 Hamlet, the Viking Hamlet. If you ask most people what they think about the character of Hamlet, they'll probably describe an indecisive and almost cowardly figure who's unable to take revenge on his uncle for murdering his father. Most people are, of course, familiar with Shakespeare's Hamlet, a product of Elizabethan England. Shakespeare's character was very complicated and nuanced character that explored some of the subtleties of human psychology. But the character didn't originate with Shakespeare and it didn't originate in Elizabethan England. It's a test in texts that come from the Middle Ages in Denmark, maybe not surprising if you've heard Hamlet refer to as the Dane. The character and the story is not only set in Denmark, but it actually originated in Denmark. The medieval world that this character comes from looks like this. There's the regions of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which roughly correspond to the modern nation states, although they're not exactly the same because these nation states don't exist yet. Gotland or Geetland, which is associated both with Beowulf is where Beowulf is from, but also mentioned in the saga for Off Crockey, which you may have already read. I've separated Britain and Scotland because these are described as different countries in the text. Iceland up there in the top left, a source of a lot of the Old Norse texts that we have because the Icelanders, despite being a really small population, produced a lot of literature from the Middle Ages. But this text about Amlif actually comes from Denmark. It's one of the few texts that actually doesn't come from Iceland from this time period. It comes from Denmark and it comes from an author named Saxo Grammaticus, that is Saxo the Grammarian. His larger work is called Just a Danorum, or History of the Danes. It was written around the year 1208. He began production of it in 1208. As the title in Latin suggests, this is a work that's in Latin, although Saxo is Danish. He could speak an Old Scandinavian and Old Norse type of language. Everyone in the Middle Ages in Europe who wanted to write for an international audience, wanted to write in the language of scholarship of the church, but also of the academy, would write in Latin. Although this was not the language of the people of this area, obviously. Only a handful of scholars could read this. And the region he's describing, this is again the modern nation of Denmark, but it's not a nation state at this point. It's a series of kingdoms with the most prominent kingdom being located at Lera. That's on that island of Zeeland in the middle of this enlarged map. Zeeland is where the Hrothgar's Hall of Hylroth and Beowulf is located. It's where Hlydhar, the Hall of Rolf Kraky, and the side of Rolf Kraky is located. So the king who rules from the central area of Lera on Zeeland, tends to be the most powerful sea king in Scandinavia. And frequently the other king is like the kings of the Jutes and Angles and geese and Swedes tend to be subordinate to this king. Although there's never really the kind of hierarchy that we would see in the Roman Empire that we might see later in the age of European empires. This is going to be important in the text about Amlef because Amlef's father and uncle rule over the Jutes. They rule over Jutland, but they're subordinate to King Rorik in Zeeland. Now unlike most of the authors we've read so far in this class, Saxo is writing a chronicle. He's not sitting out to write a work of literature. He's not sitting out to write a unified narrative with coherent characters and you know something like an epic that has something holding all of the individual events or episodes together. He's writing a chronicle and for our purposes a chronicle is a record of historical events arranged in chronological order in a list form with you know sort of here's a year and here's what happened that year and here's the next year and here's what happened in that year rather than a unified narrative. And a good example of an extreme version of a chronicle is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is written over several centuries in the early Middle Ages. It'll have lots of different authors and they'll write something like you know in 860 this is the year the King Athelbal died and his body lies at Sherbourne and then in 861 Saints Wythen died who was a bishop and then in 866 importantly this is when the Great Heathen Army attacks England and I chose this segment of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in order to highlight this event. This is where this group called the Great Heathen Army which is led by as you see down in the 870 entry led by two guys named Ingvar and Uba. This is Uba and Ivar the Boneless that are sons of Ragnar Lordbrook. This allows us to see that the Anglo-Saxon England and the Scandinavian Norths were very closely connected throughout this time period. This is going to be relevant to our our narrative about Amlet. But a chronicle is usually just like this and this year this happened this year this happened. There may be something connecting several of these years but from beginning to end there's no consistent narrative. The completely different characters come and go and there's no beginning middle and end it's just one thing after another. But Saxo's not just trying to write a list like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He is trying to make this into a story and he admits that he's taking these different sources from all over the place including oral tradition. He even mentions that he's using runic inscriptions. He says you know not only did the Danes allude to the splendor of their nobly wrought achievements with choice compositions of poetical nature in other words these poems that praised rulers and things like that but they also engraved the letters of their own language on rocks and stones to retell these feats of their ancestors which have been made popular in the songs of their mother tongue. And these are the sources that Saxo admits that he's pulling together and taking individual narratives and putting them into this larger chronicle and the but still the one thing that unifies the whole chronicle is that it's a historical record of Denmark which did not exist up until Saxo's time. But even though his goal is just history, we keep in mind that history is kind of always a narrative. It is always attributing large forces to individual people even though those individual people may not have had quite as much agency as the story tends to give to them. As Michael Shudson put it, to pass a version of the past on it has to be encapsulated into some sort of cultural form and into a narrative with a beginning a middle and end an original state of equilibrium, a disruption or resolution has to have a protagonist overcoming obstacles and that sort of thing. The historian Hayden White also has written a lot about the narrativization of history or the emplotment of history and as a narrative a chronicle or any other account is susceptible to change over time. There is the author has to select through all these different potential elements of this multi-form of all these different story elements and events and ultimately decide what's important, what do I include, how do I describe it, what else do I need to add, what sort of interpretations and explanations do I need to add and create a specific iteration of a multi-form story that could have gone many other different ways and frequently one that will be contested by other people with other points of view. Each successive iteration even if it's based on the one before it tends to add many things that the new author thinks he read or thinks he saw in the original text which may or may not have actually been there. Each iteration undergoes many successive changes before it at length arrives at a relatively fixed form in which it may become current throughout a whole community. It seems that Saxo wanted to be that final form. He wanted to take this oral tradition these other competing accounts and put them into the definitive version but of course when the definitive version of history comes at a later stage it's further removed from the actual events themselves so we always want to be a little bit skeptical to create that definitive form Saxo is redacting lots of different sources. Some of those sources he's taking directly from oral tradition some of those sources he's taking from other written texts and of course a redactor has to reconcile discrepancies between parallel accounts. If you've got two different accounts of the same story which one do you go with? If you try to combine them both or change one and and also the redactor has his or her own influences. In this case Saxo is clearly familiar with Virgil's Aeneid which we've already read in this class. There's a passage which we'll read about Amleth where he tries to inscribe or create pictures of his deeds all the things he's accomplished in his life and have them all recorded on a shield. Well this comes directly out of Virgil's Aeneid it's a part that we didn't read it's in the second half of the Aeneid but it's pretty clear that Saxo is introducing this element from Virgil's Aeneid rather than from some local Scandinavian or Norse account about Amleth. So every story has to be fit into a narrative frame into a narrative context and in this case everyone who's literate in the Middle Ages is going to know Latin and they're going to have read Virgil's Aeneid so there's a little bit of that influence that will color the local traditions that get recorded in a chronicle like Saxo's history of the Danes. And another thing a redactor is going to do in any narrative is going to do any narrator is going to do is to add interpretations about what people were thinking because this is not something that pure history could really observe. You can observe what people say what they write but as far as what they were thinking you have to sort of create your own interpretation what their motivations are what they were afraid of what they wanted and that sort of thing. And in narrative we call this this sort of clunky title unfortunately but we call this free indirect discourse. This is when a narrator tells you what a character was thinking or what a character said but doesn't give you a direct quotation. We're not left to infer what a character is thinking. We're not left to use theory of mind. We're told here's what he was thinking or here's the kind of thing he said. And a lot of this introduces interpretations from the narrator or the author. The author is telling us how we should interpret an event not just leaving it to us to come up with our own interpretations. When Saxo says oh Valiant Amleth and worthy of a mortal fame who being shrewdly armed with the faint of folly covered a wisdom too high for human wit under the marvelous disguise of silliness and not only found in his subtlety means to protect his own safety but also by its guidance found opportunity to avenge his father. Now Saxo tells us this entire story detail by detail but in this situation in this quotation he's actually interpreting summarizing but then telling us that this is a great thing. This isn't just a deceptive person. This is someone who actually is worthy of praise. But remember the difference between the way Homer described the trickery of Odysseus and the way that Virgil described the trickery of the Greeks. Homer thought this was great. Virgil thought this was wickedness. Thought this was underhanded and not of virtue. Well we see with Saxo in praising Amleth he's trying to say that this sort of trickery is a good thing. So this is the narrator sort of sliding his interpretation in alongside the facts and that sort of thing we call free and direct discourse. Now elsewhere in Saxo's text the Justa d'Anore and the History of the Danes he doesn't just tell the story of Amleth. He tells the story of Amleth in the end of book 3 and the beginning of book 4. He also describes a lot of other characters which we may be familiar with today. For instance if you watch the History Channel show Vikings about Ragnar Ludbroke and his sons, Saxo is one of the main sources for what we know about Ragnar and his sons and including his first wife Lagritha. The figures of Bjorn Ironsides and Ivar the Boneless and Uba Fitserk and Sigurd Snake-Eye. These characters that we see on the TV show and elsewhere and that also figure in certain north sagas do have their basis in something that happened in history. Now can we say that Saxo's version is the true definitive historical account whereas the the sagas are more fictionalized? Well no we really can't because for all we know Saxo's sources for these were the sagas or were oral versions of the sagas at this time. And in Saxo's account in book 9 where he introduces Ragnar Ludbroke and his sons he also introduces Lagritha who's one of several female warriors that Saxo mentions. She's someone who actually does don armor, pick up a shield, pick up a sword, and go with her own army to fight against other armies. And she comes to Ragnar's rescue a time or two despite the fact that Ragnar leaves her at one point. She still shows up and saves his life in book 9 of Saxo's history. And in the narrative about Amleth we also read about two other female characters that were they were very dominant and proactive. One of those is Sela. She's the sister of Cole, king of Norway, and she's described as quote Saxo tells us quote, a skilled warrior experienced in roving. And in your translation whenever you read roving this is you know raiding. This is doing what Vikings do getting in a ship and going and attacking and plundering a foreign settlement. But this is something women did as well as men. And then of course there's the character of Herman Throod who's the second wife of Amleth and the queen of Scotland who Saxo describes as being a queen but for all practical purposes being a king or being a queen with the quality of a king. In other words she was just as assertive and just as respected and just as powerful as a queen as any male king would have been. Saxo also describes another familiar character if you've already read the saga of Rolf Krocky. Rolf shows up again in Saxo's history as well as references to Lydaar the capital which is Rolf Krocky's capital but also Rothkar's capital in Beowulf. And Saxo relates several stories about the Norse gods with one sort of condition and that is he employs what's called euhemerism. This comes from the name of a Greek historian who suggested that the gods were really just historical humans that over time as their legend was told the narratives added these supernatural qualities to them. And so the gods are actually once human but people just sort of exaggerated their actual powers to sort of grant them supernatural powers only in the story. That's euhemerism. And Saxo wants to tell stories about Odin and Balder and other Norse gods but wants to remind us you know as he is a Christian chronicler. This is long after the conversion of Denmark to Christianity. He wants to tell these stories but he wants to sort of distance himself from any other religion. And so he'll tell stories about Odin. He'll say at that time there was a man called Odin who was believed throughout Europe though falsely to be a god. In other words I'm going to tell the story about Odin but he wasn't a god he was a human maybe that he had magical powers or something like that. But he still wasn't a god he wasn't competition for the Christian god. Now for the character of Amleth we know this wasn't a character the Saxo invented because they're in in old Icelandic there are references to a character named Amlovi which is cognate with Amleth which meant fool. It came this name comes to be later used in Old Norse just to mean a fool. And there's a reference in the prose Eda by the Icelandic poet and author Snorri Sterlson that Snorri is trying to describe some of the poetical references to past mythology that people have sort of forgotten the stories about. He's trying to sort of remind people who may have forgotten the stories that these poetic references refer to. He's trying to explain these stories a little bit and he says there was a poet named Sniborn who relates this line they say the nine sea brides turn fast the most hostile island mill out beyond the land's edge they who long ago ground Amlovi's flower. Now this reference to Amlovi's flower is a description of sand sand that's on the seashore and the island mill the mill that sort of grinds up islands the way a human mill would ground up grain and make it into flower. Well the ocean is like a mill it metaphorically the ocean is the mill of islands grounds up these islands into flower and the flower is the sand on the beach. And this connection of this character named Amlovi with this reference to sand as flower is something we see in Amleth and that lets us know that this is something that has been part of Amleth story since very early on. He's someone who describes the real world in metaphorical language in poetic language and this in Anglo-Saxon literature is called a Kenning. I'm gonna go ahead and introduce this term even though it's specifically about Anglo-Saxon literature like Beowulf but it's the kind of thing we see in all Germanic literature especially northern Germanic literature that is it's a metaphoric or metonymic figure speech that refers to an object indirectly usually in the form of a compound word like Amlovi's flower is a Kenning for sand or the island mill is a Kenning for sea. In other words Amleth or Amlovi is this characterization of poetry as something mistaken for foolishness referring to reality in an oblique way in an indirect way an artistic way in a way that a lot of people will just think is ridiculous or doesn't make any sense but actually does make sense if you can connect the vehicle with the tenor. There are also other accounts of Amleth or Amlovi that come after Saxo Grammaticus this time but show the signs that they were also gathered from folktales rather than being influenced directly by Saxo. One of these is the Icelandic Ambalis saga which wasn't actually written down until the 17th century until roughly contemporary with Shakespeare's Hamlet but it's written down in Iceland and it seems to be derived from a lot of folktales and these folktales have just enough ties just enough parallels with Saxo's Amleth and some of these other references that let us know this is part of a continuous character a continuous story that shows up in different narratives across northern Europe. This is also a more complete account it's a whole saga and if you're interested in that I'll put a link to that in the YouTube description and I'll mention briefly that there are parallels outside of Scandinavia with the Amleth story primarily the figure of Lucius Junius Brutus who was one of the founders of the Roman Republic back in 509 BCE. He killed his uncle the last Roman tyrant Lucius Tarkinius Priscus and one of the ways he was able to plot against this really powerful tyrant his uncle was to pretend to be foolish, pretend to be stupid and that's what the name Brutus means means you know Lucius Junius the stupid but he was just pretending he was just pretending so that he could escape being caught before he was actually able to kill this this tyrant and by killing this tyrant he then you know he and his other co-founders of the Roman Republic were able to free up the Republic itself to be to be something that was actually sort of rule by the Senate rather than by a single individual. Now to what extent was the earlier story of Amlothi or Amleth influenced by this Roman Brutus? We don't know but we can be pretty certain that Saxo at least knew of the Roman Brutus story because he was fluent in Latin and would have been educated with Latin history. Still it's highly unlikely that he could have just made up the Amleth story from this not to mention the fact that there are these other references to this poetical character who's mistaken for a fool. So in Saxo's character of Amleth we have this coalescing of a character who's a poet who can use metaphor and indirect references to describe reality in a way that other people just think is foolish. It's someone who is able to then use this the fact that other people underestimate him to right a wrong that is the murder of his father by his uncle. And it's this character that will eventually show up as Shakespeare's Hamlet although as we're going to see there are some clear and obvious differences. But he says of his the character of Amleth says of his strategy that it is better to choose the garb of dullness that is of foolishness or stupidity than of sense and to borrow some protection from a slow from a show of utter frenzy. Yet the passion to avenge my father still burns in my heart but I'm watching the chances I await the fitting hour. There is a place for all things against so merciless and darkest spirit must be used the deeper devices of the mind and that's the theme of the character. It's there's all he it doesn't seem like there's much going on in his head but there really is there's a lot more than any of these other characters realize. But although he was pulling off this deception he didn't want to be known as a liar. As Saxo tells us he was loath to be thought prone to lying about any matter in other words he didn't want to be known as someone who could lie or wanted to lie. And accordingly he mingled craft and candor that is a guile or trickiness as well as secrecy in such a way that though his words did not lack truth yet there was nothing to betoken the truth and betray how far his keenness went. In other words he wasn't lying but the words so obvious that they would give away how intelligent he was and that he was up to something and that he was planning revenge. And so this is a kind of irony and that word irony has lots of different meanings you probably learned several in your high school English classes that there was situational irony where the audience knew something that the character didn't you know dramatic irony or tragic irony. There's also structural irony where maybe the narrator doesn't know something that the audience really understands or something about the structure is sort of set up to be so that the words mean something other than what we actually read. But what Amleth is using here is verbal irony. We can define that as speech that has a meaning other than the obvious meaning. But irony is not just lying. Verbal irony takes us back closest to the original Greek sense of irony and the word irony comes from originally this word eronea which means dissembling not exactly lying but doing something that people will draw an idea from that's not very accurate. And there was a character called the iron in a lot of Greek comedy especially that was a very intelligent character but a character that was in a weaker position than a stronger character which was called the Alazon. But the iron was able to misrepresent himself even though in a position of weakness until he was able to overcome the stronger opponent who was a bit slow-witted or who just didn't have to think very much. A character who's strong who has power over others doesn't have to be that intelligent to get his own way most of the time. But a character who's weak or in a weaker position has to think ahead and has to be has to come in under the radar not be recognized as a threat until he's able to take power for himself. And Hamlet is very much this type of character. He's in a weaker position and he's much more intelligent than the person in power but he can't show that he has to come across as a bit slow-witted. And I want to have that grass for just a second to talk about another element of irony. You may have heard the joke about a panda. So in this joke a fellow is sitting in a truck stop cafe in California having lunch when suddenly a giant panda walks in and orders a burger with fries and a chocolate milkshake. The panda sits down, eats the food, then stands up, shoots several of the other customers and runs out the door. The guy is astonished but the waiter seems completely undisturbed. What the hell is going on? The customer asks. Oh well, there's nothing surprising about that, says the waiter. Just look it up in the dictionary under panda. So the guy goes to the library, takes out a dictionary and looks up panda. A big furry black and white animal that lives in the rainforest of China. It eats, shoots, and leaves. This joke is used by the neuroscientist Vilnau Ramachandran to illustrate something that happens in humor. The structure of a joke is actually kind of predictable even though there's, you know, thousands and thousands of different specific jokes. They tend to follow this sort of structure. The speaker shares certain information, selected information that leads a listener to a particular expectation. That is a narration. In a narration you pick certain details to share with the listener. And then there's an unexpected twist that prompts a reinterpretation of all that preceding information. And Ramachandran says it's critical that the new interpretation after this unexpected twist, though it's wholly unexpected, has to make as much sense of the entire set of facts as did the original expected interpretation. The joke is funny only if the listener gets the punchline by seeing in a flash of insight how completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending. In the joke about the panda, the panda walks into a restaurant and acts like a human just like in any other joke where animals can act like humans. A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, why the long face? That kind of thing. But once we hear that this is all an acting out of a dictionary definition minus a comma that a panda eats, shoots, and leaves. In other words it eats bamboo shoots and bamboo leaves. Or the panda eats something and then shoots people and then walks away. That reference to the dictionary definition of the each shoots and leaves makes us go back and reinterpret what we just heard about the panda going to the restaurant and shooting people. Without it, we would still have a story about a panda who acted like a human, but it wouldn't have the new interpretation. So there's two separate interpretations of the same facts. That joke depends on verbal irony. The same words meaning two different things or having two different interpretations. This is something that is Amlet's main characteristic. That early, early reference to Amlothi's mill or Amlothi's flower. This character was known as someone who made a reference to the sand as if it was flower ground up in the middle of the sea. Something similar in Saxo's account of Amleth where he's taken along the beach and his companions see the rudder of a ship which had been wrecked. And he says this was the right knife to carve such a huge ham. In that, he means the rudder of a ship is carving the sea. The sea is the ham that's being carved up by this rudder because the rudder cuts into the water. And then again, they pass the sand dunes on the beach and tell him to look at the meal, meaning the sand. And he replied that it had been ground small by the tempest of the ocean. And his companions praised his answer and he said that, you know, I meant what I said. I'm speaking the truth. So what he's doing there is interpreting something metaphorically. Remember that metaphor is fusing two schemas, two different imagery from two different references that enable one thing to be spoken of as if it had the properties of a different thing. The same information, the same visual information, in this case, either the sea or the sand has two different schemas that can describe it, two different interpretations, or it fits the criteria of metaphor, it also fits the criteria of verbal irony. So this double reference sort of fits two different types of figurative language. But it also requires us to engage in theory of mind to a level that we normally don't have to. And to a level that things retainers that are sort of keeping watch over Amlif aren't very well able to do. Remember that theory of mind is the ability to impute mental states to yourself and to others to predict their behavior on the basis of these states, to be able to understand what other individuals thinking, what their beliefs are, whether those beliefs are accurate or inaccurate, what they want, what they're afraid of, and that sort of thing. And literature really pushes us to use theory of mind more than we normally would. The situations presented in literary fiction because they disrupt our expectations, because they familiarize us, they require us to draw on more flexible and interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of the characters. We have to use theory of mind more in fiction, usually than we do in reality. So think of us as compared to Amlif's companions, they hear him say one thing and they just assume he means exactly what he says. We realize that what he says is not alone what he thinks, that it is an oblique reference, an indirect reference, a metaphor, a verbal irony, that he's actually thinking something slightly different than the most obvious interpretation of what he says. And this game of theory of mind is something that Saxo as an author, as a narrator kind of sells us short on, precisely because he uses so much free indirect discourse. When he tells us Amlif said this but he was really thinking this, he kind of undermines the joke. It's kind of like somebody that tells a joke but gives away the punchline too soon. And this is something that's going to be really relevant when we compare Amlif and Saxo to Hamlet and Shakespeare. How much work we as a reader or as an audience have to do. We actually don't have to do that much work in Saxo because he will tell us, notice the double meanings of what Amlif just said, where Shakespeare won't do that. There is no narrator in a play or at least in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet. So we have to not fall for the simple interpretation, the easy, the obvious interpretation. OK, let's take a quick look at our characters here. It's always in your notebook, always keep a character list as you're reading a text like this. It's easy to get confused about who's actually King in Denmark at this point because we have a reference to Rorick, the High King, at Lara. But remember that Lara is only on Zeland and that's the sort of really central powerful capital where the main king there will have sort of subordinate kings in other territories. And some of those subordinate kings are Horwindel or Orvindel and depending on your translation, it may be Orvindel or Horwindel. And this is a character that shows up a lot in Old Norse literature. But he has a brother named Fing and they're both given sort of governorship over Jutland, the peninsula. So they're still subject to Rorick, the King of Denmark, but they each have their own territory that they rule over. And Orvindel or Horwindel is a sort of heroic character and he goes off to fight Cole, the King of Norway. They have a duel and in that duel they agree to pay each other war guild. You know, whoever kills the other will then pay his survivors a certain amount of money. That's going to become very important later. But despite his successes raiding and the successes in battle, Horwindel is eventually murdered by his brother Fing and Horwindel's wife, Garuda, then marries Fing. But before this happens they've already given birth to Amleth. So Amleth is the son of Horwindel and Garuda. He's the nephew of Fing. He has an unnamed foster brother that's going to help him out when other people are trying to trap him. One of the ways people try to trap him is they set him up with this girl and they see if he wants to sleep with her. She's not given a name either. We're just going to refer to her as Amleth's lover. But they were childhood friends that becomes important because that's why she doesn't betray him. There is a friend of Fing who's unnamed but he goes to try to spy on Amleth while Amleth is talking to his mother Garuda. There's the King of Britain. There are two retainers or two Thames or two Hinchmen of Fing that are sent with Amleth to the King of Britain. There's the daughter of the King of Britain who Amleth marries. There's Herman Truda who is Amleth's second wife despite the fact that he remains married to the Princess of Britain. And then eventually there's the son of Rorick named Viglek who is the one who eventually kills Amleth. So when we keep track of who these characters are we want to keep in mind, use theory of mind, think about what each of their motives are. What do they want? What do they think about Amleth? More importantly how do they interpret the things that Amleth says? So in several of these descriptions where Amleth will say something to usually Fing's retainers, Fing's Hinchmen, the ones that are keeping an eye on him to make sure that he's not plotting revenge for the murder of his father. They're looking to make sure he's really insane and not just pretending. But at the same time he wants to say something that's true from a certain point of view under a certain interpretation. So there's a real game for the narrative to work we have to see these other characters misinterpreting his words. But that means that we have to keep track of two interpretations of each of these descriptions. Each of these metaphorical descriptions or verbal irony or under statements. We've got to keep track of what Amleth's actual meaning is, but then keep that distinct from what Fing's men think he means by those words. And not all these references are metaphor or verbal irony. Take for example these wooden stakes that he's been carving. He's been sort of creating these barbed stakes, almost like tent stakes, from the very beginning, from the earliest time when he was you know making himself all dirty and trying to look really incompetent. He spends all of his time creating these stakes and when Fing's men ask him why he's doing that he actually says something that's pretty close to the truth. He says I'm preparing javelins to avenge my father. Now they think this is ridiculous because these little sticks they're very small and they're not something that you can use as a javelin. You can't throw these things and kill somebody with them. And if you're looking for weapons there's a lot better weapons just lying around. And so they think well even if he is playing revenge, which he just said he is, he says I'm planning to avenge my father, they're looking at this and thinking okay even if he wants to he's too incompetent with weapons. He doesn't understand what these things are. They're just wooden sticks. He can't do anything with them. He can't use them as javelins. Therefore he's not a threat. But what we see is from very early on he has an idea about what he's going to use these for. But he doesn't actually see them as javelins. He's clearly not going to use them as direct weapons to stab or throw at somebody. But that doesn't mean they don't have a purpose. So they're going to show up later. He knows exactly what he's going to use them for. But the way he describes them leads the others to assume that he has no idea what he's doing. Still people are a little bit suspicious of him and Feng knows he can't just directly kill Amleth because he's married to Amleth's mother and that's going to be a problem. But also he doesn't want to offend his high king Rorik by killing the son of his Rorik's former champion, Horvindal. So Feng sends him to the king of Britain. Now it's important at this point to know a little bit about British history, which is also going to be important in Beowulf, which I also mentioned in a previous lecture about the history of medieval Europe at this point. But from the time that the Romans withdrew from Britain, Anglo-Saxons and Jutes started to invade Britain. And so there were the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were actually coming from the area of the Jutland Peninsula. You see on the map here that the Saxons are coming from just south of the Jutland Peninsula. The Angles, the homeland of Angelen, is the central part of the Jutland Peninsula. And then the Jutes are coming from the northern part of the Jutland Peninsula. And this is where Amleth and Feng are coming from. They're coming from the area marked as Jutes up here. Not only that, but centuries after the Angles and Saxons sort of become the dominant power in England when Britain had become Angleland, England, we have later invasions of the Norse people from all over Norway and Denmark in that area. They're sometimes referred to as the Danes and sometimes referred to as Norse. They were, remember in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, referred to as the Great Heathen Army that invades sort of northern central England and establishes what later becomes known as the Dane Law. They win so many victories here that Alfred the Great and some of the other kings of Wessex and Mercia decide, okay just let them stay there and we'll pay them not to, you know, further attack us. And this Great Heathen Army, once again to go back to the reference to the the History Channel show Vikings and to, you know, the figures of Ragnar Lodbrok, Bjorn Ironsides, Ivar the Boneless, Uba, these are the guys that are leading the Great Heathen Army historically. So does that mean that Fing is sending Amloth to Ragnar Lodbrok or Ivar or somebody like that? Well no. We don't know that Saxo really knows any specific king that he may have in mind at this point, but it's important that we think of England as not disconnected from the Norse world. For much of its history, especially in the early Middle Ages, England was for all practical purposes a Scandinavian kingdom right up until the Norman conquest and the early part of the, you know, a few decades before the Norman conquest, a king named Knut, Knut the Great, was king of Denmark, but he also ruled over Norway and England as the the primary king. We don't want to think of England as being too distinct from the the area that Saxo is writing about. And when Fing sends Amloth and his two retainers to the king of Britain, he also sends with him this stick and a lot of really important sticks in this story, but rather than just tell his two henchmen deliver this message to the king of Britain, he sends a secret message and the way he does this is by carving runes on a stick. And the word rune actually means secret. So if you want to keep something secret, you carve it in these letters that almost nobody can read, but Fing can read that and carve it and he knows the king of Britain can do the same thing. And in Saxo, in Saxo's time runes aren't used very much anymore, but he still remembers what they are, but he takes it upon himself to describe to his reader what exactly this is. He says that two of Fing's retainers set out with Amloth bearing a letter engraved on wood and at one time this was a familiar kind of writing material. And we know from archaeological finds like this one that these sorts of messages were frequently carved on wood. In fact the runes, the reason they're so sort of stick-like rather than having more curves is because they were designed to be able to be carved on wood before ink and parchment were widely available. What Fing didn't count on though was that Amloth could also read runes and he could carve these runes. And while they're on the ship headed for Britain, Amloth finds this rune staff and then scrapes off all the runes that are on there, carves on his own runes and says, kill these two retainers and meanwhile give Amloth in marriage to your daughter. And the King of Britain does this. Well you know clearly there's this bond, there's a the King of Britain and Fing actually have history together and they're close friends. So this is something that Fing thought he could get the King of Britain to do without facing the consequences of killing his own nephew and stepson. Now once again Amloth is playing with interpretations. He actually carved those runes that said kill these two retainers but he wants to keep up the pretense that it was actually a Fing that did that. So he acts as if he has been wounded personally. If these were his men and now that they've been killed the King of Britain has to pay war guild. Now war guild is an old English term that just literally means man gold. In the Germanic world, in the Old Norse world, in the Old English world, there were constant blood feuds. One person would insult another and that second person would kill the first person. Well killing somebody just then means that their next of kin or their closest friends then are going to get revenge on you and then you know if they kill you then your friends are going to get revenge on them. It's just going to go back and forth. So one of the ways that the Anglo-Saxons and Norse came up with to keep this sort of you know blood feud from going on forever was the the principle of giving gold to the survivors of somebody after you kill them. It doesn't matter why you kill them even if they really deserved it or whatever, but there there is this custom of paying gold in order to replace the men that you you kill. And you have a description of this all the way back at the beginning of this Ameth episode before Ameth is born, his father Horvindal goes to war with King Cole of Norway and they describe to each other before they fight this duel. They agree that whoever is the the victor and kills the other one will then pay a certain amount of war guild to the the deceased's survivors. And they say that you know this is a good practice. This is something that good people do. You know the man who pays the rightful dues over his dead enemy wins the good will of the survivor. Well I don't know about that and frequently we have in old Icelandic family sagas where this is ongoing feud we have someone refuse to accept war guild. But the thing is if you accept war guild if somebody kills a friend of yours or a family member and you take gold from them you give up your right to then go get revenge. The gold is supposed to sort of buy away the revenge. And Ameth demands this but he doesn't make it obvious. He melts this gold down and puts them into these hollowed out sticks and he does this so that later when people ask him what happened to your two friends you know they don't know that the king of Britain has killed these two guys much less why much less that the the runes were changed to to fool the king of Britain into killing them. But this gives Ameth the opportunity to say something else crazy which is to hold up these two sticks go here these two friends here are my two friends. Well it was a custom frequently to if someone was going to refuse war guild they would say I refuse to carry my brother around in my purse. In other words my brother has been replaced by the gold I've been giving his war guild by the person who killed him but I'm not going to carry him around his gold I'm going to refuse that and I'm going to get blood vengeance for the murder of my brother. So by referring to the sticks as if they were the two retainers there is a certain truth to that in the way people talk because these this is the war guild inside these sticks is the war guild for those two retainers. So again Ameth isn't actually lying he's speaking figuratively but things men take it literally and taking it literally makes it sound completely ridiculous that you know this guy's two friends are these two sticks. And when he returns from Britain to Jutland to Denmark he is asked his mother to put on a funeral for him to pretend as if he was dead which again is something that Feng expects he does not expect Ameth to show up again. So they're having a funeral for something that is totally plausible. Feng believes it's appropriate that yes I do believe there's a chance that he was killed in Britain. What he's not telling Garuda is that he actually ordered that death but Ameth has also asked Garuda to hang up all these tapestries in the hall so that we have all of these these woven tapestries that were used as decoration especially in the later middle ages in stone halls because the stones would stay cold you put the tapestries up as sort of insulation. But Ameth has another intention for them they go along with those quote-unquote javelins that he's been carving these little sticks these barbed sticks he's been carving all this time that people thought was a sign of his insanity. He's then going to use these after he gets all of Feng's men drunk while they're asleep or they're so drunk they don't know what's going on. He drops all these tapestries on them and then he runs these stakes through them so that they're all sort of pinned in place and they they can't get free they don't know what's happening outside of this sort of collapsed tapestry tent that they're trapped under. And that's when Ameth sets the hall on fire you know he's not going to be able to kill all these guys individually you know even if they're drunk he'd probably still would only be able to kill a few before the rest realize what was going on enough to defend themselves but they're drunk and trapped under these tapestries and the building is burning down around them they have no idea what's going on until it's too late. Also because he pretended to sort of accidentally stab himself people took Ameth's sword away and they replaced it with one that the sword was sort of attached to the sheath so that he couldn't get it out well he switches his sword with Fingy's sword and when Fing wakes up and Ameth tells him now I'm here to get revenge for my father he tries to pull the sword out of the sheath and he's you know still groggy and he can't get the sword out so Ameth technically is fighting somebody who is armed you know Fing actually does have a sword it's just he can't get the sword out of the sheath so Ameth is able to kill him and still call it a duel rather than necessarily cold blood and murder and he's able to do something that if we come from the expectation of this version mirroring Shakespeare's Hamlet we probably didn't expect we did not may not have expected that Ameth wins Ameth actually does get revenge for his father he kills Fing he doesn't die in the process he's not indecisive all of this acting crazy or acting foolish is all a cover everything he does is sort of getting him closer to this actual revenge so Ameth's vengeance is accomplished he's still alive to enjoy the fruits of his labor and there's a whole second half to his story he returns to Britain where remember he's married the daughter of the King of Britain but that brings him into the middle of a new conflict that is that now the King of Britain is in a similar position to the one Ameth had been in previously the King of Britain we learn had actually had a pact with Fing that if one of them was killed the other would be his avenger so these were these were close friends Fing and the King of Britain and they had set it up so that one would avenge the other and now the King of Britain realizes that his son-in-law is the one that he's going to have to kill because in order to keep his vow to Fing so you know this is very similar by the divided loyalty is very similar to the one that Ameth had been in previously when he had to kill his uncle to avenge his father it's also similar to the bind that Fing had been in when he needed to kill his nephew Ameth but he didn't want to do that because it's his nephew and you know he would incur the wrath of both his wife and the High King Rorick so like Fing the King of Britain thinks I'll send Hamlet away to someone who someone else who will kill him that is the Queen of Scotland who kills all of her suitors well Ameth agrees to go woo the Queen of Scotland on the King of Britain's behalf but lo and behold despite the fact that she's killed all her previous suitors she actually thinks Ameth is is the kind of guy she wants to marry now remember Ameth is still married to the Princess of Britain the daughter of the King of Britain and you know he's able to marry Herman Truda without divorcing his first wife or anything like that and so he comes back again to Britain but he knows at this point that the King of Britain is probably setting him up so he brings an army of Scots along with him and even though his men are outnumbered at a certain point he you know props up the bodies of his own dead soldiers so that from a distance it looks like he still has a huge army and that eventually allows him to kill the King of Britain so once again using deceptiveness that's not a direct lie using a type of irony Ameth is able to accomplish what he needs to accomplish and survive the ordeal it's only then eventually when Vigleck the son of Rorick becomes the High King of Denmark again Ameth sort of overking that he begins making trouble for Garuda back in Denmark and then Ameth comes back and he's eventually killed in battle with Vigleck so despite the very different ending there's enough with the characters and with the individual parts of the Ameth versus Fing plot that we can recognize enough parallels to tie a Saxo Grammaticus's story of Ameth with Shakespeare's Hamlet and this is something I'll come back to when we talk about Shakespeare's Hamlet later in the semester but we have the sort of ambiguous background characters like the King Rorick in Ameth and the King of Norway who's just described as Old Norway and Shakespeare his son Fortun Brass who's the one who rides in at the end and sort of after Hamlet and everyone is dead takes over has some vague similarities to Vigleck but the rest of the characters are actually pretty close pretty easily recognizable even though a lot of the ones who aren't named so Orvindol is Old Hamlet you know Hamlet's father and Shakespeare is just called Old Hamlet a Fing is Claudius a Fing and Claudius the names may not be very close but we recognize them whereas Garuda is clearly very similar even in name form to Gertrude Amlet is Hamlet his unnamed foster brother the one that helps him out of the situation where he was supposed to where Fing's men were going to test him to see if he would sleep with this young woman his foster brother since this little insect with a straw tied to it so that he'll know something's up and flies past him that foster brother seems to be this sort of partner in crime that seems pretty close to Horatio although Horatio is a much more developed character in Shakespeare there's also the the woman that he goes to sleep with who actually helps him actually sleeps with them but then helps him keep it a secret because they were lifelong friends this is something we know from some of the hints that we hear from the speech between Hamlet and Ophelia that they've known each other for a long time the implication there is that they had been lovers there's the friend of Fing who's unnamed but he's the one who spies on Amlet while Amlet was talking to Garuda he's in the straw and Amlet stabs through the straw to kill him just like Hamlet stabs through the curtain while Polonius is spying on him speaking to his mother Gertrude the king of Britain is used for the same purpose these two retainers and Shakespeare's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent along with Hamlet to the king of Britain where Claudius is hoping he won't make it back now we don't know whether Hamlet actually set up Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be killed by the king of Britain but we hear the the line Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead toward the end so we have clearly recognizable characters clearly recognizable plot events but don't overlook the difference when you comparing Shakespeare's play Hamlet to Saxo-Grammaticus's narrative from the history of the Danes notice the biggest difference is the way we know what's happening the way we know what characters are thinking Saxo has the free indirect discourse he can just tell us this is what Hamlet was thinking this is what the young woman that he was with his lover his childhood friend this is what she was thinking this is why she helped him out this is why his foster brother helped him out all of this description of the internal state of the thoughts of the characters is something Saxo could just tell us directly and it's something he does consistently try to explain to us maybe explain too much even though we kind of get yes we see the double meaning there but Saxo insists on sort of giving away the punchline of the joke before he's through telling the joke he over explains everything but when we get to Shakespeare we're going to have to infer from dialogue everything the characters think and keeping in mind that especially Hamlet is going to be saying things that he doesn't mean but even in Shakespeare we're going to see some of this double meaning we're going to see verbal irony we're going to see metaphor when the other characters don't recognize it we the audience have to recognize it and I think that's why this is such a good example of the same story two different narrative forms but the difference in those narrative forms really really changes how we see what happens and how we interpret the characters and what they do throughout that narrative