Gerutha

Gerutha is Amleth's mother — daughter of King Rorik, taken by Feng after he murders her husband Horwendil — the original of Shakespeare's Gertrude. Married to the brother who killed her husband, she is caught, like the later queen, between her new husband and her watchful son; and in Saxo's telling she is given a striking scene of her own. When Amleth, feigning madness, is brought to her chamber to be drawn out (with a spy hidden in the straw), he kills the eavesdropper and then turns on his mother — and, in a fierce reproach, shames her for her hasty marriage to her husband's murderer until she weeps and is reconciled to her son's secret cause. Gerutha is the saga's image of the compromised mother won back — the widow married to a fratricide, rebuked by her own son into remorse, the first Gertrude, torn between the man who shares her bed and the boy who shares her blood.