Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/45

 Rh growth from the same root as that from which Marie's poem has sprung. I allude to the Amleth (Hamlet) story told by Saxo Grammaticus in the fourth book of his Historia Danica. After the slaying of his uncle-stepfather, Amleth returns to Britain to his wife, daughter of the king of that land. When he tells his father-in-law what has happened, the latter is greatly perplexed. There was an old covenant between himself and Amleth's stepfather, that whoever survived should avenge the other's death. To fulfil his promise, he sends his son-in-law to woo for him a Scottish Amazon, who loathed her lovers, and always inflicted upon them the uttermost punishment. But the queen loving Amleth ("the old she utterly abhorred, desiring the embraces of the young") for his wise and valorous deeds, craftily substitutes for the message of his father-in-law one directing that he should be married to her. Amleth readily falls in with the plan, and returns to Britain with his new bride. On his way he meets his first wife, who has come to warn him against her father. Her words (I quote from Mr. Elton's translation, to be issued shortly by the Folk-lore Society) are worth noting. Speaking of her own son, she says: "He may hate the supplanter of his mother. I will love her; no disaster shall put out my flame for thee," etc. Amleth, later, gets the better of his father-in-law, and goes back with his wives to his own land, i.e., Denmark. After a while he is defeated and slain by a competitor for the Danish throne, and the second wife, Hermutrude, yields herself up of her own accord to be the victor's spoil and bride.

I cannot but think that Saxo is giving us here at second, if not at third hand a distorted version of an heroic legend that his countrymen heard in Celtic Britain. My chief reason for believing this is supplied by the Scottish (i.e., Celtic) Amazon queen, whom the King of Britain sends Amleth to woo for him. The warrior virgin who will only yield to the perfect hero, and who treats her other wooers much as the female spider treats hers, is, of course, a