Counter-Reformation Versions of Saxo: A New Source for "Hamlet?"

Abstract

It has always been assumed that either Shakespeare or the author of the Ur-Hamlet was the first to introduce controversial religious allusions to the pre-Christian setting of Saxo's Amleth saga. But this article seeks to relocate the legend in the competing confessional narratives to which it belonged in mid-sixteenth-century Europe. A new link between Saxo, Belleforest, and Shakespeare's versions of the story is identified in the ethnographic histories of Johannes and Olaus Magnus of Sweden. The overlooked Historia Olai Magni (1567) is proposed as the source of local details (like the sledded Polacks) in Hamlet.