the story of the prince who plots revenge on his uncle (the current king) for killing his father (the former king) is an old one. many of the story elements—the prince feigning madness and his testing by a young woman, the prince talking to his mother and her hasty marriage to the usurper, the prince killing a hidden spy and substituting the execution of two retainers for his own—are found in a medieval tale by saxo grammaticus called "vita amlethi" (part of his larger latin work "gesta danorum"), which was written around 1200 ad. older written and oral traditions from various cultures may have influenced saxo's work. amleth (as hamlet is called in saxo's version) probably derived from an oral tale told throughout scandinavia. parallels can be found with icelandic legend, though no written version of the original icelandic tale survives from before the 16th century. torfaeus, a scholar in 17th-century iceland, made the connection between saxo's amleth and local oral tradition about a prince ambales ("amlóði").