Shakespeare was more interested in psychological truth, weighing the pros and cons of vengeance without evidence, the existential ramifications of suicide and murder-for-hire, and the trauma of unresolved grief.īut Eggers is interested in similar interiority, explaining that he and his collaborators tried “to recreate the minutiae of the physical world, while also attempting to capture, without judgment, the inner world of the Viking mind: their beliefs, mythology and ritual life.” This included making “the supernatural world as realistic as the ordinary” and replacing Hamlet’s Christianity with Norse mythology. While Hamlet encounters his dead father’s ghost and worries it may be a “devil hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape,” Eggers’s Amleth experiences visions, communes with Odin, and encounters valkyries, revenants, shamans, animal spirits, a magical sword, a seeress (played by Björk), and - as in Hamlet - the skull of a dead jester. The idea of a jester is also reflected in Hamlet’s name. “Amleth” derives from an old Icelandic word (not coincidentally, The Northman was filmed in Iceland) meaning a fool or trickster. The Old Norse halves of the name also suggest “bothered by madness,” a phrase that fits both Amleth and Hamlet: the Danish prince puts “an antic disposition on” while Eggers’s protagonist spends years as a berserker, a warrior who attacks with crazed, mindless, animal savagery.
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