All That:

Once there was a man named Horvendile, sub-king under Rorik over all of Jutland. He won great fame and plunder, and secured the favor of King Rorik; he married Rorik's daughter Gerutha, and had a son named Amleth. Horvendile's brother and co-king Feng was envious of his estate; he set upon his brother and slew him, and then married Gerutha himself.

Amleth feared for his life, for he knew that Feng would slay him too if there seemed the slightest chance he would avenge his father. Therefore, to allay his uncle's suspicion, he pretended to be an idiot. He never washed, but kept himself foul and dirty, and sat in the ashes of the hearth. He carved small wooden crooks with barbs at the end, saying they were javelins with which he would avenge his father. Feng's courtiers laughed at him, and mocked him for a fool, but the king was not so sure.

On the advice of one of Feng's consellors, it was arranged that Amleth should be brought into the presence of a fair young woman, to see how he would act towards her. But Amleth suspected he was being watched and took her away into the woods; there he lay with her and took her into his confidence, and she kept his secret. Then that same counsellor, to overhear Amleth speaking with his mother, hid in the straw on the floor; but Amleth discovered him, and killed him, and fed his flesh to the swine. What Amleth had been talking to his mother about was to ask her to make him a great knotted wall-hanging, to hang in the king's hall.

Now Feng sent Amleth to Britain, in the care of two escorts, with a secret letter instructing the King of Britain to kill Amleth. But the prince changed the letter to make it order the killing of the escorts instead; when the killings were carried out, Amleth feigned outrage and demanded compensation for his countrymen. He insisted that the weregild be paid in gold, and then had it melted down and hidden inside hollow sticks. (Hidden Fortress, anyone?) When he eventually returned to Denmark and was asked where were his former escorts, he held up the sticks and replied "Here is both the one and the other." This was, of course, taken for more of his insanity.

Late one night shortly after his return, when Feng and all his followers were asleep in the hall, Amleth took down the knotted wall-hanging Gerutha had made for him and cast it over the sleeping men like a net. Then he took his little wooden hooks and pinned the tapestry to the earthen floor, trapping the men underneath. And then he set fire to the hall and burned it down. Thus did Amleth avenge the killing of his father.

Malcolm II succeeded by the old system in 1005 when he killed Kenneth IV, king of a collateral line, in battle. (While it was not the rule for the king to be killed by his tanist, it was not uncommon either.) But then Malcolm changed the rules, using killings and dynastic marriages to ensure the succession of his own grandson Duncan. Malcolm died in 1034 and Duncan inherited - direct-line succession instead of collateral-line for the first time in over a century - but soon proved himself less capable than his grandfather. For one thing, he was young; we don't know just how young, but he did succeed his grandfather, and his oldest son was only 9 when Duncan died. For another thing, he was "soft and gentle," and ill-suited to rule in unstable 11th-century Scotland. There were probably many who felt this new system of direct-line succession wasn't proving such a good idea.

One person who felt this way was the mormaer (ruler) of the province of Moray, practically an independent kingdom in the north, a man named Macbeth. Under the old system Macbeth would have been a likely candidate for Tanist: he was a nephew of Malcom II, older than Duncan was, and a proven war-leader. Furthermore his wife Gruoch was a granddaughter of Kenneth IV, the alternate-line king killed by Malcolm a generation earlier. After six years of Duncan's rule Macbeth raised an open rebellion; Duncan was slain in battle, and Macbeth took the throne in 1040.

Macbeth's reign lasted 17 years. His first ten years were stable and peaceful; he went on pilgrimage to Rome in 1050, spending lavishly. But after that, as Duncan's sons became grown men, there were intrigues and rebellions in their name that grew more serious as the years passed.

Siward, earl of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, invaded in 1054 and installed Duncan's son Malcolm as king in the south. Macbeth fought Malcolm for three years, until his death in 1057; his stepson Lulach continued the war for another year, until he too was killed in 1058. Malcolm III then ruled for 35 years, known to history as Malcolm Canmore, and the crown of Scotland remained in direct-line succession (more or less) from then on.

So Macbeth wasn't a usurping upstart, but a perfectly plausible candidate for the throne (by the old system, anyway); he didn't murder a kindly old man in his sleep, but killed an incompetent young adult in open battle; and he wasn't a tyrant who succumbed in a few short acts to the fruits of his own paranoia, but a secure monarch for ten years of peace and stability, defeated in the end by the puppet of a foreign power.

First, let us recognize Shakespeare's genius in changing the names "Feng" and "Gruoch" to "Claudius" and "Lady Macbeth." More to the point, the Amleth story dates from at least the mid-12th century, and Macbeth reigned from 1040 to 1057; Shakespeare wrote his plays in 1600 and 1606. This means, if you think about it, that we are closer to Shakespeare - in absolute time, and in access to knowledge of his world - than he was to the originals, yet they all fall into the time we call "period." We should not lump all of pre-1600 Europe into one category, and think of it as a homogeneous culture.

And let me put in a word for the Tanist system. Its strength in period was that it allowed for the successor to be chosen for experience and ability rather than birth; its weakness, of course, was that kings tended to die in battle, killed by the tanist's army.

We used to use the title in earlier years in the East Kingdom, you know: the heir was called the Tanist, not the Prince. The weakness of using it, for our re-creation purposes, is its relative obscurity in an era of overwhelmingly direct succession: it would be like instituting democratic elections for king, on the grounds that the Icelandic Althing elected its Lawspeaker. But it had this strength: we could play our personas more fully and more deeply if we didn't have to pretend that the heir were the son of the current king, or some kind of officially sanctioned usurper, but what he truly was - the successor chosen because of his ability.

Of course, Shakespeare was writing literature, not history. For fun, though, you might read A Midsummer Tempest (1974) by Sir Bela of Eastmarch (writing as Poul Anderson) for a world where Shakespeare was "the Great Historian."

For interesting reading about the plays, I highly recommend Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970, 2 vols.). It's full of neat stuff, ranging from historical background - like tracking the mythical figure of Banquo as it evolved over time - to trivial tangents - like working out mathematically, if Puck can fly fast enough to "put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes" (37,500 mph), can he get from Athens to London and back again (a round trip of 5400 miles) with the purple flower "ere the leviathan can swim a league" (whales can swim at 20 mph)?

And do check out the Gesta Danorum. Saxo's prose is rather florid (avoid 19th-century translations!) and he tends to lay his moral on pretty thick, but the early volumes, concerning legendary times, are full of great stories. Among other things, there's a lot more to Amleth's story than I could fit here; there's also the story of Cnut and the tide, mentioned in my essay on Columbus. (The later volumes, on Saxo's contemporary times, are not reliable as straight history.)