantium and Scandinavia", Saether, Saxo, Historia Danica Scotland, Scotch, 12, 30, 50, 51, 67; see also Hermutrude Shakespeare, William, 9, 15, 27, 33, 37, 46, 47, 48, 54, 55, 64; see also Shakespearians, Hamlet, Amleth, Gertrude, Gerutha, Saxo, Historia Danica, Schück Shakespearians, Shakespeare scholars, 9, 15, 27, 46, 55; see also Shakespeare, Schück, Elton, Gollancz Sineus, in Chronicle of Nestor, 38, 41; see also Truvor Sinnis, 21, 63 Slavs, 9, 18, 35, 36, 38-39, 42, 45, 59; see also Rurik, Varangians, Vernadsky, Schück Snaebiorn, 25, 27; see also Saxo

INDEX Grammaticus, Historia Danica, Elton Sweden, Swedes, Swedish literature, 16, 18, 19, 20, 31, 32, 35, 54, 55, 58-63 passim, 72, 73; see also Varangians, Scandinavians, Schiick, Vernadsky Tarquin, Tarquinius (overcome by Junius Brutus), 26, 27, 28, 65 Theseus, 21, 63 Torkel, 22, 23, 68-69; see also Saxo, Schiick Truvor, in Chronicle of Nestor, 38, 41; see also Sineus Ubbe, 36 Urse, mother to Rolf, 54 Valerius Maximus, 26, 27, 53; see

79

also Brutus, Elton, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus Varangian Guard, 19-20, 44, 45, 59-60, 62; see also Rurik, Varangians, etc. Varangians, Varangian literature, 9, 13, 15-21 passim, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 42-45 passim, 55, 59, 68, 73; see also Scandinavians, Vikings, Russians, Schiick, Vernadsky, Cuny Varangian Way, or Route, 17-18, 28, 32, 60-61; see also Varangians Vikings, 15-20 passim, 32, 39, 40, 45, 47, 55, 60, 63, 72, 73 fn.; see also Varangians, Varangian Guard, Varangian Way, Sweden, Danes, Rorik, Amleth, Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica, Schiick, Vernadsky