real addition to our knowledge of Shakespeare may remain.
For the earliest references to the legendary Hamlet the reader should consult Mr. Gollancz's interesting volume Hamlet in Iceland (1898). The first in date, he tells us, is found in the second section of Snorri Sturlason's Prose Edda (about 1230):—"The Nine Maids of the Island Mill" (daughters of Ægir, the Ocean-god) "in ages past ground Hamlet's meal." The words occur in a quotation of Snorri from Snæbjörn, who was probably an Arctic adventurer of the tenth century. The name Amhlaide is found yet earlier. In the Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters, under the year 917 (= 919), in a fragment of song (having reference to the battle of Ath-Cliath between the Northerners and the Irish) attributed to Queen Gormflaith, appear the words: "Niall Glundubh [was slain] by Amhlaide." Mr. Gollancz identifies this Amhlaide with Sitric, a Northerner, who first came to Dublin in 888, and hazards the conjecture that "Gaile," a cognomen applied to Sitric, may mean mad, and that Amhlaide may be a synonym of "Gaile." He believes that in the Scandinavian kingdom of Ireland was developed, in the eleventh century, the Northern tale of Hamlet as we know it from Saxo.[1]
Probably about the opening of the thirteenth century the Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus told in Latin the
- ↑ The Ambales Saga, which Mr. Gollancz prints, is in its present form "a modern production belonging to the sixteenth, or perhaps early seventeenth century," preserving possibly some elements of the pre-Saxo Hamlet legend. The Icelandic folk-tale of Brjam (first written down from oral tradition in 1705) is "nothing but a levelling down of the story of Hamlet, cleverly blended with another folk-tale of the 'Clever Hans' type" (Gollancz, Introduction, lxiv and lxviii).
