When I watched Hamnet the other night, the last thing I expected was to find a connection to the popular Outlander series.
In the Academy Award-winning film (Best Actress in a Leading Role, Jessie Buckley), there is a scene where William Shakespeare, while courting Agnes Hathaway, recounts the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is the Greek myth of a man who walks out of the Underworld with his deceased beloved after convincing Hades to set her free. But there is one caveat: he must walk in front and never turn to look at her until they reach the living world. But, alas, he loses her forever because he cannot resist turning his head.
As I pondered that moment, another scene came to mind, one I had watched several seasons ago: Jamie Fraser in Outlander, walking away from Willie, the young boy he fathered — refusing to look back even though the effort nearly tears him apart. At the time, the scene had simply struck me as an act of sacrifice. But Hamnet had given me a frame — a mythic lens — and suddenly the parallel snapped into focus. Not because the stories are the same, but because they are perfect inversions of each other. One man separates from his love because he chooses to look back. The other separates from his son because he chooses not to.
Jamie Fraser is, in his way, the anti‑Orpheus.
In the Orpheus myth, the condition is simple: Walk forward. Do not look back. Trust she is there.
Orpheus’s journey is driven by love, but his failure is driven by fear — the fear that Eurydice is not truly following him, that the gods have deceived him, that love is not enough. His backward glance is a moment of human weakness, and the price is absolute. Eurydice is lost forever, and Orpheus becomes the archetype of the artist whose grief becomes his only companion.
Jamie’s walk away from his son reverses every step of that logic.
He, too, walks forward with someone he loves behind him. He, too, feels the gravitational pull of turning around. But Jamie’s refusal to look back is not rooted in fear — it is rooted in sacrifice. He knows that if he turns, if he allows himself even a moment of connection, he will not be able to leave. And leaving is the only way to give the boy a life free of the scandal and violence that surrounds Jamie’s world.
Where Orpheus loses Eurydice because he cannot resist the pull of love, Jamie preserves his son’s future because he can.
The difference is not in the depth of their love, but in the direction of their gaze.
And in that contrast, the ancient myth finds new relevance — not in the Underworld, but on a Scottish hillside, where a man walks away from his son and never once turns his head.
