By Lisa Collinson
‘Few etymologies are perfect. Neither is this one. Yet it may be right.’
So wrote the eminent scholar Anatoly Liberman in 2007, in a beautifully-crafted OUPblog post entitled ‘Hamlet and Other Lads and Lasses: Or, From Rags to Riches’. That post explored the origins of the name of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, and – with wonderful spark and spirit – revived an old theory that ‘Am-lothi … is the correct division [of the name], with Am- and loth- being related to Engl. em(ber), and lad respectively (-i is an ending).’ The name ‘ember boy’ as a whole was, Liberman noted, suggestive of ‘a despised third son of fairy tales, known in British folklore as Boots.’
This wholly Germanic etymology may, indeed, be right. But, in an article published online last week in the OUP journal Review of English Studies, I have set out my own – no doubt even less perfect – theory, which I hope will be of as much interest to artists of various kinds as to scholarly specialists.
In this new article, I conclude that Hamlet probably came ultimately from Gaelic Admlithi: a name attached to a player (or ‘mocker’) in a strange and violent medieval Irish tale known in English as ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’. If I’m right, this means that some version of the Hamlet-name was associated with players hundreds of years before Shakespeare lived or wrote.
What does Admlithi mean? It has proved tough to translate – particularly for me, as a specialist in Old Norse, rather than Gaelic. But once I’d found the name (sent to me years ago by a friend who knew I had an interest in medieval player-figures), it was impossible to let go. Partly, this had to do with the fact that it clearly had something to do with the concept of grinding, which I knew was a key element in two important early Nordic ‘Hamlet’ texts; but which also seemed to have plenty of powerful cultural potential of its own. (Just think of the range of its contemporary connotations!) In the end, I plumped for not one but three weird-yet-interesting interpretations of Admlithi: Great Grindings; Greatly Ground (plural); Due-To-Be-Greatly Ground.
But what did these really mean, in the Middle Ages? To Gaelic-speakers? To Norse-speakers? To people who spoke bits of both languages?
Once I started asking these questions in earnest, one of the answers I found was that yes, Gaelic words connected with grinding probably did (as we might guess) suggest violence, or sexual activity. But they could also imply low or ambiguous social status: sometimes linked to gender, sometimes to categorization as a ‘fool’ of some kind. In other words, use of the peculiar name Admlithi – grammatically hazy, yet bursting with meaning – could probably have said more about the character tagged with it than lines and lines of straightforward description. Just as well, in fact, for Admlithi has scarcely been mentioned in surviving versions of ‘Da Derga’s Hostel’ before he’s gone – out of the picture entirely.
So … Was this Irish player, Admlithi, Hamlet?
No!
Hamlet is Hamlet!
But, as I discuss in the RES article, I do think there is a fair possibility that Gaelic Admlithi was known as a player-name in medieval Scandinavia, and that this somehow contributed to the development of a riddling figure called Amlethus, long identified as an early version of the
By Anatoly Liberman
English lacks a convenient word for “ancestors of Germanic speaking people.” Teutons, an obsolete English gloss for German Germanen, is hardly ever used today. The adjective Germanic has wide currency, and, when pressed for the noun, some people translate Germanen as “Germans” (not a good solution). I needed this introduction as an apology for asking the question: “What did the ancient Teutons drink?” The “wine card” contained many items, for, as usual, not everybody drank the same, and different occasions called for different beverages and required different states of intoxication, or rather inebriation, for being drunk did not stigmatize the drinker. On the contrary, it allowed him (nothing is known about her in such circumstances) to reach the state of ecstasy. Oaths sworn “under the influence” were not only honored: if anything, they carried more weight than those sworn by calculating, sober people. Many shrewd rulers used this situation to their advantage, filled guests with especially strong homebrew, and offered toasts that could not be refused.
In the mythology of the Indo-European peoples a distinction was made between the language of the mortals and the language of the gods, a synonym game, to be sure, but a game fraught with deep religious significance. The myths of the Anglo-Saxons and Germans have not come down to us, but the myths of the Scandinavians have, and in one of the songs of the Poetic Edda (a collection of mythological and heroic tales) we read that the humans call a certain drink öl, while the Vanir call it veig (the Vanir were one of the two clans of the Scandinavian gods). Öl is, of course, ale, but veig is a mystery. No secure cognates of this word have been attested, and the choice among its homonyms (“strength,” “lady,” and “gold”) leaves us with several possibilities. Identifying “strong drink” with “strength” sounds inviting, but who has heard of an old alcoholic beverage simply called “strength”? Veig- is a common second element in women’s names, of which the English speaking world has retained the memory of at least one, Solveig, either Per Gynt’s true love in Ibsen and Grieg or somebody’s next door neighbor (I live in a state settled by German and Scandinavian immigrants, so to me Solveig is a household word, quite independent of Norwegian literature and music). It is hard to decide which -veig entered into those names. “Gold” cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, it was a woman’s duty to pour wine at feasts, so that -veig “drink” would also make sense. In any case, veig remains the name of a divine drink of the medieval Scandinavians. It stands at the bottom of our card.
From books in the Old Germanic languages we know about the Teutons’ wine, mead, beer, ale, and lith ~ lid, the latter with the vowel of Modern Engl. ee. Lith must have corresponded to cider (cider is an alteration of ecclesiastical Greek ~ Medieval Latin sicera ~ cicera, a word taken over from Hebrew). It was undoubtedly a strong drink, inasmuch as, according to the prophesy in the oldest versions of the Germanic Bible, John the Baptist was not to taste either wine or lith. The word is now lost, and so are its origins. Mead is still a familiar poeticism, while the other three have survived, though, as we will see, beer does not refer to the same product as it did in the days of the Anglo-Saxons—an important consideration, because the taste of a beve
