HAMLET MEMORIAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 65, 17 March 1934, Page 8 (Supplement)

HAMLET MEMORIAL.

ON VIKING MOUND. DANISH HERO'S GRAVE AMMELHEDE FIELD. A group of Jutlanders recently raised a memorial stone to Hamlet on a viking mound on Ammelhede Field, outside the Danish city of Eanders. According to Denmark's first historian —Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote in Latin and lived about the year 1200— Hamlet fell in battle on Ammelhede. The fact that an Elsinnore hotelkeeper a generation or so ago manufactured a grave which he called Hamlet's is deplored by many Danes. Prince Hamlet—or Amled, as he is called in the Danish of ancient days— lived at a time when the Peninsula of Jutland was divided into small separate kingdoms, always at war with one another and with the neighbouring kings on the islands. That was about 200 years before the so-called Great Viking Age, or about the year 600. (Shakespeare, of course, placed his Hamlet much later in time.) According to Saxo, Hamlet, after having been crowned as king, was killed in battle with the King of Lejre (Isle of Zealand) and was buried on the field on which the memorial stone has now been raised. This field, says Saxo, was therefore called Ammelhede, a corruption of Amled Hede or Hamlet's Heath. Jorgan Olrik, curator of the Danish Filk Museum at Copenhagen, who unveiled the Ammelhede stone, has said that no claim can be made that the Ammelhede viking mound is Hamlet's grave. That is impossible to determine. The Ammelhede stone is a roughly finished piece of granite from the Ice Age, light brown, almost rose in colour, like the great Jelling runic stone in Jutland. It bears the following inscription in letters resembling Old Norse script in the poetic, clipped form of the ancient Eddas, or heroic verse of the Viking age: Amlede, wisest of all in viking days, played the fool until the hour of revenge. Hailed as king by the Jutes, he rests on Ammel Hede.

But the heath itself has vanished and is to-day a cultivated field on the property of Niels Munck, Jutland farmer.