'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages
'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages
"The Northman"
In this episode Richard and his special guest and co-host Dr. Christine Senecal of Shippensburg University discuss the 2022 Viking movie "The Northman." Director and co-screenplay writer Robert Eggers' avowed goal in making this movie was to recreate the material and mental world of the Vikings. Please join Richard and Chrissie as they assess how well he succeeded in accomplishing this.
[My apologies to the 110 listeners who have already downloaded this, but I added five more minutes toward the end to cover some historical points that I left out in our discussion of the movie "The Northman." A transcript of the missing material is posted in the transcript section. ]
This episode includes sound clips from the movies "The Vikings" (1958) and "The Northman." The composer of "The Vikings" theme music is Mario Nascimbe. The composers of "The Northman" music are Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough. Alexander Nakarada composed the podcast's intro and exit music.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
Episode 23: "The Northman"
SUMMARY KEYWORDS vikings, film, movie, Eggers, “The Northman”, sagas, vengeance,, Amleth, Saxo Grammticus, Hamlet, viking and Slavic religion, slavery, iceland, viking magic (seiör), shamanism, Valkyries
Richard Abels 0:03
Welcome to our podcast, "'Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction about the Middle Ages." Today, we're going to be talking about a movie and a couple of television shows, all of them dealing with Vikings. The movie is "The Northman." The two TV shows are the History Channel's "Vikings," and Netflix, "Norsemen." I'm delighted to have as my coihost for this episode, my old friend and colleague, Dr. Christine Senecal. I Chrissy, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Chrissy Senecal 0:41
Thank you very much, Richard, I feel very lucky that you invited me to join you on your podcast and I know Richard from a long time ago, so I'm Christie Senecal. I'm an associate professor of history at Shippensburg University. It's a midsize State University in south central Pennsylvania. And my specialties are in medieval history, topics that include gender and warfare and aristocratic culture. I recently am also interested in Big History. And my main scholarly development as of late is my history Instagram project. So if you would like to listen, you can follow me at at chrissysenecal.com. And I received my PhD from Boston College. I was tutored under Professor Robin Fleming, who is a close friend of Richard. And it was during that time that I also I met you and yes, you were gracious enough to serve on my dissertation committee. And I was a big fan of your scholarship from the very start of my career. Oh, yeah. So your work on the English aristocracy before the Norman Conquest was super important to my dissertation.
Richard Abels 1:53
And it was an excellent dissertation, I felt fortunate to be on that committee. And I feel fortunate to have you on this podcast. Because my loving wife and my usual co-host, Ellen refused. She just refused at where marriage will survive this, I think. But we do have a mixed marriage. I love movies, and she finds them too intense. And "The Northman" turns out to be a pretty intense film thick. It's pretty metal. I should begin with warning. This episode will have spoilers. If you haven't seen “The Northman”, you might want to watch it first. And then come back to our podcast. As our listeners know, I divide movies about the Middle Ages into four categories. The Good, the Bad, the not so bad, and the downright ugly. Yeah. And “The Northman” is one of the few movies that I would place in the category of good medieval films, by which I mean a movie that tries to capture the authentic spirit of the age.
Chrissy Senecal 3:02
I have to say, I think it's my favorite medieval film. And that's saying something because there's a lot of good ones out there. But if you have to medievalists who are Movie Geeks that give it good ratings, that's something
Richard Abels 3:17
the popularity of Vikings at least goes back to 1958. With the release of the movie, “The Vikings” with Kirk Douglas Tony Curtis, I still can't get over the idea of Tony Curtis as a Viking—Ernest Borgnine, and Janet Leigh as a beautiful Welsh princess. That movie is a swashbuckler. Movie critic Philip Scheuer described it as, quote, “a kind of “Prince Valiant” without the prince. It is filled with pell-mell action that the adults will follow with a mixture of amusement and disbelief.” End quote. Nobody involved in the making of the Vikings believed that this would be taken seriously. It was meant to be a popular fun movie that would make a lot of money. And that's precisely what it did. Robert Eggers, the director and co-screenplay writer for "The Northman," had grander ambitions. He wanted to make an epic movie about vikings that was faithful to the sensibility of the sagas. And I think he succeeded. The very different intentions of the movie makers can be heard in the musical themes for these two films.
Plays
Music theme for “The Vikings”
Music theme for “The Northman”
The musical score for “The Vikings” was composed by Mario Nascimbe, and it's lushly romantic. It recalls the 1930s Warner Brothers swashbucklers with music by Erich Korngold. The second is from the movie "The Northman." The composers are Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough. It features native Icelandic medieval instruments. And their intention was to reproduce the harsh dissonant, brutal world of the film. And I think they succeeded.
Chrissy Senecal 6:15
I absolutely agree with you. We were talking before and it is the saga ethos, but the heroic journey of an epic, so it kind of meshes the genres and in some ways,
Richard Abels 6:27
exactly, it has the linearity of plot development of an epic, and avoids all of the tangents of the sagas. But it has the tone and the characterization and worldview of the 13th century sagas. "The Northman" is obviously the work of people who love the saga genre. Eggers became interested in doing a film about vikings after he made a trip to Iceland with his wife in 2016, which is when Edgar's met Sjón, the Icelandic lyricist, poet and novelist who would collaborate with Eggers on the screenplay for "The Northman," Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Amleth, the protagonist of "The Northman," was also interested in doing a movie about vikings, he himself had played a vampire Viking in the TV show “True Blood.” As Skarsgard points out in an interview, the character he played and drew blood, Eric Northman, was a prince out for revenge against the man who destroyed his family, not unlike the character that he plays in "The Northman." In it interview Skarsgard said, quote, “I want to credit “Trueblood” a little, at least for giving me that idea. I was kind of harboring this idea this dream of one day making an epic Viking movie, but in a truly authentic way that would capture the essence of the old Icelandic sagas in the poetry, that stark laconic harsh world and characters and tone but it was a distant dream 10 years ago.” Eend quote. And when Skarsgard met Eggers in 2017 to discuss a possible project together, they began to bond over Viking sagas. As Skarsgard tells it, quote, “’The Northman’ is about fate. It was fated that we should work together. I was with Lars Knudsen, the Danish producer, who had just worked with Rob on “The Witch” and Lars and I were trying to figure out the perfect Viking story to tell. We're going through the old sagas and trying to decide which one to base our Viking movie on. And then I met Rob about something else. And he had just returned from Iceland, where he had dinner with Bjork and Sjón, the Icelandic poet, author, musician, Renaissance man. Rob had fallen in love with Iceland, the people the culture, and was really into Norse mythology, and mentioned that I was trying to make a Viking movie, and Rob got fired up and started talking about different ideas. We ended up spending the entire lunch just talking about vikings. Leaving the meeting, it just felt inevitable. I called Lars and told him about the meeting. And Lars was like, “Rob is a genius. He's amazing to work with. Of course, we should ask if he wants to join us and try to do this together.” And so we did.” End quote. Robert Eggers' hallmark as a filmmaker is his almost fanatical attention to historical detail. This is clearly evident in two earlier movies, “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch” and it's equally true for "The Northman." In an interview, Robert Eggers explained that in "The Northman," he was world building, the insane notion, as he put it, of recreating the past. Quote, "it's impossible, especially for an era from 1000 years ago, but it gives me and my collaborators a North Star, we were lucky to be working with leaders in the field of Viking studies to advise on this, I'm sure historians will find plenty of things to pull apart. And in 10 years, it'll all be moot. But there's never been a Viking movie as focused on accuracy as this one.” End quote,
Chrissy Senecal 10:31
I agree. I think it is the world building where it really succeeds, in the spiritual representation, the shamanic aspects that it emphasizes, and in general, the material culture. It's just those are two areas that are very, very strong and Robert Eggers had the budget to make them worthy. I think
Richard Abels 10:53
it really helps that Eggers had good historical consultants, and paid attention to them. These were Dr. Neil Price, an archaeologist at the Uppsala University, folklorist Terry Gunnell at the University of Iceland, and historian Dr. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir of the National Library of Norway in Oslo, and author of Valkyrie, the women of the Viking world. Of the three I'm most familiar with the work of Neil Price, whose book, The Viking way, magic in mind in late Iron Age, Scandinavia, is a bold attempt to understand the Viking worldview, the Viking mind, based upon literature, and material artifacts,
Chrissy Senecal 11:43
yeah. Really trying as much as possible to see the Viking culture as peeled back divorced from the Christian lens that the Sagas really put on Viking culture.
Richard Abels 11:54
Yes. So it's not just simply doing the mythology, what it's really trying to do is get a sense of what the belief system really was. It's much more shamanistic than the Viking mythology would have us believe. It's not Marvel Comics,
Chrissy Senecal 12:14
no. And gee, that stuff is really fun. I mean, I love mythology, of course. But it's usually a lot of times this sort of way it's represented in pop culture does tend to be Marvel and flat, as though it's unchanging. And, and there's a pantheon with clearly defined boundaries.
Richard Abels 12:33
And it's, it's a religion, which doesn't seem to have religion in it. And what Neil Price is doing is recovering is the belief system, a belief system of a people who are essentially a farming people as well as people who raid. So yeah, absolutely. Nature is all important in the system.
Chrissy Senecal 12:53
Yes. And on the one hand, I think you mentioned the ethics, on the other hand, the importance of ritual and religion, that's something that I've always tried to stress to my students, because in American culture that, you know, whatever our nonreligious or religious background, it's so Christian cerebral. It's like from a book, and that is the idea of what religion is. It's like, what's the theology,
Richard Abels 13:20
certainly true for American Christians, and for the wider audience for this film, less true for Hasidic and other Orthodox Jews. And for Hindus. Both of those religions emphasize orthopraxy and ritual--though the movies rituals, probably would strike neither group as having anything to do with what they would recognize as religion.
Chrissy Senecal 13:46
Exactly. And instead, a lot of the, what people have really attached as what's religion has been around rituals. And yes, yeah, and I think this film does,
Richard Abels 13:58
I think it does as well. I was impressed by the range of sources that I could footnote in this film, both archaeological sources and literary sources, although the narrative itself is loosely based upon Saxo Grammaticus’ story of Amleth. The source material for Shakespeare's “Hamlet.” Eggers also draws upon the poetic Edda and Prose Edda and a number of sagas Egil's Saga, Grettir's Saga, the Eyrbyggja saga and the Saga of Hrolfr Kraki. As material for the mentality, the world that he was trying to create in this film. Honestly, that he also was thinking in terms of Conan the Barbarian.
Chrissy Senecal 14:46
Oh, right, that that well, that's there was like the elements of his youth that he could remember that he liked about. Yeah, but I also think he used a lot of material culture like the tree that motif that appears throughout the film from the office. suburb burial shipbroker Yes. And a lot of the archaeology, like the the houses, for example, they're
Richard Abels 15:07
Everything is an attempt to get it right. Yeah. And credit for this really needs to go to the production designer Craig Lathrop, and to the costume designer, Linda Muir, from ships, to houses to costumes. All were attempts to get it right to for the late ninth and early tenth centuries. And if there is a real criticism from historians point of view of the movie, is that the material world is really set in, it's supposed to begin what in 895 And it continues to 915. The material world really is that period, right? The ethical world seems to be to be partly that period, and partly the period of the Sagas, which are 13th century. Yeah, yes, looking back upon the earlier period,
Chrissy Senecal 16:03
right, the kind of lens of the vengeance motif as the saga is portrayed as the Sagas
Richard Abels 16:09
portray. So I think it's a hybrid between the saga and the attempt to be able to recreate a world of a Scandinavian world of the early 10th century,
Chrissy Senecal 16:24
which is I think, its merit. For example, if I was to use it in a teaching classroom, even thinking about having people pick out well what elements are like the sagas, like the kennings, the wordplay that are constantly being used in the script, war Raven, is that King Aurvandill and things like that that saga and then what isn't is interesting to to think
Richard Abels 16:49
about what my favorite of the kennings is Fjölnir the Brotherless. Oh, yeah, he's brotherless because he killed his brother. Which I love. But every one of the major characters has a has a nickname to distinguish them so you have King Aurvandill War-Raven, you have Thorir the Proud and Thorfinnr Tooth-Gnasher. These are great names. They are really great. They're the type of names you get in sagas.
Chrissy Senecal: Exactly.
Richard Abels Yeah, yeah. I'm really impressed by Eggers’ world building, and its attempt to capture the Viking mind. The only movie that I would actually put up next to it in terms of attempts to be accurate, was an Icelandic film made in 1981, called “The Outlaw” based upon the saga of Gisli the Outlaw, which doesn't have the epic scope of this movie, but was really an attempt to be faithful to the saga genre. “The Northman” is not nearly as faithful to its main source, the story of Prince Amleth, which appears in the guest to denote from the deeds of the day. It's a work written by a Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, in the early 13th century, and with sounds like Hamlet for a reason. That is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In the story, Amleth is the son of a king, a great warrior king, who is killed by Amleth’s uncle, the brother of the king, so that he can marry Amleth’s mother the queen. Sound familiar?
Chrissy Senecal: It should.
Richard Abels: Yeah, because it's the basic plot for Disney's “The Lion King.” Anyway, in Saxo Grammaticus’ story, Amleth gets his vengeance by pretending to be crazy and therefore harmless. His madness and his simplicity, the fact that he comes over as a fool, is a disguise which allows him to bide his time and plan the vengeance that he will eventually take upon his uncle. As he explains to his mother Garutha, “I wear this zany appearance for my own benefit, as I've no doubt whatsoever, that the ruffian who can kill his own brother is likely to savage his other kinsmen with equal ferocity. That's why I prefer to put on the behavior of an imbecile instead of a purposeful sanity and borrow safe cover by looking like an out and out maniac. Yet, in my heart, there is this persistent yearning to avenge my father, and among the watch for opportunities always waiting for the right moment. There are different time for different undertakings against a secretive and pitiless mind deeper machinations have to be employed.” End quote.
Chrissy Senecal 19:47
so it's really a trickster figure.
Richard Abels 19:49
He's like Loki, right. Saxo Grammaticus emphasizes the Trickster element by having Amleth always tell the literal truth, which is always misinterpreted as being a sign of his madness. Unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet, Saxo Grammaticus’ story of Amleth ends happily. The Prince manages to get all of his uncle's retainers dead drunk, covers them with a tapestry, fastens it to the ground so that they can't get up, and sets fire to the palace. And he then stabs his uncle to death., his mother is recalled to virtue, and he succeeds the to the throne.
--(laughing) That has almost nothing to do with the movie, right? Chrissy, could you give us a synopsis so that our listeners know what this film is about?
Chrissy Senecal 20:45
Absolutely. So thank you. I think that two of the main characters don't have names or proper names there. And they’re ideas. And the two ideas are fate and vengeance.
Richard Abels: Yes.
Chrissy Senecal: And both of these play the main roles really, and they're both sad. They're both incredibly problematic, because they are the driving force of the action and they don't lead to happiness than you to a lot of pain. So I think that's the umbrella
Richard Abels 21:13
which I think is again, very much true to this Viking conception of the world. The world is not a pleasant place. Any religion which is going to culminate in Ragnarok, with the destruction of everything right. Is not a happy religion.
Chrissy Senecal 21:31
No. Right. Right. Valhalla, you know, is just like a little episode. It's that is not the total picture. No, absolutely. Yeah. So King Aurvandill at the beginning returns home to….I wrote it down
Richard Abels 21:47
Hrafnsney. Sorry.
Chrissy Senecal 21:50
So his queen is there. His son Amleth is there. And as he is greeted, you think that the family is going to be reunited and happiness. Very early on. King Aurvandill has a ceremony of adult initiation with his son Amleth. And I really feel like you named it
Richard Abels 22:12
like a werewolf Bar Mitzvah. Alas, I can't claim credit for
Chrissy Senecal 22:16
it. It's so Roberta Onion Right.
Richard Abels 22:20
Rebecca Onion uses that characterization in an interview that she did with Robert Eggers for Slate. Right. Yeah, say hey, I think he's almost perfect
Chrissy Senecal 22:30
It really is. It's great. I’ll just mention it here because we'll talk about it probably later. But very soon after that, Fjölnir, King Aurvandill’s evil brother, slaughters the king, ravishes Queen Gudrun and is going to try to kill Amleth, but Amleth has been initiated into a vow of trying to save his mother avenge his father and kill his son. He
Richard Abels 22:56
does this mantra as he rows away to safety he keeps repeating.
Sound bite for “The Northman”:
I will avenge you, Father.
I will save you, Mother.
I will kill you, Fjölnir
Chrissy Senecal 23:27
You know, having that as a mantra that he has to obey, and being unable to come to terms with maybe the nuances of a situation,
Richard Abels 23:36
They’re nuances???? Nevermind.
Chrissy Senecal 23:39
Is what brings tragedy I think ultimately. So what he does is eventually he makes his way to an area of where the roost Vikings live. Yes, and he becomes a Berserker. So there he's engaging in all kinds of violence.
Richard Abels 23:54
Yeah, over the top violence in a raid on a Slavic village. He acts like a killing machine
Chrissy Senecal 24:01
Just to keep it short, because I'm sure we can return to it. He sees it he finds a Seeress who tells him his destiny is to kill Fjölnir He ends up becoming on purpose a slave so that he can sneak into Fjölnir’s lands, who's now in Iceland. He’s now a refugee having lost his kingdom, right?
Richard Abels 24:14 He's a refugee, but a pretty wealthy refugee. He's the owner of a large farm worked by many slaves, and the master of several warrior retainers. He's no longer ling, and it is a real come down, but he's probably what the Icelanders would have called the Gothar, an Icelandic big man.
Chrissy Senecal 24:38
There he meets a fellow slave named Olga, and who's a Slav.
Richard Abels: Exactly. And a witch
Chrissy Senecal: and a witch. Exactly. They have sexy time. And also she's essential to the plot because she helps him to recall the unholy vengeance. I guess we can't use the word holy because it's so, yeah. Olga uses fly agaric?
Richard Abels 25:07
Yeah. Magic mushrooms
Chrissy Senecal 25:12
to poison their enemies. Fjölnir ends up being killed in an epic battle at the end with Amleth at the Gates of Hel, which is on a big volcano. But not before Queen Gudrun has tried to to kill her own son Amleth.
Richard Abels 25:34
Yet the big reveal in this is that Gudrun, who we keep on thinking of as having been a victim, turns out to be the instigator of the entire story. She seduced her brother-in-law, persuaded her brother-in-law to kill her husband. And instead of being ravaged and taken away, she was the willing accomplice of this and was also willing to have her son Amleth killed. She's not a nice lady.
Chrissy Senecal 26:10
She's not--although I'm not, I'm not totally sold that she was the one that instigated it as much as with took an opportunity where it lay in a really brutal way.
Richard Abels 26:22
She's She tells Amleth in the big reveal that she herself had been a slave that she had been raped by his father. He is the product of rape.
Chrissy Senecal: And that so often happens
Richard Abels Yes, yeah. And she wants a avenge that. And she then apparently tries to seduce her son. And since it Nicole Kidman, it's not a bad seduction.
Chrissy Senecal 26:53
But it induces extreme horror on the part of Amleth
Richard Abels 26:56
And also the audience
Chrissy Semecal:
Exactly.
Richard Abels
It’s not really a seduction, because she's really going to get close enough to him to be able to stab him.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah
Richard Abels
Gudrun obviously loves her young son Gunnar, her son by Fjölnir, but she just as obviously views her older son as a threat that must be disposed of. At the end of the movie, she will try again to kill Amleth, who in self-defense will kill her. Amleth will also kill his half-brother in self-defense, after Gunnar leaps on his back, repeatedly stabbing him, which given Amlthe’s earlier mantra is really ironic, attempt to save his mother. This sets up the final set-piece Holgang the duel to the death between Amleth and Fjölnir at the Gates of Hel, the crater of the Icelandic volcano Hekla, which was foreshadowed in the movies opening sequence. It's not it's not a happy family.
Chrissy Senecal 28:00
No, it is not.
Richard Abels 28:03
It is not, no. And it's not a happy movie. Although in terms of maybe the Sagas and maybe even 10th-century Scandinavia, it is happy, because our hero Amleth will get his vengeance. He will also go to Valhalla. We know this because the last thing he sees is a Valkyrie coming to take him, right? The Valkyrie by the way, is not a beautiful lady.
Chrissy Senecal
Valkyrie is a pretty scary woman. pretty terrifying,
Richard Abels
pretty terrifying with the etched teeth that are dyed blue, as we know vikings did. And then, yeah, and we know that his, that his new wife Olga, who's going to the safety of his kinsmen in the Orkneys,
Chrissy Senecal:
Right
Richard Abels:
that she will bear him a daughter, whom he knows from the prophecy of the Seeress is destined to be a Maiden-King.
Chrissy Senecal
Exactly.
Richard Abels
So they have to play the story out to its end. It's all fated from the very beginning. This is how it has to end.
Chrissy Senecal 29:09
Yeah. And if there's any kind of sort of positive or what do we want to say uplifting moment, it almost seems unable to break away from his fate. And he does manage to get it all he gets to choose both the love of his kinsmen, instead of his, ah, Olga and their children, and also get vengeance which he, he just can't, he can never stop that
Richard Abels 29:35
And he gets the vengeance because of the love of his kinsmen. He can't leave behind Fjölnir because Fjölnir will now take vengeance upon him for the death of his son whom Amleth has killed. By the end of the movie, Amleth will have killed both of Fjölnir’s sons,
Chrissy Senecal 29:59
Right, Gunnar and Thorir,
Richard Abels 30:00
so he's killed both of his sons. If he leaves Fjölnir alive, he knows that his children will be hunted down.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah.
Richard Abels
So he has to
Chriisy Senecal 30:10
So he has a good reason,.
Richard Abels
Yeah.
Chissy Senecal
So, it’s not just for like overdone courageousness
richard abels 30:17
Yeah. The irony is that for the sake of the Slavic woman, Olga, Amleth is willing to forego the sworn vengeance of a Viking. But because of his love of Olga, and because of his concern for his unborn children, he is forced, nonetheless, to fulfill that vengeance. To put it another way, he's fated to complete the story.
Chrissy Senecal 30:38
Absolutely. I think the worldbuilding here just works so well, because this kind of very tough civilization where really cruel fate that you can't escape, and the rules of vengeance, they don't even relax their grip for the, the so-called hero, the protagonist of the movie
richard abels 31:07
No they don’t. And you… But it's incredibly moral film. because of this. Amleth is compelled by his, by ethical pledge to avenge his father. He doesn't have a real choice about this; he won't be a good man unless he's, he does this
Chrissy Senecal 31:29
right. I also really thought that Robert Eggers did a great job at both presenting the moral lens of the Viking world and layered with it, it’s “Show, don't tell” in terms of the modern viewer and being allowed to be repelled by that, like, repelled by the amount of slavery that exists in this world and the amount of brutality. It's not presented in a way that soft pitches it at all.
Richard Abels 31:54
No, not at all. The slaves are presented as chattel. If they're not going to be fit, there'll be disposed of; that slave women can be casually raped.
Chrissy Senecal
Oh, yeah.
Richard Abels
Olga is on the verge of being raped when she forestalls it by indicating that she's menstruating?
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah
Richard Abels
the taboo about menstruation is an invention. Apparently an invention of the….
Chrissy Senecal 32:23
Yeah, one wishes we have more information on that. But
Richard Abels
yeah,
Chrissy Senecal
reaching down grabbing her menstrual blood and then slapping her would be rapist shoulder. That's pretty epic there.
Richard Abels
Yeah.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah.
Richard Abels 32:33
Actually, it’s Thorir, the son, who is going to do the raping,
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah, sorry
Richard Abels
and he just simply goes on to somebody else. He treats it as his right.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah,
Richard Abels
to do this.
Chrissy Senecal 32:36
Yeah. That does remind me of the, you know, the writing of Ibn Fahdlan. Because that's, you know, most one of the most famous sort of primary sources that people like to read to look at Viking culture in the in the area of the Rus, and there's some pretty horrible scenes where Ibn Fahdlan, is remarking on the lack of modesty of these Vikings, that they just have sex openly,
Richard Abels
like animals
Chrissy Senecal
like animals. And I we talk about that in my classes because I assume there that what's happening is that the their slave women that are being raped,
Richard Abels 33:25
Yes, because it's a free woman. The rules are completely different. One of the paradoxes is that the Scandinavians society for this early Middle Ages gives more rights to free women than most of its contemporary societies would. They are property owners, they are law worthy, they
Chrissy Senecal 33:47
this is like the Irish in the early medieval period, I feel like which was also a slave owning society. And if you, you showed your status because you weren't a slave, and something that I always think about when I'm teaching history is the motive that runs across human time, I think in whatever social groups people are in to try to be special-er if you're special-er because you show that you're not a slave. You can, you can hold weapons in public, you can go to a legal court.
Richard Abels
Yeah. And our hero, Amleth proves himself even as a slave to be special by being an exceptionally good ballplayer and the really brutal form of lacrosse or field hockey. It's probably more like field hockey than anything, knattleiker,
Chrissy Senecal
that's how I was hearing it, knattleiker
Richard Abels
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a it's a ball game but it's the ball game that is described in Egil’s saga
Chrissy Senecal
right
Richard Abels
in which Egil loses his temper, ends up killing another kid
Chrissy Senecal
And everyone says, like, good job good job
Richard Abels
Yeah, his mother says, you're gonna make a great Viking. And Amleth rescues his head half-brother he knows it's his half-brother, nobody else does. The kid is about to be killed as he lay on the ground which is apparently fair in knattleiker. It actually would have helped to have had the rules of the game explained
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah
Richard Abels 35:14
the would-be killer, Thorfinnr Tooth-Gnasher, raises his club to bash Gunnar’s skull in, when Amleth rushes over and strikes Thorfinnr dead. This act of courage and prowess wins him the favor of his uncle. Of course, his uncle doesn't know that the slave is actually Amleth, whom he ordered to be killed 20 years earlier and who he believes is long dead, and who is now intent upon taking vengeance upon him.
Chrissy Senecal 35:43
Right. And isn't it Thorfir that actually allows Amleth to choose a woman and so as his reward, and Amleth of course picks Olga
Richard Abels
Olga is one of the two female characters in the film. She's an essential character because Amleth will not be able to get his revenge without her help. A criticism of “The Northman” on another medieval popular culture podcast, “Media-Eval,” a really good pun, is that the character of Olga is left completely undeveloped. The actress Anya Taylor-Joy does a really good job playing Olga of the Birch Forest, but I have to agree that the part is underwritten. We don't know anything about her besides the fact that she's a Slavic witch woman.
Chrissy Senecal
Right.
Richard Abels
But we don't know what backstory.
Chrissy Senecal
Right
Richard Abels
And we don't know what attracts her to Amleth. And Amleth is attracted in part because she's useful to him for the vengeance.
Chrissy Senecal 36:48
I mean, at some point Amleth could be useful to her as protection
Richard Abels
Yeah, let's face it, they're also the best looking slaves.
Chrissy Senecal
Absolutely. Yeah
Richard Abels 37:00
Now, what the movie is particularly good on, and I think brave about, is rituals that if it's not put into the context of the movie, if you just see it on the internet alone, look intensely silly.
Chrissy Senecal
Sure, yeah. Being inhabited by animal spirits after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Richard Abels
Yeah, the first example of this is what we called Amleth’s “werewolf Bar Mitzvah.” King Aurvandill brings his 12 year old son into a temple. They descend stairs into an underground cavern. Aurvandill orders Amleth to imitate him as they both go down on their hands and knees, and act like wolves or dogs. In this way, they scamper into a chamber where they encounter a man in an animal mask. This man turns out to be Heimir the Fool, though in context, he's now Heimir the Wise, played wonderfully by Willem Dafoe. I probably should have said this before, but let me take a few minutes to say it now. The movie is really well cast. This is true for the main characters. Alexander Skarsgard is Amleth, Claes Bang as Fjölnir, Nicole Kidman is Queen Gudrun, Anya Taylor-Joy is Olga. And it's true for the smaller roles especially Willem Dafoe as Heimir, Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandill, and Björk as the Seeress. Okay, now that I've done due diligence, let's get back to the ritual. And they're on their hands and their feet. They're howling, they're barking. They're proving that they're not dogs, but they're wolves. And then they have to prove that they're men and they do it by burping and farting.
Chrissy Senecal 38:46
I love that. Yeah, yeah. Showing the like, what makes us matter, them men is something that's base to, yeah, yeah
Richard Abels
after King Aurvandill burps and then turns to Amleth and Amleth farts. His father says, What did he say to him?
Chrissy Senecal
I smell a good pupil. I smell a good pupil.
Richard Abels
Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, and it's silly, but they take it intensely seriously. And it's a prelude to a vision.
Chrissy Senecal 38:12
Yeah, all of this, I really like how it's dealt with as liminalness, which is about what shamanistic religion. So is it this world? Or is it another world? Is the leading shaman a fool or is he a wise man? Are they men? Or are they, you know, wolves.
Richard Abels
And Hemir is both the fool and the wise man.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah, that's great.
Richard Abels
Yeah, it really is great. (Chrissy: Yeah.) The liminality of the wise fool is is clear in the scene in which Fjölnir enters the court of his brother and greets the king and queen as they sit on their thrones. Heimir is the only one insightful enough to suspect the illicit relationship between Fjölnir and Gudrun. When Queen Gudrun offer her cup to Fjölnir, Heimer the Fool says, “Look how the Queen's cup grows wet for more men than her king. What metal might buy a fragrant sip, sweet silver or hot iron?” Fjölnir yells out, “Silence dog. By prayer. You slander your lord and mistress.” But King Aurvandill responds. “Please you brother, ‘tis but a jest a jest. Heimir keeps a foul tongue. Yet I keep him as a deep sworn friend.”
Chrissy Senecal
Right. Like fools in the Central Middle Ages. They were supposed to be figures that told the truth but could get away with it.
Richard Abels 40:40
Exactly. (Chrissy: yeah.) This just is going to end up costing him or his life. He'll be decapitated by Fjölnir and Amleth will learn this in a very odd way. When he is seeking a weapon to be able to do his vengeance, he consults a seiðr-maðr , witch man, and the witch man has as his aid to the spirit world, the mummified head of Heimir. So Heimer doesn't even shut up when he's dead. (Chrissy: Yeah.) The other ritual highlighted in the film is the berserker ritual. And this is, I think, very much Neil Price, who wrote about ecstatic dancing. And about the idea of seiðr, of magic, in which you could channel the spirit of animals. (Chrissy: Yeah.) It's not literally becoming a werewolf or werebear. (Chrissy: Right.) But what it is, is being possessed by the spirit of the wolf (Chrissy: right) and the spirit of the bear. (Chrissy: Right.)
Chrissy Senecal
Right. And that shows a lot about the the what were the kinds of social views of the natural world. I think, I think if you look across human cultures, it's a kind of consistent line that humans want to draw between human and non-human and playing with that is, on the one hand, it almost is a recognition that that line can be crossed, and that there's not really this line after all of specialness between human and animal. (Richard: Yes.) And sometimes it's something you want, and sometimes it's something that you ridicule and hate. Yeah, right.
Richard Abels 42:22
When I first saw it. I thought to myself, I'm watching the practice of a Chippendale strippers for a Bachelorette (Chrissy laughs), as they go ahead, and they dance together. But it is an attempt to show that they are leaving their own personalities, their own bodies and becoming part of that natural world.
Chrissy Senecal
A world that allows for breaking away from the social norms where you don't just kill people and rip them to shreds and make them bleed and be in pain.
Richard Abels
So you don't have to have guilt. Because this is not you who's doing this. You have become something beyond human.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah. And there's so many war rituals across time where that you know, ritual behavior before battle takes place.
Richard Abels
And what the movie wants to do is, the movie’s making an interpretation. The berserker is a difficult character in Norse Sagas and historians are really divided. There are historians who say this is a fictional (Chrissy: right) creation of the Sagas (Chrissy: right). And in the later sagas, berserkers are villains. They're almost always villains. The hero is going to face a berserker and kill the beserker. Berserkers rape women. Berserkers are just evil in the later sagas. The earlier berserkers are more ambiguous figures. What they do share throughout is that they have a blood lust (Chrissy: Yeah.) Now the question is what exactly is a berserker. (Chrissy: Right.) The word itself in Old Norse is difficult because it can mean two very different things. The “ber-“ part of it could either mean that you are going into battle without armor. without a shirt right.
Chrissy Senecal
Yeah, you are bare.
Richard Abels
Yeah, the “-serker” is shirt. (Chrissy: right.) The other possibility is that it refers to the animal the bear and that you're either going into battle with a bear skin on (Chrissy: right) or you're going into battle channeling a bear, (Chrissy: right) the spirit of the bear,
Chrissy Senecal
right or and somehow being vulnerable. (Richard: Yeah, wearing the bear.) Right. I also like the idea that it's both even at the time
Richard Abels 44:44
and I think so. And it doesn't have to make a choice. (Chrissy: right.) We want to somehow say there is an etymology here. But the thing about about this Norse society, at least the elite society, is it’s a society that loved puzzles, games, puns, wordplay. That's what the skaldic poetry is about. (Chrissy: Yeah.) And I think that anyone hearing the word berserker would think both of them simultaneously. (Chrissy: Yeah.) So you don't have to choose about that. (Chrissy: Right.) The other term is the is the ulfheðnar. (Chrissy: Yeah, right.) They're the ones who channel wolves. Right. And they go in wearing wolf skins.
Chrissy Senecal
Sure. And we see that in the film
Richard Abels
and we see that in the film. But in both cases, what you have are people who are getting outside of their own bodies, and who are introducing into their bodies, the spirits of vicious and violent animals that allow them to do things that a normal person wouldn't do.
Chrissy Senecal 45:47
Absolutely. So I don't know if this is a good place to talk about it, because we were talking about rituals in the film. But it seems like a couple of the scenes that I think are really interesting are about almost magic realist (Richard: yes) in the film. And like vision with the Seeress, for example, and also where he meets with a draugr. (Richard: Ahhh) I wonder if, you know… Yeah, yeah,
Richard Abels
yeah, why don’t you tell us about the draugr.
Chrissy Senecal
Ah, the draugr. Well, at one point Amleth goes to visit the mound dweller, right? (Richard: yes.)Underground, and it's a haunting scene and it could be almost like now you're done with history and you're in a magic land, like Dungeons and Dragons or something. Where he's underground, he sees the skeleton and the draugr tells him about his his future how he will fight a big battle at the Gate of Hel. And that this sword is going to play a really important part
Richard Abels
but he has to take the sword (Chrissy, yeah, and aggressed..) and to win the sword from the draugr.
Chrissy Senecal
It's fabulous. Yeah, its fabulous.
Richard Abels 46:53
Yeah, draugrs appear in a number of the Sagas. They're the Norse undead. They're not vampires, because they don't suck blood. What they tend to do is, like dragons, they tend to defend hoards. (Chrissy: Yeah.) In this case, what we see is him fighting this undead figure. He starts off as if he were mummy, a mummy (Chrissy: Yeah), but then he comes to life. And throughout the film, what we have is a blurring between what the audience sees as reality (Chrissy: right) and what the characters think of as reality (Chrissy: right), which is the spirit world that they see and believe (Chrissy: right) to be as real as the natural world.
Chrissy Senecal:
Yeah, it really works.
Richard Abels
I think they really does. The last thing that our hero is going to see is a Valkyrie (Chrissy: right), coming to take him to Valhalla. (Chrissy: Yeah.) It is what the Valkyries originally were before 14th century saga writers turned them into the beautiful shieldmaiden of what might be called saga romances. They are the searchers… they are the seekers of the worthy dead from the battlefield to take them to either the hall of Freya, or the hall of Odin. (Chrissy: right.) And our hero has proven himself to be worthy.
Chrissy Senecal 48:19
Yeah. And I know before we recorded we were talking about “Pan's Labyrinth,” blurring the real with the child's imagination. And I feel like there's parallels here.
Richard Abels
I think so too. (Chrissy: Yeah.) And great film. If you haven't seen “Pan's Labyrinth,” you should see it. It's both a really wonderful fantasy, touching fantasy, but a very disturbing historical movie set in the last stages of the Spanish Civil War.
Chrissy Senecal 48:46
Absolutely. Is this an okay time to talk about gender? (Richard: Yes, please.) So I think that's super interesting, because I know in the popular imagination is the Brunhilda Valkyrie. That's like very, very beautiful. (Richard: Yes.) And as you mentioned, these are more in the late sagas. And… and I think it's interesting to think about any kind of point at which there is actual, you know, evidence for women being in being involved in military warfare,
Richard Abels
and there are at least two Viking Age graves in which were found skeletons which originally were thought to be male, (Chrissy: right) and they were thought to be male because of the grave goods which were weapons (Chrissy: right). One is in a high status chamber grave in a Viking Age cemetery in Birka, Sweden, that was first excavated in 1878. (Chrissy: That is the more famous one), and the second skeleton that has since been sexed as female and was buried with the sword was excavated in South Eastern Norway in 1900. As Chrissy said, the Birka Viking burial is pretty famous. It's one of the more magnificent Viking burials. The person was about 30 to 40 years old and of slender build. The corpse was interred with silver trim clothing. It included a cap, which seems to have come from Kyiv; the fragment of an Arab coin; two horses, one male, one female, with equipment; weights’ a game board, including gaming pieces and dice. The body was surrounded with weapons, including a sword, two spears, 25 sharp arrowheads, a battle axe, a fighting knife and two shields. Although the person buried was both slender and short, and the bones showed no sign of any previous violence, archaeologists had also no doubt that this must be a male warrior. That changed in 2017, when, when the bones were DNA tested, and turned out to be female. The published study is entitled “A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics” (Chrissy: right.)
Chrissy Senecal 50:58
So I think that's a really interesting thing. The word that a lot of people like to think about is shieldmaiden. And of course, that's in the “Vikings” series. (Richard: Yes.) And we do have some evidence written evidence like Saxo Grammaticus. I think he does talk about like Lagertha, with her hair streaming all around her, going into battle. And I think Lagertha is a major character in [the History Channel’s television show] “Vikings.”
Richard Abels:
Yes, she's the wife of Ragnar. And she's referred to consistently as shieldmaiden. (Chrissy: right), and in fact “Vikings” has has things in common with “The Northman.” And you have two brothers, one brother lusting after the wife of the other brother
Chrissy Senecal
Right. Yeah, yeah, it's a very similar.
Richard Abels
Rollo wants Lagertha as his own. And she knows he wants him, but in this case, Lagertha is going to be faithful to Ragnar because
Chrissy Senecal
Until she's not, because it's… because it’s a six year series
Richard Abels
Yeah, as they need to do something. Six years you got to do something.
Chrissy Senecal 52:03
Right. Exactly. But all along she has splendid hair (Richard laughs) I feel like you know, this is how we were in pop culture. Imagine the Valkyries and the shield maidens. And, of course, you know, the Valkyries, having them be beautiful was the kind of idea in the Sagas. And I think a lot of scholarship has been written on to what extent are these Valkyries really transgressing against gender norms. Over and over in the sagas that were these Valkyries are beautiful, they always come back to embracing what is kind of normative ideas about how women behave. So they give up their special powers and they get married to the hero of the story. And I think that when we're talking about shield maidens, or women who actually fought in battle, from my point of view, I just think that we don't know enough yet to know how typical it was. That when we have much more evidence for elite women, is their involvement in magic, but also in fabric making. All of this also takes us back to this really fabulous fine from the ninth century, the Oseberg burial. (Richard: Yes.) So these are burials of two women. And they were both elite. We know from DNA analysis what they ate, and it was good stuff. They had toothpicks. they and then they also were probably put associated with magic with the practices of the seiðr [53:37] (Richard: seiðr, yeah), and we know this because they were they were carrying around a staff, a volva staff. Yep. And we know also that the Osprey burials have these tapestries. And on these tapestries, really careful work has been done to figure out what the patterns are. And from tiny little shrouds, people, really good scholars, have been able to see, for example, a priest leading and then three priestesses following behind. And then also is this famous tree that appears over and over in the film with this one, the Oseberg tree, it's all these people that are hanging, so they're dead. They're corpses.
Richard Abels 54:16
Trees are really important. After all, the world tree, Yggdrasil, is at the very heart of the world that extends from our world, from Middle Earth, to Asgard and to Hel.
Chrissy Senecal
Absolutely. And the offspring. I think, also, what's interesting is how much of the fabric is destroyed. So we know that fabric is one of the first things to disintegrate. And yet, when we, you know, scholars figured out just how many tapestries and fabric was in part of the burial. We know that it was major, and the fact that it's associated with women is also I think, not irrelevant. So this is, you know, getting interestingly because there's a recent scholarship by the historian Michèle Hayeur Smith. She wrote a book in 2020 called The Valkyries’ Loom: The Archeology of Cloth Production and Female power in the North Atlantic. And she looked at all these different shrouds of Viking cloth, Viking Age cloth, and found that there was a regularization of the process of weaving that happened starting in the 12th centuries, and it had a certain number of warp threads, that after the 11th century, the horizontal thread, that's called the weft, just switched. And it's been marked in written sources, that there's a kind of fabric called “wadmal.” And Icelandic law codes mentioned it as being currency. So that she was able to argue, I think very well that it was women's fabric production. They were literally making money because their fabric was used as currency in Iceland and across the Viking world. It's a really cool ways of talking about women that were very powerful, and yet very gendered for the main state, despite the fact that there is, you know, a possibility allowed for the fact that sometimes women did participate in battle.
Richard Abels 56:06
Really interesting points about gender. Chrissy really interesting. "The Northman" is a very masculine film--in fact, one might say that it’s a film about toxic Viking masculinity. Nonetheless, it has two strong women in it, both of whom overcome their submissive positions by acting in perfectly gendered roles, neither of whom is a warrior.
56:36 We are running out of time, so here’s a few parting thoughts about “The Northman” from the viewpoint of a historian. The first time I watched the film I found it odd that the settlement pillaged by Amleth and his fellow berserkers was in the land of the Rus. I have no problem with the notion that an exiled Danish 12 year-old prince might go East and become a Rus-viking berserker. My problem is that the slaves taken in this raid are to be sold in Iceland. Yes, the plot requires this, otherwise Amleth could not disguise himself as a slave to be purchased by the man against whom he has sworn vengeance. But, as the movie makers and their historical consultants are undoubtedly aware, slaves taken in Rus raids would have been sold to the Arab Caliphate, which had an inexhaustible demand for pagan and Christian slaves. There is no evidence I know of for Slavic slaves being transported from eastern Europe to Iceland. And it certainly isn’t supported by the recent Icelandic genome projects. Their findings show that the men who settled Iceland were predominately of Norse ancestry, while two thirds of the women were from the Gaelic British Isles, either from Ireland or western Scotland. What is not present is DNA that can be traced to the Baltic or eastern Europe. The natural inference is that the Norse who settled Iceland brought with them Irish slaves, with whom they had children.
58:09 I thought about this a lot. Given the film makers’ attention to detail, I assume that Robert Eggers and, especially, his historical consultants would have realized this. So why place Amleth in a Rus raiding warband? I think that Eggers and Sjorn were willing to stretch the history in the service of the plot and their goal of world-building. Through the character of Olga of the Birch Forest they could emphasize the shared shamanistic religions of early medieval Scandinavia and eastern Europe and their shared sense of a spirit world. The Slavic Olga serves the plot by being the witch woman that Amleth needs to fulfill his vengeance. This allows Eggers and Sjorn to balance the negative agency of the ‘wicked’ woman, Gudrun, with the positive agency of the good woman, Olga. Having Amleth’s love interest be a Christian Irish slave woman would have made more sense historically but I am not sure how it would have advanced the plot. It would have made this into a completely different film.
58:21 The world of “The Northman” is pagan. The only reference to Christianity comes in the scene late in the movie when Amleth begins to take his revenge by killing Fjolnir’s retainers during the night. Fjölnir’s grown son Thorir (Gustav Lindh) awakens to find his two friends dismembered, their heads and legs and torsos rearranged in an outline of a horse and pinned to the roof of their hut. Thorir shrieks in rage and horror, blaming the atrocity on “Christian swine.” Terrified, another man asks, “Could it be the Christians? Their God is a corpse, nailed to a tree.” But another points out that the corpse’s form the outline of an eight legged horse, Odin’s mount Sleipnir. Iceland was not converted to Christianity until around 1000 C.E., and the Christians on Fjolnir’s farm would all be slaves.
100:28 One of the more historically clever moves of the movie-makers was to set the second half of the story in the year 915. This was a conscious decision by Eggers. In an interview on the excellent viking podcast Saga Thing, the hosts challenged Eggers about the absence of legal actions in the movie. Legal disputes in the Thing, the assembly of free men, play a critical role in the family sagas of the Icelanders, which this movie becomes. But “The Northman” is a pure tale of vengeance, in which lawyers like Njal of Njal’s saga play no role. Eggers and Sjorn were aware of this, which is why they set the movie in 915, fifteen years before the establishment of the Icelandic Althing. That is the kind of attention to historical detail that I admire.
( 1:01:30) I was really hoping that we could squeeze in a discussion of recent popular television shows about Vikings and maybe even some video games, but we are running out of time. And perhaps it would be best to hold that for another episode.
Chrissy Senecal
We could probably talk about this for a long time, but other people have other things to do. Maybe their their trips on their car rides are over by now.
Richard Abels
We're also recording this on Super Bowl Sunday. And if Chrissy doesn't leave now, she's not gonna get home in time for the kickoff.
Chrissy Senecal
(Laughing) We're more interested in knattleiker than football.
Richard Abels
Although I really liked the episode on “What We Do In The Shadows” about the Super Bowl.
Chrissy Senecal
I didn't see that one
Richard Abels
They misread it as the Superb Owl. Which they thought was wonderful.
Chrissy
Yeah, that is that is amazing.
Richard Abels
Yeah. Anyway, thank you for joining us. And the next episode I think is going to be on the man who actually was able to defeat Vikings, Alfred the Great
Chrissy Senecal
Here’s to your, your guy,
Richard Abels
My guy, and Ellen will rejoin me for that one. But I'd like to thank my guest and co-host Chrissy that was fun kissing.
Chrissy Senecal
Oh, my goodness. Richard, thank you so much for having me.
Richard Abels
I'm hoping that you'll come again in the future for one or another of these
Chrissy
It would be delightful.
Richard Abels
Okay, great.
Chrissy Senecal
Thank you.
Richard Abels
Okay, bye bye for now.
