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In the Danish text, Amleth is the son of Jutland’s King Horvendill, who after a successful expedition that led to him slaying one of the kings of Norway has returned home to marry Gerutha, a princess from another Danish kingdom. This shouldn’t be a total surprise since Shakespeare likely discovered a French translation of Saxo Grammaticus’ work from the 15th century, hence how he was inspired to write Hamlet.Īnd like that famed English play, the most well-known surviving version of Amleth has a lot more courtly intrigue and subterfuge than Robert Eggers’ film. What might surprise folks, however, is that Saxo Grammaticus’ Amleth has arguably more in common with Shakespeare’s Hamlet than it does The Northman.
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Subscribe Differences Between the Original Amleth and The Northman And for what it’s worth Icelandic historian Thormodus Torfæus recorded that in his youth-which would’ve been in the early 1600s-the legend of “Amlodi” was a popular one shared among children.
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This gives credence to the theory that the story of Amleth goes back to a forgotten Icelandic saga from the Viking Age. That version is also set in Jutland.Įven so, the name of Amleth itself is likely derived from the Old Icelandic word “ Amlóði,” which is a moniker that appears once in the Edda, an Old Norse textbook from the 13th century which is the primary surviving source for our understanding of Norse mythology. There’s also a slightly older version, also of Danish origin, and which was likewise written in Latin, from a piece of scholarship called Chronicon Lethrense. Saxo Grammaticus was a Danish historian, theologian, and author, who-unlike the Icelandic poets and authors of sagas from which the dialogue in The Northman takes its inspiration-tended to write from a scholarly perspective, including by writing in Latin and by depicting clearly embellished stories like that of Amleth as historical events.Īccording to Saxo Grammaticus, Amleth was a prince of Jutland, which was a northern kingdom in medieval Denmark. Still, the most famous medieval version of the story is the one penned by Saxo Grammaticus in either the late 12th or early 13th century. Many scholars of medieval literature out of northern Europe seem to agree that the legend of Prince Amleth, which in turn inspired Shakespeare, does go back several hundred years prior to the birth of Saxo Grammaticus-or when most oral Icelandic sagas were finally written down in the 13th century. While there is no existing surviving 10th century saga of Icelandic origin to exactly confirm Skarsgård’s assertion, the actor is not wrong. But Saxo Grammaticus most likely based Prince Amleth of Jutland, which we based our movie on, on an even older Icelandic saga from the ninth or 10th century.” “Shakespeare based his Hamlet on Saxo Grammaticus’ Prince Amleth from the 12th century. “It’s a very old saga,” Skarsgård explains when we bring up the root origins of his film’s tale. It’s foreboding and stimulating… and it feels like part of a shared past. It’s the basic plot of, yes, Hamlet and The Lion King, but as presented by Eggers, it takes on a primal, bestial form in which hellish vistas like an erupting volcano play host to the sight of two naked men trying to hack each other to death. Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with the Icelandic poet Sjón, Eggers retrods a deeply classic saga in which a son ( Alexander Skarsgård) avenges the murder of his kingly father (Ethan Hawke) by slaughtering the uncle who is to blame (Claes Bang). Indeed, there is something primordial about the storytelling in Eggers’ film. “So therefore I can really indulge in the world-building without confusing people.” “I felt if I’m doing Hamlet or The Lion King, I have a story that the audience knows already,” The Northman director Robert Eggers told Den of Geek Magazine. And whether viewers are familiar with the Bard’s tragedy or not, that connection to Elsinore pervades throughout this weekend’s bare-chested epic. Nevertheless, the character has much in common with William Shakespeare’s Danish prince, who famously uttered the above quote during a soliloquy in Act Three of Hamlet. It’s the same thing as last week: a bloodthirsty Viking. He knows exactly what he’ll be next week. “To be or not to be.” That is a question which never occurs to Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth in The Northman. This article contains The Northman spoilers.