Yorick’s Skull and the Farting Irishwomen: Folkloric Migrations in Late Medieval Literature

This article offers an approach to folkloric motifs in pre-modern literature, and with it, new answers to two old questions. The first question is how Shakespeare got the idea for Yorick’s skull. Most critics have suggested a general inspiration from the memento mori theme in the visual arts.¹ In this essay I offer the first ever investigation of a textual source.² The second question is why, in an Irish legend recorded in two twelfth-century texts, a certain man’s tomb made women fart and laugh when they saw it. The answer to this question is closely related to the answer to the first, and both involve a genealogy of the jester’s skull motif that reveals a series of cultural migrations between Francia, Ireland, Norway, and England between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. The results of my study shed new light on several European literary texts, both Latin and vernacular, not least Act 5, scene 1 of Hamlet.³ By reconstructing the historical development from a fart-prompting tomb to a jester’s skull, I demonstrate that supernatural motifs can survive significant adaptation between different literary genres as religious, obscene, and humorous elements are edited or recoded.

I. Yorick in Hamlet

Hamlet’s most iconic scene is not as original as most critics have believed.⁴ Imagine a Viking Christian graveyard where fresh graves are being dug: an old skull is found by chance, recognized as that of a famous jester, and then handled and inspected. Although this narrative is familiar from Hamlet 5.1, there are striking parallels with another text written down three and a half centuries earlier: a medieval anecdote about an Irishman named Clefsan, in the Old Norse text Konungs skuggsjá (The King’s Mirror).⁵ I shall argue that this text reflects a highly dynamic and mobile folkloric tradition, some part of which reached Shakespeare to become the model for Hamlet’s graveyard scene. I will step further into the past to argue that Clefsan’s story is itself a hybrid of two separate stories: a serious one from Iceland and a comic one from Ireland. Clefsan’s story illustrates the dialogue between the two cultures established during centuries of Viking settlement.⁶ The product of this dialogue fits perfectly into the grotesque aesthetic of Shakespeare’s study in melancholy, with its acute juxtapositions of absurd mirth and morbid grief, and may hint at previously unknown inspirations behind one of his most famous plays.

The basis for Hamlet is the story of Amleth the Dane, a Viking historical legend written down in the thirteenth century.⁷ In the Latin Gesta Danorum (History of the Danes), published in or after 1208 by Saxo Grammaticus, Amleth pretends to be a fool through a combination of absurd behavior and riddling speech, buying himself time to discover and kill the uncle who murdered his father.⁸ Two features show that the plot is more folklore than history: first, Amleth is a “speaking name” meaning Fool; second, the prince sets himself the moral principle of never telling lies, which turns him into a trickster who utters insane-sounding technical truths.⁹ The theme of “escape by shamming madness” is found in other folktale traditions, including the ancient Roman historical legend about Brutus (which is another speaking name meaning Fool).¹⁰ The Danish story of Amleth is the indirect template for the plot of Hamlet; I will argue that the Norse legend of Clefsan is, likewise, the indirect template for the Yorick scene. It would be typical of Shakespeare’s compositional method to integrate one narrative source into the other as a coherent whole.

Shakespeare knew the Amleth story though the French adaptation of François de Belleforest, which did far more to shape it than rendering the prince’s name as “Hamlet.”¹¹ The most important of Belleforest’s embellishments was giving Amleth/Hamlet’s character a melancholic dimension. This profoundly ironizes the story’s preoccupation with fools and foolery, which it arguably needed in order to work as Elizabethan stage tragedy: the theme of foolishness remains central, but Shakespeare makes further adaptations, building a more elaborate plot that is recentered on the psychology of the main character. Absurdity and joking are now just one side of a coin, and on the flipside are madness and death, with the attendant melancholic implication that life itself is folly. In narrative terms, the main function of Hamlet 5.1 is to show Hamlet’s changing state of mind after returning from England and on seeing Ophelia dead. But as a morbidly humorous scene in which the “fool” Hamlet contemplates the skull of a court-fool, offered by another fool (the First Clown), it is thematically crucial. Hamlet performs something like a puppet routine by holding Yorick’s skull as he talks to it and jokes about it; Nicole Sheriko has plausibly compared the skull to the court-fool’s marotte.¹² At the same time, the skull prompts an even deeper reflection on selfhood, since this faceless face is both individual and anonymous, subject and object.¹³

Although we know exactly how Saxo’s Amleth was transmitted to Shakespeare, we can only guess at how the Konungs skuggsjá’s Clefsan might have reached him. The Norse original was inaccessible beyond Scandinavia, but a famous geographer (to whom Shakespeare alludes in a later play) published an English paraphrase of the miracle-lists from the Konungs skuggsjá about two years before the Yorick scene was staged.¹⁴ In the expanded 1598 edition of his 1589 principal work, Richard Hakluyt reprinted—and translated—a recent Latin passage by the Icelandic author Arngrímur Jónsson, in which Arngrímur scornfully recounted the marvels of the Konungs skuggsjá; unfortunately for our purposes, he considered the Clefsan story too foolish to mention.¹⁵ Because Arngrímur omitted the Clefsan story, this is hardly a smoking gun, but it does show that the miracles of the Konungs skuggsjá had reached English readers shortly before Hamlet was staged, in at least one well-known text.

Yorick’s skull is famous as a stage property, and perhaps this is why the critical discussion about what could have inspired it has focused on images, not texts. A skull is obviously a token of death, and therefore dramatizes the memento mori or vanitas theme from the contemporary visual arts.¹⁶ Despite considerable scrutiny of the scene, no textual source has been proposed. Not until 1938 did a critic point out that Hamlet’s musings upon the skull recall a 250-word dialogue by Lucian, known to Christopher Marlowe, in which Menippus expresses a similar mixture of pathos and wry disgust over Helen of Troy’s skull.¹⁷ No one has questioned Yorick’s presence in Hamlet, though some have sought to explain the unusual and Scandinavian-sounding choice of name.¹⁸ Otherwise, scholarly energy has been invested in explaining Yorick as a cipher for some contemporary figure. This game will be familiar to many, as it has been played with numerous Shakespeare characters, including several other parts in Hamlet.¹⁹ Most follow Brinsley Nicholson in identifying Yorick with the actor Richard Tarlton, who died only a decade before Hamlet’s premiere. Other suggestions include Clod, a famous court-fool of Queen Elizabeth; the living actor Will Kemp (who, having recently left the playing company, might have been “dead to Shakespeare”); and even the Catholic Edmund Campion, martyred in 1581.²⁰ Establishing a textual model for the graveside scene would not invalidate these meanings, but it would align it with the overall project of the play (not to mention Shakespeare’s method in tragedies generally), which is not to invent new historical fables, but to invest existing ones with unprecedented emotional depth.

II. Clefsan’s Skull in The King’s Mirror

It is not surprising that critics have overlooked the much earlier analogue for Yorick’s skull, the Konungs skuggsjá, because the Old Norse original only reached print in the eighteenth century; the first translation, in German, appeared in the nineteenth century, and an English translation appeared in the twentieth.²¹ At least part of the text was paraphrased into Latin by the fourteenth century and could have traveled further.²² The nearest link that I have found between the Konungs skuggsjá and Hamlet is through Hakluyt’s 1598 reprint of Arngrímur Jónsson’s scornful commentary in Latin, though this does at least show some knowledge of the original in Elizabethan England.

The Konungs skuggsjá is a prose dialogue that survives in about forty manuscripts, some from the mid-thirteenth century. This original contribution to the “mirror of princes” genre, in which a father delivers essential knowledge to his son and heir, has a first section on merchants and their business. Our concern is the end of this section, which becomes a Viking-centered cosmography including weather, navigation, peoples, and topography, eventually finishing with lists of marvels from Norway, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland (chapters 8–20). The partially settled Ireland stands out as ethnographically exotic.²³ The Irish material has been called an interpolation, but probably comes directly from Ireland: the names reflect spoken Irish, and King Hakon Hakonarson (the most likely sponsor of the text) is known to have received Irish ambassadors while in Scotland. ²⁴ At the end of the Irish marvel-list, the author offers one more topic, just for amusement.²⁵ A dead Irishman named Clefsan made all men and women laugh while he was alive; grave-diggers uncovered his bones, including an intact skull, which was set on a high rock in the churchyard. It remains there still, and anyone who looks into its mouth is compelled to laugh, no matter how sad they are. “Clefsan” is an obvious confusion of the Irish word Clessan, “Trickster,” from cless, meaning trick.²⁶ The Iron-Age Celts displayed skulls in stone niches, and there was also special treatment of heads and skulls in Iron-Age and Viking Scandinavia, but I shall argue that the story of Clefsan has no historical basis in Norway.²⁷ Instead, it is concocted from external legends, traceable to the post-Carolingian period.

In what follows, I will connect the marvel of Clefsan’s skull to certain texts of the twelfth century, and demonstrate that it is a product of the Norse-Irish cultural dialogue that began with the Viking settlements from the late eighth century (and perhaps gained a last impulse from the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the late twelfth century). The story of Clefsan merges two tales that typify separate storytelling cultures. One, from medieval Irish literature, has been compared with the Clefsan story, though without any exploration of the relationship between them.²⁸ The other, from the Norse Icelandic sagas, has not. Together, they provide the recipe for the Clefsan story that goes on to shape the scene featuring Yorick’s skull.

III. Egil’s Saga and the Tombs of Mac Rustaing and St. Gangulf

To take the Norse contribution first: this is an anecdote tacked on to the end of Egil’s Saga, whose oldest manuscript dates from 1140 but which is considered one of the earlier sagas and attributed by some to Snorri Sturluson.²⁹ Long after Egil’s death, the priest Skapti Thorarinsson exhumes the 150-year-old bones of his ancestor, identified by their large size, to rebury them at a new church.³⁰ Before transferring them, Skapti puts the huge skull on the churchyard fence in order to inspect its strange heaviness and wavy, shell-like surface. He even tries to crack it with the back of a hatchet but can only chip off the dirt: this proves how stout Egil’s head was in life.³¹ This anecdote contributes its narrative to the Konungs skuggsjá: in both texts a famous man’s skull is exhumed, handled, and admired in a churchyard. Perhaps the two skulls can also be compared for their miraculous properties. Egil is a warrior and a serious poet (skald), not a jester like Clefsan, but his skull miraculously remains unbreakable, which preserves the ability he had in life. Clefsan’s does the same in a different way, by remaining irresistibly funny.

The second, Irish contribution to Clefsan’s story is the marvel itself—compulsive laughter caused by the remains of a mischievous man—that has a more complex history to uncover. This is found in two older sources that are often cited together: the earlier of them names an obscure figure, Mac Rustaing (supposedly a seventh-century abbot buried at Ross Ech), and says that no woman could look on his tomb without spontaneously farting (cen maidm a delma esti) or laughing immoderately (cen ardgaire boeth).³² The commentator then quotes these verses:

Evidently extracted from a longer story, these verses almost certainly represent a lost narrative explaining Mac Rustaing’s miracle, which is now enigmatic to us. Our second source is the late twelfth-century On the Wonders of Ireland, an Irish Latin poem in which another version of the anecdote appears.³⁴ This one mentions no specific name or location: when a marvel is transferred into the catalogue format of paradoxography, such details are often stripped away.³⁵ Despite this, the Latin version is fuller and seems to preserve more of a lost original narrative:

Two new details expand the enigma. The “certain man” (hominis cuiusdam) violated a great many women (numerum ingentem violavit earum) before eventually repenting, and the involuntary laughing or farting of women who see the tomb—we learn that their bellies rumble if they try to hold it in—is a “cunning trick” (fallentis more doloso).³⁷ This dead man is playing a practical joke. Embarrassing people is a stock-in-trade of fools, and farting itself is a medieval fool’s trick, while women’s loud laughter was a lapse of modesty that suggested sexual looseness.³⁸ In medieval Irish thought, an unchaste woman allows herself to be impulsive and shameless in private, exactly as the idiot and the professional jester do in public. The conceptual link between male foolery and female immodesty is supported by a semantic link in Old Irish: drúth and báeth (“wanton, unchaste”) both developed the two separate definitions “fool/jester/idiot” and “loose woman.”³⁹ When we compare the two texts above, they tell a ribald tale in which the humiliation of spontaneous farting punishes women for illicit sex. The earlier text does not say why the women who see Mac Rustaing’s grave are shamed, but in the later one it is because they’d had sex with the buried man (who is unnamed, but probably Mac Rustaing again). If so, then it can be traced directly to the widespread motif of the supernatural adultery test, which gained renewed popularity in medieval Europe through the Arthurian romances with their drinking horns and mantles.⁴⁰ Many such tests reveal women’s guilt in involuntary and embarrassing ways: some even expose their genitals.⁴¹ Farting is an understandable alternative for genital exposure, though to confirm that women’s farting really does imply adultery, external evidence is needed.

I suggest that the key to this pair of anecdotes, in the Irish verse fragment and On the Wonders of Ireland, is an early tenth-century text from France. The Vita Gangulfi Prima explicitly punishes an adulterous woman with spontaneous farting.⁴² This text has many of the trappings of a standard hagiography, but its focus on cuckoldry and scatological humor anticipates the verse fabliaux that would become popular in northeast France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Despite its claim that all written records about Gangulf were destroyed and only oral sources were available, it has playfully reworked a very recent miracle-story in Flodoard’s annals from Reims.⁴³ The Vita Prima probably determined the character of my hypothetical Irish source for the legend of Mac Rustaing, on which (I have suggested) both the surviving sources draw. Gangulf exposes his wife’s infidelity with a chastity test, which painfully and explicitly shames her: this is important for my argument, because I claim that the spontaneous farting later in the text serves the same function. She confidently accepts his challenge to retrieve a pebble from his spring, but it boils her skin off, which reveals her adultery with a priest.⁴⁴ This priest murders Gangulf and then, “exactly like Judas the betrayer and Arius the heresiarch,” fatally excretes his entrails into the latrine.⁴⁵ The wife, meanwhile, hears on a Friday that miracles have happened at Gangulf’s tomb. She exclaims, “Gangulf is as miraculous as my ass!,” and thrusts it out to make her point.⁴⁶ Saying these fateful words, she spontaneously farts: on every Friday thereafter, she continuously farts whenever she speaks.⁴⁷ In early Latin hagiography, farting accompanied excretion in the pseudo-medical purgation of demons.⁴⁸ It was a temporary version of death-by-excretion (also present in this text), inflicting a similar combination of disgust, offensiveness, and humiliation.⁴⁹ However, the author moves flatulence into decidedly humorous territory by pairing it with odious babble; his pious commentary serves more to excuse this rude joke than to defuse it.⁵⁰ The Vita Gangulfi Prima is an example of the medieval phenomenon Mikhail Bakhtin dubbed the “carnivalesque,” found in whimsical manuscript illustrations, in which the “material bodily lower stratum” (buttocks, belly, genitals, and bodily functions) joyfully escapes its normal suppression and usurps the upper stratum of the head, face, and voice.⁵¹ The related mode of grotesque realism may not be needed to explain the theme of adultery, but it certainly accounts for the manner of Arius’s death; for the indecent gesture and words of Gangulf’s wife, when she retorts to his miracles; and above all, for the curse that combines talking with farting. Gangulf himself retains full physical control: it is the bodies of the adulterous woman (and man) that literalize the unboundedness of their wanton sexual activity. Perhaps for that reason the text is only partly a carnivalesque celebration, and partly a cautionary tale: we get the sense that the humor is in conflict with the moral lesson. Perhaps the theme of revenge from the grave is already somewhat dark, anticipating much later versions of the deceased jester who mocks the living. But the Irishwomen laugh as they fart, suggesting that the motif can be carnivalesque and moralistic at the same time.⁵²

French culture influenced Ireland even before the 1169 colonization, and Gangulf’s Vita circulated widely, so it is entirely possible that it inspired a local Irish legend.⁵³ In this later Irish version, two changes have been made that we can easily understand as continuing down the path from Flodoard via the Vita Gangulfi in the adultery-themed farce of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century fabliaux. In other words, the Irish sources make the miracle funnier and more like a folktale. First, the punishment of Gangulf’s wife was extended onto other adulterous women. Second, the trickster-saint was changed from a cuckold into a rogue who had illicit sex with numerous women and then repented. This explains why at the tomb of the “certain man” in Ireland, “every woman talks, / Breaks wind and laughs like a woman.” We can now clarify these words better: like Gangulf’s wife, these women fart whenever they speak. This also explains why, in the slightly fuller account of the Wonders of Ireland, a woman “rumbles with trapped wind if she doesn’t laugh”: only by staying mute can she avoid farting. In the two Irish texts, the punishments of Gangulf’s wife have been combined. She reached into Gangulf’s spring (his sacred site?) as a chastity test and was scalded, then she shamelessly mocked his miraculous tomb and suffered the fart-curse. These punishments were apparently merged into a chastity test for all unchaste women, or are separate reflections of that much older theme in connection with a comic story about adultery.

Another new element in the two Irish sources is the irresistible entertainment of the jester, which can endure even after death. The Konungs skuggsjá says that when Clefsan was alive, nobody could hold back laughter at hearing him talk, “even though a man was heavy at heart.”⁵⁴ Metaphors in the same line may underlie the marvel itself: Irish verse may be the source for the idea of a jester so funny that even his remains cause hilarity.⁵⁵ A twelfth-century Irish text provides a clear specimen of such hyperbole: King Conari’s three jesters, Mael, Mlithe, and Admlithe, are said to be capable of making every man in Ireland laugh—even if they were all standing over their father’s or mother’s dead body.⁵⁶ The Irish accounts of Mac Rustaing and the “certain man” both introduce the element of involuntary laughter alongside the farting. This laughter is eventually what survives in the marvel of Clefsan’s skull, and laughter (not farting) is what echoes in Hamlet 5.1.

It is quite plausible that the miracles of Gangulf the cuckold saint would appeal to Irish audiences as a bawdy and scatological joke (even though there was enough of the conventional saint’s life in it to make it defensible monastic reading). It is equally plausible that they would reimagine the hero of the narrative as a wanton jester, instead of a cuckold who is by nature a humiliated victim. I suggest that both of these changes did in fact take place, in a thriving oral performance culture that drew on (but was independent of) written sources from monastic contexts. I also suggest that in a final step, typical of folkloric migration, the legend was re-localized onto the Irishman Mac Rustaing.⁵⁷ His previous role (perhaps a holy man, a fool, or indeed a holy fool) lost relevance; he provided a local anchor for the drifting folkloric motif, becoming the Irish answer to Gangulf.

Now that I have identified two separate ingredients for Mac Rustaing’s miraculous grave—the chastity test that humiliates all adulteresses, and the farting-curse of St. Gangulf’s adulterous wife—we can see how the marvel of the Irish jester’s tomb was invented, paving the way for a future reinvention as Clefsan’s skull. Mac Rustaing is Gangulf himself refashioned on Irish terms. I have observed that in Ireland, a hilarious trick that is also a punishment for an adulterous woman lies squarely across the whole semantic range of “wanton” (drúth/báeth): in Ireland, the cuckolded Frankish saint became an adulterous jester because this seemed a better fit for his unorthodox “miracle” of shaming women. This kind of miracle could only ever be textual, existing in ribald semi-parodic texts independent of an actual religious cult.⁵⁸ At some point between the tenth and twelfth centuries, a narrative about Gangulf migrated from continental to insular and from Latin to vernacular culture. The arrival and transformation of the jester’s tomb in Ireland was the first of at least three migrations, though we must assume oral circulation that was far from linear. By the thirteenth century, it surfaces somehow in the Norse Konungs skuggsjá in the form of Clefsan, and by the end of the sixteenth, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Shakespeare’s Yorick. Ironically, the defining obscenity that turned the dead man Gangulf into the jester Mac Rustaing in the first place would be completely removed from Clefsan and therefore Yorick—even though Gertrude’s “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” remains central to the plot (3.4.93–94).⁵⁹

The later Norse story in the Konungs skuggsjá is obviously the one attached to Mac Rustaing and the “certain man,” now transformed again by the removal of the once-essential adultery and farting elements, and the replacement of an intact tomb with a skull. The ribald Irish tale is adapted for a more sober Scandinavian aesthetic, and as we have seen, the skull itself is drawn from the stately poetry of Egil’s Saga. As a coda or epilogue, it was detachable from the main narrative. Despite the fact that Clefsan’s name means “Trickster,” as noted above, the humor is redirected away from crude bodily functions—Bakhtin’s material bodily lower stratum—onto the upper stratum of verbal humor and the mouth.⁶⁰ We are explicitly told that Clefsan was funny for the things he said, and both men and women look inside the skull’s mouth to inspect the seat of wit. The final remark, that the skull remains there still, suggests that the source is a raconteur who considers their own story to be fantasy.

We can now reassess potential influences of the skull of Clefsan (or a lost analogue) on Shakespeare’s graveside scene. Yorick is said to have performed the full repertoire of the Elizabethan court jester, including buffoonery, but Hamlet pays closest attention to the skull’s mouth: “Here hung those lips that I have kissed. … Not one now to mock your own grinning, quite chapfallen?” (5.1.178, 181–82). As for making people laugh, Yorick has no such power over the melancholy Hamlet, but the famous epithet “of infinite jest” (l. 175) might allude to that miraculous ability. The most decisive parallel is of course that the skulls of both jesters, Clefsan and Yorick, are unearthed by chance during grave-digging.⁶¹ As a final consideration, we should ask how Shakespeare’s First Clown so readily identifies Yorick’s skull among the four unearthed in the scene.⁶² Ordinary jesters do not have distinctive skulls, but heroic Egil and miraculous Clefsan did, so Yorick is their descendant in this respect.

Conclusion

I have argued that Yorick’s skull is a version of a late medieval motif: its folkloric ingredients traced migratory patterns from Francia into Ireland, then to Norway and eventually to England, though their familiar form was already reached in a Norse text that survives from the thirteenth century. In the first phase, Irish storytellers produced the marvel of Mac Rustaing’s tomb, by combining the wife’s curse from the French tale of St. Gangulf with the widespread motif of the supernatural chastity test. They were influenced by the Irish notions that jesters are sexually wanton and supernaturally hilarious, and the tomb of the farting women joined a list of Ireland’s national marvels. Second, a Norse narrator turned Mac Rustaing’s tomb into the marvel of Clefsan’s skull, by combining it with the skull of Egil from the well-known Icelandic saga and removing the adultery and farting. Finally, through unidentified means that may or may not have included Latin, the jester’s skull motif reached Shakespeare and was adapted again, becoming a bittersweet relic of childhood fun in Hamlet 5.1. By inserting the jester’s skull scene into Belleforest’s retelling of Amleth, Shakespeare merged two folkloric traditions, which exist for us in two entirely separate sources: one Danish (from Saxo’s Latin history), the other Norse. But perhaps Shakespeare encountered the second in association with the first, since both are thirteenth-century prose texts from Scandinavia? Despite this lingering uncertainty, I hope to have convinced readers that Yorick’s skull was not invented by Shakespeare, but reinvented—again.

Many people’s attention improved this article. I wish to thank Sarah James, Anne Alwis, Kelli Rudolph, Lucy Grig, Ryan Perry, and especially this journal’s readers and editors.

Footnotes