On the name ‘Hamlet’
There are, it seems, three theories as to the meaning of the name ‘Hamlet’.
One is that it means Fool, or Madman, as per the story, in which Hamlet acts the fool, pretends to be mad, to avoid being killed by his uncle, who has killed Hamlet’s father and seized power. 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, from whence Shakespeare likely drew the story, calls him Amleth (in fact, writing in Latin, Saxo calls him Amlethus). No such name is recorded in the Danish royal records, but the Old Icelandic name Amlóði is in Snorri Snurluson’s Prose Edda, and there may have been a similar name in Old Norse. The Icelandic amlóði means ‘fool’ or ‘simpleton’, from Old Norse ama ‘to annoy, to attack, to damage, to vex’ and óðr, which means ‘mad, furious, violent’ — it also means ‘divinely inspired.’ The name of the god Odin, Old Norse Óðinn, derives from óðr: which is to say ‘Odin’ means ‘the Mad One’. Madness, madness, they called it madness. Amlóði would therefore mean ‘the annoying mad one’. The Irish words amhlóir, abhlóir, meaning ‘buffoon, fool, boor, bewildered, person’, come from this same root. [My favourite detail from Saxo’s ‘Amleth’ is that, amongst the mad things Amleth says to throw his murderous uncle off the scent, is that he likes to take his rest upon a beast of burden’s hoof, upon a coxcomb, and upon the ceiling — living on the ceiling, no more room down there, and so on, and so forth]. Our word harm is related to the Old Norse ama, which gives us Harm-loony as a kind of decoding of the name Hamlet.
A different theory is that Hamlet, Amleth, Amlóði, are all variants of the name Olaf (along with Olav, Áleifr, Ólafr, Óblafr, Óleifr, Anleifr, Ǣlāf, Amlāf, Anlāf), a common Baltic, Scandinavian and German name. The popularity of the name followed Norwegian king Olaf II Haraldsson (995–1030), known as Saint Olaf and Olaf the Holy. It’s itself originally Old Norse: Óláfr, which comes from *anô (‘ancestor’; compare the German Ahn) and *laibō (‘remainder, heirloom, descendant’). So Olaf means, flatly enough, ‘descendant of my ancestor’. If this is behind Hamlet, then his name means Ancestor-leftover. Ancestor-attestor.
Edward Bergdal has a different theory. He notes the closeness of the legends of Amleth and Oskelad, a figure from a set of Scandinavian stories, whose feigned madness involved him, amongst other things, warming himself beside a dead fire and lying down in the cinders. Bergdal says ‘ The Oskeladd stories tell us that Oskeladd is a nickname. The proper name of the hero, when given, is nearly always Esben, a variant of Esbern, which in turn is a form of the Norse name Asbjtfrn, corresponding to the modern English Osborn. The form Espen is used by some writers In the Ambales-saga, one of the Icelandic versions of the Hamlet story, we are told that Ambales was called Arnióni “because he lay continually in the fire-hall opposite the ash-heap.” This statement as it stands can hardly indicate anything else than that Amlódi and Oskeladd mean the same thing in a literal sense as well as in a general sense.’ What they mean, says Bergdal, is Cinder-hairyfoot. Oske is Old Norse, and indeed modern Norwegian, for ash; -ladd and -lódi mean not ‘lad’ (which word comes from a quite different, Irish root) but are versions of lode, “hairiness” or “shagginess,” and loden, “hairy” or “shaggy.” Bergdal thinks Saxo’s name is not Aml-óði but Am-lóði, ‘Ash-shaggy’. If this is right, then the name Hamlet means, basically, Cinderella — Cinderfeller, we could say. This is my favourite of the the theories.
