The Last King (aka Bierkebienerne, 2016, dir. Nils Gaup, Norwegian dubbed into English) tells a story famous among Norwegians but probably obscure to most other people of how two farmers saved the life of an infant king by taking him on a cross-country ski trip. But it doesn’t tell the story well. Or accurately.
The Norwegian Civil Wars
The period in Norwegian history from 1130 to 1240 is generally called the Norwegian Civil Wars because of a series of succession disputes. During these conflicts, two major factions emerged, the Baglars and the Birkebeiners. The Baglers were the faction of the aristocrats and the clergy, broadly speaking, while the Birkebeiners were essentially peasants and landless men who supported the power of the crown as a check on the aristocracy and clergy. There was also a geographic dimension to this struggle, with the Baglers dominating the southeast and the Birkebeiners dominating the west of Norway, especially around Trondheim. (The term ‘Birkebeiner’, incidentally, originated as a slur against them. It means ‘birch leggers’ and derives from Bagler claims that their opposition was so poor that they had to tie birch bark around their legs as clothing. In contrast, ‘Bagler’ refers to a bishop’s crozier, designating them as the party with ecclesiastical support.)
In 1177, Sverre assumed leadership of the Birkebeiners, married Margaret Eriksdottir, the daughter of the Swedish king, and reformed the Birkebeiners, purging the movement of its early criminal element. In 1184, he became king of Norway, but in 1194 he was excommunicated during a dispute with Church officials, which provoked another round of civil war. When he died in 1202, he was succeeded by his illegitimate son Haakon III, who got on poorly with his father’s wife. Margaret attempted to return to Sweden with her daughter Kristin, but Haakon prevented this. At Christmas in 1203, Haakon fell ill after undergoing a bloodletting, and died on New Years Day, 1204. Margaret was accused of having poisoned him, and one of her men underwent a trial by ordeal to prove her innocence. He failed, and she was forced to flee to Sweden without Kristen.
King Sverre
The unmarried Haakon was succeeded by his 5-year old nephew Guttorm, but the boy died in August of the same year. By this time, the Birkebeiners were politically ascendant, which alienated the Baglers, who put forward Erling Steinvegg, a supposed son of Sverre’s predecessor as king, with the support of the king of Denmark. The Birkebeiners favored Inge II Baardsson, the jarl of Trondelag. A low-level civil war ensued, which Inge essentially won by outliving Steinvegg in 1206, but the Baglers put forward another candidate and conflict continued.
However by 1206, it had became known that Haakon III had had an illegitimate child, Haakon, by a woman named Inga of Varteig. Inga was living in Bagler-controlled territory in the southeast of Norway, so when the Baglers starting hunting for her baby, a group of Birkebeiners fled with Inga and Haakon in the middle of winter, trying to reach King Inge in Nidaros (modern Trondheim). The party became snowed in, so two of the best skiers in the group, Torstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka, took the young boy and skied over the mountains from Lillehammer to Osterdalen and eventually got to Nidaros, where Inge took charge of the boy and raised him. The Baglers’ new candidate, Philip Simonsson, reached a deal with Inge in which Philip was given the eastern third of Norway to rule, but as a jarl rather than a king. He also married Kristin Sverresdottir.
Eventually, in 1217, when first Inge and then Philip died, the 13-year old Haakon emerged as one candidate in a four-way contest that also included Inge’s illegitimate son, Inge’s half-brother Jarl Skule, and a fourth candidate. Haakon had widespread support, especially after his mother Inga successfully underwent an ordeal to prove his paternity. Ultimately, Skule was made regent for the boy and given Philip’s portion of the kingdom, which he held onto until 1239. After years of resisting Haakon’s adult rule, he went into open rebellion, but Haakon’s men burned down the monastery he was in, killing him and ending Norway’s civil wars. Haakon emerged as a powerful king who played important role in German politics. He helped import broader European culture into Norway and his reign, down to his death in 1263, is often called Norway’s Golden Age.
Haakon IV
The perilous trip by Skevla and Skrukka was memorialized in the early 20th century with a cross-country ski race in Norway, and today there are no fewer than 5 Birkebeiner races, including three in Norway, one in Canada, and one in my home state of Wisconsin, with the American Birkebeiner being reportedly the largest cross-country ski race in the world.
The Last King
The Last King focuses entirely on the brief moment when the young Haakon’s life was in overt danger. The incident of the daring flight on skis is justly famous in Norway, so it makes sense to build a film around it. After a brief opening in which Skjervald (‘SHARE-vald’) Skrukka (Jakob Oftebro) is established as a simple farmer with a wife and child, the film focuses on political machinations, but sort of assumes the audience will understand who the characters are, so it does a rather poor job of explaining who people are.
Gisle (Paal Sverre Hagen) is the younger brother of Inge Baardson (Thorbjorn Harr). This character is a messy mix of Philip Simonsson and Jarl Skule, whose only clear motive is that Inge has always ignored him. Gisle is having an affair with the widowed Queen Margaret and hatches a plan with her to poison Haakon III. Her motive for participating in this is unclear, since the plan requires her to immediately flee home to Sweden while leaving her beloved daughter Kristin (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) in Nidaros, even though the plan is to somehow implicate Inge as the poisoner, based on the fact that he’s the ‘obvious’ person to want to kill Haakon. So when Haakon dies from Margaret’s poison, Gisle immediately orders Inge’s arrest.
Tom Green wasn’t available to play Gisle
The film establishes that there is a rift between the Baglers and the Birkebeiners and that it has something to do with the Baglars being allied to the Church and the Birkebeiners being the farmers, but it’s all very muddy. The Baglers are apparently based in the royal palace at Nidaros instead of in eastern Norway, but almost everyone else in Nidaros seems to be a Birkebeiner, including the chancellor of Norway. The fact that Gisle is apparently a Bagler while his brother is a Birkebeiner never seems to make anyone suspect that maybe Gisle is the bad guy here.
As he’s dying Haakon tells his men that he has an illegitimate young son in eastern Norway. Gisle announces that they want to rescue the previously unknown boy and bring him to Nidaros, while the villainous bishop of Nidaros, who is never given a name, declares that now is the time to end the rule of kings and let the Church rule everything, which Gisle seems to agree with, even though it would mean that he won’t get to become king. So the Bagler soldiers are given orders to kill the boy that Gisle has just announced needs to be rescued. Like I said, it’s all very messy, but it establishes the basic plot of the film, which is that the Birkebeiners need to save baby Haakon from the ruthless and nameless Bagler soldiers trying to kill him.
Inga and baby Haakon
The soldiers come to Skjervald’s farm, somehow knowing that he knows where the baby is, and they get the information out of him by threatening to kill his wife and son. After he tells them, naturally they kill the wife and son anyway because that gives Skjervald some manpain and a motive to hate the soldiers. He escapes by slapping on a pair of skis and eluding the soldiers long enough to get to the farm where Inga of Varteig (Ane Ulmoen Overli), her son (who seems to be about 6 months old), and Torstein Skelva (Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju) are staying. But the evil soldiers show up right behind him and massacre everyone except Inga, who inexplicably survives, while Skjervald and Torstein flee on skis carrying the baby.
Skjervald, Haakon, and Torstein
This is the best part of the film. There’s some gorgeous camera work in the majestic Norwegian landscape, and the idea of an extended chase scene on skis feels pretty fresh. Our two heroes are clearly the better skiers, but the fact that there’s a blizzard setting in cranks up the tension. But the film falls into a pattern in which every time Skjervald and Torstein get to safety, the bad guys show up right behind them (apart from a brief break for sleep and character development), and somehow when they get to the next farm, Inga has magically gotten there first. Her sleigh-driver must be pretty damn good.
Meanwhile, there’s a really dreary sub-plot about Gisle wanting to marry Kristin. It keeps popping up to interrupt the main plot and theoretically provide some tension, but it’s hard to care very much about any of the people involved since their motives are undeveloped. It’s never even established that if Gisle marries her, it will give him a claim to become king.
Eventually, Skjervald and Torstein raise a small band of Birkebeiner fighters and decide to ambush the pursuing soldiers with a team of crack ski commandos. While sort of an interesting scene, it devolves into a highly improbable chase scene in which Inga’s sleigh is being pursued by the leader of the Bagler soldiers on horseback, while a trio of riderless horses pursue him, towing a wounded Skjervald behind them on his skis as he tries to kill the leader with an arrow. The horses rather improbably just keep running after the leader at full gallop for what seems like a mile or more without slowing down or veering off into the trees.
Ultimately, Skjervald saves Inga and the baby by killing the leader but dies in the process. Torstein gets the baby (who now seems to be at least two years old—I guess it was a really long chase) to Nidaros just in time to stop the villainous bishop from marrying the distraught Kristin to the villainous Gisle more or less over the corpse of the unwitting chancellor. Gisle, following the tradition of bland, uninteresting villains everywhere, just gives up without a fight.
Mawiage is what brings us togethew today
Inge is released from the dungeon and declares that he will ‘guard the throne’ until Haakon is old enough to rule. As the epilogue text tells us, “In 1217, 13-year-old Haakon Haakonsson took over the throne from Inge Baardsson and held it for 46 years. During his reign, there was peace in Norway.” That’s quite a simplification of what actually happened, but right in line with the film’s approach to the facts.
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So far as I know, there isn’t a good English-language book on the Birkebeiners’ famous escape on skis, but there is a really charming children’s book about the incident, Lise Lunge-Larsen’s The Race of the Birkebeiners. It’s never too early to get your children hooked on medieval history. It tells the story much better than this movie does.
If you’re looking to learn more about Norwegian history (and Scandinavian history in general), I strongly recommend T. K. Derry’s A History of Scandinavia, which covers all of Scandinavian history in about 450 pages. It’s a very good intro to the subject. There’s also Birget and Peter Sawyer’s excellent Medieval Scandinavia.
Beowulf ranks among the greatest works of literature in the English language, and holds pride of place as the first great work of English-language fiction. It is a powerful, profound, and mysterious text that continues to move and fascinate readers more than a thousand years after it was first written down.
Unfortunately, when film-makers try to translate the story to the big screen, this strange old tale thwarts their best efforts to produce a decent story. Beowulf (2007, dir. Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) is perhaps the worst adaptation of a piece of medieval literature I’ve ever read, and Neil Gaiman, who is normally a great storyteller as Sandman demonstrates, ought to be embarrassed that he wrote it.
The Poem
Beowulf, as many who read it high school or college know, tells the story of the Germanic’s warrior’s three greatest battles. He is a Geat, belonging to a tribe that resided in what is today southern Sweden, a branch of the Gothic people. (Side note: ‘Geat’ is pronounced ‘Yat’ or “Yay-at’, not ‘Geet’.) He travels to Denmark to help the great Danish king Hrothgar. Hrothgar is a successful war leader, but he is outclassed by the horrible troll Grendel, who is harrying the Danes in their great hall, Heorot. Beowulf kills Grendel by ripping off the creature’s arm. But then Grendel’s unnamed mother (whom I’ll just call Mother) continues her son’s feud against the Danes, and Beowulf is forced to track her to under lair in the moor where he eventually kills her.
The geography of Beowulf
After that Beowulf returns home to Sweden and becomes the Geatish king. Fifty years later, a slave steals a cup from the horde of a dragon, who goes on a rampage, killed and destroying the Geats until Beowulf and his warband go to confront the monster. With the exception of the faithful Wiglaf (‘Wee-laf’, not ‘Wig-laf’), the warband chickens out and runs away, leaving Beowulf unsupported in his battle against the dragon. As a result, he kills the dragon but is mortally wounded. The poem ends as it begins, with the funeral of a great king. The Geats lament not only the death of their king but also the cowardice of the warband, because they are now vulnerable to the depredations of their neighbors. One woman predicts the destruction of the Geatish tribe, a prediction that eventually came true in the real world when the Swedes eventually conquered and absorbed the Geats.
While a great poem, Beowulf presents many puzzles to the reader. In a surface reading, the first two fights seem essentially unconnected to the third fight, and scholars have debated how much unity the poem actually has. Indeed, it’s been suggested that the poem as we have it (which survives in a single 11th century manuscript) may in fact represent the fusion of two unrelated poems. My personal feeling is that two halves of the poem are in fact a unitary whole, tracing as it does a hero from his early triumphs to his disastrous death. There is an underlying theme about the dangerous nature of violence. The poem is riddled with apparent digressions about unrelated acts of violence, but I tend to see these digressions as commenting on the nature of violence and highlighting Beowulf as a hero precisely because he understands when violence should and shouldn’t be resorted to. The cowardice of his men serves as a warning that sometimes violence is necessary, and Beowulf’s successful battle as an elderly ruler counterpoints Hrothgar’s earlier inability to triumph over Grendel. But that’s just one way to understand the poem.
The first page of Beowulf
As a result, the story presents a basic problem for modern audiences. The first two acts don’t connect to the third in any obvious way; there’s no through-line for the plot. Beowulf is a Germanic hero; he lacks the interiority and personal conflict that modern audiences tend to want in their heroes. His conflicts are mostly of a purely physical kind, although he does face social challenges as well, such as when he arrives as an outsider at Heorot and is challenged by the loud-mouthed asshole Unferth. And at a later moment in the poem, he is tempted by Queen Hygd to seize the Geatish throne, but refuses to do so, refusing to take it until King Heardred is killed in battle. (Like I said, he knows when to use violence and when to reject it.) But the moral universe in which he operates is drastically different from modern America, and that makes it harder to get modern audiences engaged with the underlying ideas in the poem.
The Movie
When Gaiman and Avary were trying to figure out how to turn this story into a 3D animated film that uses motion capture technology, they clearly recognized the problem of the disjunction between the first two acts and the third. Unfortunately, their solution to the problem was to tie the third act to the first two in a way that shits all over the heroic qualities of Beowulf and Hrothgar. In order to explain what’s so wrong with their screenplay, I’ll need to summarize the whole film.
The film opens with a feast in the newly-built Heorot. The elderly Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) is a fat, drunken slob who has to be carried into the hall and can barely keep his bed sheet wrapped around his otherwise naked body. His beautiful young wife Wealtheow (Robin Wright Penn) is disgusted by him and refuses to sleep with him. The feasting and merriment unsettles Grendel (Crispin Glover), who has very delicate ears, and so he rampages through the hall, killing men while the impotent Hrothgar proves unable to attack him.
Grendel
Eventually Beowulf (Ray Winstone) the ‘Geet’ shows up and promises to fight the monster. He is confronted by Unferth (John Malkovich), who points out that the only thing Beowulf has done of note is lose a swimming contest. Beowulf responds by explaining that he lost the competition because he had to take time to kill nine sea monsters. One of his retainers comments that the last time Beowulf told the story, there were only three monsters. And in the flashback to the event we see that Beowulf is lying; one of the monsters is actually a mermaid, who successfully seduces him, rendering him unable to kill her.
Beowulf clearly has the hots for Wealtheow, because as the feast is winding down, he literally takes off all his clothes while everyone watches. She is appalled by this and flees the room, so he just lies down to relax while his men keep partying. When the fight with Grendel comes, Beowulf rather inexplicably watches the monster kill most of his men before getting into the fight. He manages to trap Grendel’s arm in the door of the hall and smashes it off. As he later retells the story, he just ripped the arm off while wrestling with him.
After Mother comes to slaughter Danes in vengeance, Hrothgar offers Beowulf his greatest treasure, the Dragon Horn, an elaborate drinking cup, which he got when he killed Fafnir, a dragon. (Fafnir is the dragon from a completely different legend, the story of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, but whatever.) Beowulf inexplicably takes the horn with him when he tracks Mother back to her lair, and discovers that it glows in the cave (which is actually kind of a nice touch).
Hrothgar giving Beowulf the Dragon Horn
When he meets Mother, she turns out to be Angelina Jolie with golden body-paint, a sexy braid that is also her tail, and built-in stiletto heels. Instead of fighting her, she seduces him with a promise that as long as the cup remains in her lair, nothing will be able to harm Beowulf and he will be a great king. So instead of killing her, he bones her and then goes back to Hrothgar and claims to have killed her. Hrothgar is relieved, declares Beowulf his heir, and then commits suicide by jumping off a tower. By this point it has become clear that years ago Hrothgar did exactly what Beowulf has just done, and that Grendel was actually Hrothgar’s son.
It must be really hard for Mother to shop for shoes
The film jumps forward to years later. King Beowulf of the Danes is married to Wealtheow, who is as disgusted with him as she was with Hrothgar, so he needs to sleep with slave girls instead. He’s disgusted with himself, because he knows he’s not actually a hero but rather just a liar. There’s a hint that perhaps his deal with Mother has made him invulnerable to battle, so that he no longer feels any danger when he fights.
Unferth has inexplicably become a Christian. But his slave steals the Dragon Horn from Mother’s lair. A dragon, who is Beowulf’s kid, goes on a rampage, destroying the local church (which is several centuries too early for a film set in 6th century Denmark), and sending Beowulf a message that the deal is off. Beowulf returns the horn to Mother, but she refuses to accept it, and releases the dragon again. The dragon rampages, destroying the town and much of Beowulf’s castle. He eventually realizes that the dragon has a soft spot at the base of its throat, but for reasons I won’t go into, he has to partly sever his right arm in order to reach into the soft spot and rip out the dragon’s heart (I guess because he tore off Grendel’s right arm). They both plunge to the surf, where the dragon transforms into Beowulf’s son, and they both die.
The fight with the dragon is pretty much the best part of the film
Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson) becomes king and Beowulf is given a Viking ship funeral. Right after that, Wiglaf finds the Dragon Horn in the surf. Mother appears to kiss Beowulf’s corpse, and then beckons Wiglaf to come to her, implicitly offering to repeat the cycle again. Wiglaf stares back at her, and the film cuts to black, leaving it unclear how he responds.
My Analysis
Words cannot express just how much I hate this mangling of the story of the poem. It’s only with great force of will that I am going to refrain from swearing as I dissect it.
The central problem is that instead of presenting Hrothgar and Beowulf as great heroes, which is exactly who they are in the poem, the film offers us two decidedly unheroic liars. Both men achieve their worldly success not by killing monsters but by having sex with Mother and then lying about it. It’s clear that both men are glory hounds who are more than willing to exaggerate their great accomplishments. They are both fundamentally weak men incapable of keeping their pants on when presented with the opportunity for hot monster sex. Their glory is purchased with the future slaughter of their own men because their pretended triumphs lay the foundations for the future crisis that will ruin them and wreak havoc on their people.
Heorot at the start of the film
Whether Hrothgar was ever a great man is entirely unknowable, because we don’t get enough evidence to tell whether anything in his version of events is true. Beowulf shows signs of being a potentially great man; he does basically kill Grendel nearly single-handedly, albeit not the way he later claims. Whether he actually kills any sea monsters is left uncertain; he’s clearly an unreliable narrator and it’s entirely possible that he lost the swimming contest because he decided to get busy with a mermaid and then made up the sea monsters to explain his failure. But in his fight with Grendel he literally just watches Grendel butcher his warband until it’s pretty much only Wiglaf left. So in contrast to the poem, which emphasizes the mutual obligations between war leader and warband by showing the failure of the warband in the battle with the dragon, it’s Beowulf who fails his men.
It’s only at the end of the film that Beowulf gets truly heroic by confronting the dragon and severing his own arm in order to kill the dragon, well aware that he will die when the dragon he’s clinging to falls from the sky. It’s a heroic moment, but sharply undercut by the fact that the whole disaster is his own fault.
Instead of being a film about heroic men doing great deeds, this Beowulf is a story about lying faux-heroes discovering that glory is ultimately hollow and emasculating. Hrothgar’s response to this discovery is to drink himself into a stupor and eventually kill himself, whereas Beowulf manages to rise above himself and finally do the right thing. In other words, the film is about the falseness of heroism far more than its possibility. All heroic inspiration is a falsehood rooted in boasting and deceit. And Wiglaf’s final comment, “He was the bravest of us. He was the prince of all warriors. His name will live forever” reads more as an ironic commentary on the impossibility of true heroism. If the greatest of all heroes is basically a liar and braggart who barely deserves his acclaim, what possibility of heroism is left to the rest of us lesser men?
Seeing the film in the theater in 2007, I was struck by how much the film read as a critique of contemporary American politics, with political leaders whose “Missions Accomplished” are little more than hollow boasts covering up miserable failures that got lots of good people killed. But maybe that was just the mood I was in at the time.
And Then There’s the Women
The film has three female characters, Wealtheow, Mother, and Ursula, Beowulf’s concubine (who’s mostly there to demonstrate the failure of Beowulf and Wealtheow’s marriage). Wealtheow is on the surface a strong women, refusing to sleep with either of her husbands because she is disgusted that they both slept with Mother. But she’s like a day-old sink full of dirty dishes and brackish water; the moment you poke the surface, you’re assaulted by the nasty stench underneath.
Wealtheow
It’s hard to see her disgust as anything other than sexual jealousy. She’s angry that her husbands both slept with a woman who is incomparably more beautiful than she is. And her disgust appears to be the reason that both her husbands are emotionally broken men. She has driven Hrothgar to drink and left Beowulf bitter with his life. It is her failure to adore her husbands that forces them to see the hollowness of their victories, because neither man understands the long-term consequences of sleeping with Mother until long after they’re broken men. So basically, if Wealtheow wasn’t such a jealous shrew, these men would have been happy and able to enjoy their false victories. She is the cause of most of their man-pain.
What makes this worse is that she’s also the Woman as the Prize. Hrothgar literally gives her to Beowulf when he declares Beowulf his heir. So Beowulf’s reward for apparently defeating Mother is a kingdom and a beautiful young wife. But that beautiful prize turns out to be a viper that gradually poisons him by refusing to have sex with him. The film treats this as entirely natural, and is completely oblivious to the fact that Wealtheow clearly has no attraction to Beowulf. She’s his prize and ought to put out for him, and her persistent refusal to do so is part of his ruin.
She’s also incapable of saving herself. When Grendel menaces her, she is saved by Hrothgar distracting Grendel, and when the dragon attacks and she is about to fall off the castle’s bridge to her death (because Ursula isn’t strong enough to pull her up), it’s Wiglaf who saves her. And, inexplicably, the older Wealtheow has grey hair but no wrinkles; her skin seems as dewy fresh as it does at the start of the film. So she’s literally four of the worst cinematic tropes about women rolled into one. She has no agency and exists purely to drive home the plot lessons for her husbands.
And Mother is even worse. She’s an eternally young and hot sex kitten, who never bothers putting clothes on. She is literally the cause of all the evil in the film. She is the mother of Fafnir, the dragon that Hrothgar confronted; the mother of Grendel; and the mother of the unnamed second dragon who is Beowulf’s son. Presumably she seduced Fafnir’s father the way she seduces Hrothgar and Beowulf, and the film ends with the very real possibility that she will seduce Wiglaf and repeat the cycle. (In fact, I think the film makes it likely that she does seduce him; Wiglaf has just declared that Beowulf is a far greater man than he is, so if Beowulf has fallen to Mother’s temptations, it is likely that Wiglaf will give in as well. He’s a helper, not a hero in his own right, even by this film’s tawdry standards. And his reception of the Dragon Horn just a moment before acts as a symbol of his impending seduction, since both Mother and the Horn are passed on from Hrothgar to Beowulf and now apparently from Beowulf to Wiglaf.) So the locus of all evil in Denmark is Mother’s irresistible sexuality; she has been birthing monsters since before the film begins and will apparently continue birthing monsters after the film ends. Her evil triumphs over all male efforts to stop her, and no women can apparently stand in comparison.
She is also an emasculating figure. In the poem, when Beowulf ventures into the lair, Unferth gives Beowulf his ancestral sword Hrunting. The sword turns out to be unable to hurt Mother, and she melts the blade down to its hilt. In the film, as she seduces Beowulf, he holds up Hrunting and she begins to stroke it with her hands, causing it to melt even as he has sex with her. So the film directly associates the sword with Beowulf’s penis, showing it softening when he yields to her.
Mother stroking Beowulf’s sword
And lest I be accused of getting Freudian without warrant, the film repeatedly draws parallels between swords and Beowulf’s dick. When Beowulf strips naked before the fight with Grendel, the film has a running joke of various things obscuring his penis: Wiglaf’s arm, smoke, a candlestick, and finally and most blatantly a sword. When he confronts the mermaid, he drops his sword just as she embraces him. At the end, as he is trying to reach the dragon’s heart, he drops his knife and its only then that he can reach in and rip the heart out with his hands. So the film has an odd pattern in which being swordless is somehow a metaphor for sex and heroism. It’s a clumsy image; how can he get Mother pregnant if his sword has already gone flaccid? But it’s definitely there. So the film seems to say that having sex with Mother is going to lead to his impotence.
See what I mean?
And of course, Mother sends her son the dragon out to kill when her deal with Beowulf is broken by the theft of the cup. So she gets her son killed because she’s angry with Beowulf. Grendel goes out on his own, not at her instigation, but when Beowulf comes to the lair the first time, she actually decapitates Grendel’s corpse for some reason. So just as she ruins the men she sleeps with, she also seems to ruin her children and treat them as pawns.
When you combine Wealtheow and Mother as images of femininity, we’re left with a view that women are simply destructive to men. Their power is profound, corrosive, irresistible, and ultimately enduring. Both women survive the film.
I get it. I understand why Gaiman and Avary decided to make the plot of the film fold back upon itself by linking the dragon to Beowulf’s mother and using the cup/Dragon Horn as a recurrent symbol of Mother’s seductive power. I’m sure they thought that resorting to the cliché of the Hero’s Redemption would produce a satisfying twist on the original text. But I’m baffled by why Gaiman, who is normally a subtle and perceptive author, didn’t recognize what a moral sludge the story becomes as a result of these choices and how deeply misogynist the film’s treatment of its female characters are. And he failed to recognize that the poem’s continued power grows to some extent from the fact that it doesn’t follow contemporary notions of story-telling. It produces a satisfying story of a great hero doing great deeds despite the lack of a through-line plot and the directness of the hero’s personality. And it’s not as if American action films aren’t brimming over with morally simplistic heroes whose heroism mainly consists of killing all their opponents. There must have been other ways they could have made the story engaging for modern authors than just pissing all over the entire notion of heroic valor.
Still, there’s one thing I take comfort in, no matter how much this film infuriates me. As Gaiman wrote in Sandman 13, “The Great Stories will always return to their original forms.”
Want to Know More?
If you really want to see this crappy film, you can find Beowulf on Amazon. Better yet, read the original. The Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition)is popular these days, but honestly, I think it’s terrible, constantly introducing Irish terminology where it doesn’t belong and horrible to read aloud. Burton Raffel’s Beowulf (Signet Classics) is a prose translation, but does an excellent job of translating for meaning. A much better poetic option is Dick Ringler’s Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery (Hackett Classics), which is meant to capture the way the poem would have sounded. (Full disclosure: I was a student of Ringler’s in grad school–he’s the best teacher I’ve ever had the privilege of taking a class with.)
I’ve been doing a lot of TV shows lately, and I’m afraid I’m going to give you one more. But in my next post, I’ll give you a nice, if somewhat obscure film about 12th century Italy. Today’s show is the dramedy The Almighty Johnsons, which has one of the oddest premises of any TV show I can think of. The Norse gods have been reborn. In New Zealand, of all places.
The Johnson Brothers
The show focuses on the lives of the four titular Johnson brothers, each of whom is the reincarnation of a Norse god. It seems that after fading from power in medieval Scandinavia, the Norse gods sort of became humans, constantly being reborn. The show opens on the 21st birthday of Axl (Emmett Skilton), the youngest Johnson brother. His brothers take him out into the forest and perform a strange ritual and tell him that he’s actually the reincarnation of Odin the Allfather, the king of the Norse gods. His brothers are, in birth order Mike (Tim Balme), who is Ullr, god of the hunt; Anders (Dean O’Gorman), the reincarnation of Bragi, the god of poetry; and Ty (Jared Turner), who has the misfortune to be Hödr, god of cold and darkness. The man Axl thought was their drug-addled cousin Olaf (Ben Barrington) turns out to actually be their biological grandfather and the god Baldr, who is the god of rebirth and therefore doesn’t really age much. He’s also an oracle, but he’s not very good at predicting things.
Axl Johnson, the hapless Odin (middle), with his smarmy brother Bragi and stoner grandfather Baldr.
At the moment, the gods aren’t very powerful. Most of them have one or two small powers, but are otherwise normal mortals. Ullr, as god of the hunt, can find anyone he’s looking for; he’s also the god of games, because he can’t lose any game of skill or chance he plays. Bragi is supernaturally persuasive and can convince anyone to do or think anything; as a result he’s a charming but shallow asshole, especially to his secretary, the perpetually put-upon Dawn (Fern Sutherland). Ty can’t stop radiating cold, and struggles to taste anything or feel any emotion other than gloom (so he became a refrigerator repairman).
Baldr tells Odin a prophecy. If Odin can find the goddess Frigg, his divine wife, and win her, then all the gods will become full gods again and thus much more powerful. But there’s a catch; if he dies before finding Frigg, then some sort of disaster will kill his whole family and lots of innocent mortals as well. No pressure there.
Axl discovering he’s a god
It also turns out that gods and goddesses don’t really mix well. They tend to bring out each other’s passions but also their worst divine personality traits. As a result, there’s a sort of divine Cold War going on with a group of goddesses who are also looking for Frigg for their own reasons.And when mortals learn too much about ‘god business’ it usually ends up harming the mortals, so the gods can’t really tell anyone who they are.
Over the course of three seasons, our heroes run into a variety of other Norse gods (as well as a couple gods from a totally different pantheon), and the show finds an interesting mix of humor and pathos from its interpretation of the gods and goddesses. Bragi loves being a god and mostly uses his abilities to seduce women and win clients for his PR firm. Ty hates being a god, because the cold he radiates makes it nearly impossible for him to be intimate with women; when he finally manages to start dating, his girlfriend almost dies of hypothermia while sleeping beside him. Ullr wants to live without using his gifts because when he uses them he tends to become arrogant, since he literally can’t lose. And Axl is mostly baffled, struggling to discover what powers he actually has. He’s got a crush on his roommate Gaia (Keisha Castle-Hughes, whom you might remember from Whale Rider), but since she’s not a goddess, he can’t end up with her. Or can he?
Let’s Take a Look at Norse Myth
As should be obvious, the show draws heavily from Norse mythology, and that’s where things get complicated from a more scholarly standpoint. But before we can do any analysis, we need to talk about what we actually know about the subject.
Most of our knowledge of Norse myth derives from one of three sources. We have a body of Old Norse poetry, lumped into two broad categories, eddic and skaldic, but for the purposes of this post I won’t really get into the differences. Most of it comes from a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, somewhat misleadingly known as the Poeticor Elder Edda, but a good deal also survives as individual verses embedded in various Norse sagas and other texts. This poetry has a very complex structure that seems likely to have resisted the sorts of changes common to oral transmission (for example, the poems have a very complex set of metrical rules and rely heavily on alliteration; it would be hard to accidentally change a single word by misremembering it, because few other words would have the same metric pattern and first letter), so scholars generally argue that these poems are genuine survivals from the Viking era (roughly the 9th-11th centuries).
The Codex Regius
But Norse poetry is less narrative and much more allusive than, say, the Iliad is. While some poems tell stories, they rely heavily on allusions to other myths that go unexplained. This makes understanding the various mythological references somewhat challenging if we don’t know the myth being referred to. Imagine for example, a line like “when Luke met the princess in the star of death”. A contemporary person will probably get that the line refers to the first Star Wars movie, in which Luke Skywalker rescues Princess Leia from the Death Star. But in a couple hundred years, after people have forgotten the Star Wars series, that line will be much harder to make sense of; who is Luke, who is the princess, and what is the star of death?
To make matters worse, Norse poetry loves to employ kennings, a poetic device in which two nouns are linked in a genative relationship and used as a poetic synonym for a third object. The most common kenning employed in modern English is “the ship of the desert”, which is a poetic reference to a camel. There’s a lot of cleverness to that kenning; a desert is exactly where you wouldn’t expect to find a ship, and yet the dunes are suggestive of waves, and the camel and the ship both rock as they travel and get you from one place to another. But that’s an easy kenning; Norse mythology uses far more complex ones, including a kenning that replaces one of the nouns in another kenning. For example, “the gull of war” would be a raven, which flies over a battle like a seagull over the water, and the “feeder of the war-gull” would be a warrior, who kills people and leaves them as food for the raven. Nearly any god’s name can be used to substitute for a generic man and nearly any goddess for a generic woman, so a man could be called the “Hödr of battles” and a woman could be the “Freya of linen”, instead of being a direct reference to a specific god. So maybe that “star of death” isn’t the Death Star but a kenning for a gun or something.
Fortunately, to help us make sense of all this we have the Prose Edda, written by the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241). One of his most important works, the Prose Edda is a collection of Norse myths, but it also contains a long section in which he explains how Norse poetry is written and what many of the obscure references refer to; for example, he offers a long list of names that refer to dwarves, so anytime one of those names comes up, you know the poem is talking about a dwarf. The Prose Edda is our single-most important source for Norse mythology. Most of the famous Norse myths you might have heard about come from this one book.
An early print edition of Snorri’s Edda
But how, you might ask, did a 13th century Icelander, living in a society that had been Christian for almost 250 years, know so much about the myths of a religion that his people had left behind so long ago and condemned as inferior and immoral? Good question, and unfortunately we don’t have a really solid answer for that. Perhaps Norse religion held on in Iceland well after the formal conversion of the island in 1000; it probably did to some extent, but certainly not for more than two centuries. Perhaps Snorri had a written text to work from; that’s highly unlikely, since writing was a Christian technology and Christian monks would have been unlikely to faithfully record pagan stories (although someone wrote down the poems of the Elder Edda, so it’s not utterly inconceivable). Perhaps the stories continued to circulate as folk-tales; again, that’s probable, but how much change did they undergo? Is Snorri giving us myths that Norse pagans would have known, or bastardized versions that Christians considered safe to retell? Or perhaps Snorri is just making shit up. That’s more plausible than it seems; the first section of the Prose Edda tells us that the three most powerful Norse gods were actually the descendant of Trojan princes who just fooled people into thinking they were gods. That’s clearly not a native Norse idea, and is probably Snorri trying to show off how much he knows about Classical literature. There are certainly places in his text where Snorri seems to just be guessing about things.
All of this makes it incredibly hard to figure out what many of these myths actually mean. Take for example the story of how the giants stole Thor’s hammer and demanded the goddess Freya as the price of returning it. Since Freya refuses to marry a giant, Loki persuades Thor to dress up in drag as Freya (with Loki acting as her handmaiden) and go to the wedding. There’s a lot of comic banter about how ‘Freya’ has blood-red eyes (“she’s been crying for love of you!” and how much food she can put away (“she hasn’t eaten because she’s been pining for you!”). Then, when the hammer is put in Thor’s lap, he rips off the dress and slaughters all the giants.
What are we to make of this story that turns Thor into a comic drag queen as well as a bloodthirsty killer? Did Norse pagans simply consider Thor a god you can make fun of? One common reading sees Thor’s battles with giants as a metaphor for good weather driving back winter, so Thor is sometimes viewed as a farmer’s god; so is this a story of the Norse elites laughing about the god of the little guys, or an example of the coarse sense of humor of the peasantry? A more Freudian take on the tale reads Thor’s hammer as his penis; when he loses it he must literally and metaphorically become a woman until he gets it back. Or, is this a myth either an invention or a revision made by Christians to ridicule the old gods and loosen people’s devotion to them? Did Snorri know some fragment of an old story about Thor losing his hammer and then just make up the details to have another tale to tell in his book? There’s no easy way to know. (And by the way, this story demonstrates that Marvel Comics’ decision to have a female Thor has primary source precedent, although she shouldn’t have the hammer.)
A third source of knowledge is various objects recovered by archaeology. Rune stones, metal work, stone and wood carvings, and fragments of cloth all offer images that seem to connect to mythology. Take for example a small piece of gold foil depicting a man and woman with a branch between them. This might be a reference to a myth in which the god Frey sends his servant to the goddess Gerd and offers her a branch with golden apples on it if she will marry him. Or it might be a reference to a now-lost myth involving some of god or hero. Or it could just be an interesting piece of decoration whose meaning cannot be recovered.
Frey and Gerd?
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at how the Almighty Johnsons uses Norse myth.
Gods and Their Attributes
All of the characters identified as gods and goddess are loosely based on genuine figures from Norse myth, but some of them are more loosely based than others. Axl is only sporadically Odin-like, but one of the central themes of the series is his quest to learn how to be Odin, and there are numerous myths of Odin searching for wisdom and doing various extreme things to get it. As befits a god called the Wanderer, Axl departs on a literal journey of self-discovery in the third season. Odin is a god of disguises, and in one of the funniest episodes Axl wakes up to discover he’s changed sex; to my knowledge, Odin never changes sex, but as we saw, Thor does, and Loki does several times, so the basic motif is Norse. Odin is also a riddler, and this is used beautifully in a third season episode when Axl wakes up with a girl who insists on playing the Game of Questions, the first question being what her name is; later on, Axl plays a similar game with her.
The other brothers, unfortunately, are more obscure gods, about whom comparatively little information still survives. Ullr is plausibly a god of hunting; he’s associated with skiing and archery in surviving poems, and he seems to have been quite an important god, judging from how many place names include his name. But Snorri apparently knows no myths about him, so his actual function is now lost. No myths connect him to gaming. Likewise, Bragi is consistently connected to poetry; the Norse bragr means ‘poetry’ and might therefore denote “what Bragi does”. But while he’s mentioned in a number of Snorri’s myths, it’s mostly in passing.
Hödr is a minor god who plays a major role in only one story, in which he is tricked by Loki into killing his brother Baldr. Snorri says he is blind, but another source he seems to be a great warrior, which suggests that Snorri’s story was only one version of the myths around Hödr. However, no source connects him to cold or darkness, other than Snorri’s claim that he is blind, so the series has just invented the idea that Hödr is “the god of cold and darkness”. I’m not sure why you’d want a god for such a thing. And the series doesn’t seem interested in the main story about Hödr.
Ice carving is one of Hödr’s hobbies
The series has a quartet of goddesses as recurring characters. Freya is presented as the goddess of prosperity and thus a wealthy businesswoman. The real Freya is generally understood to be a fertility goddess more than wealth specifically, but she does own a fabulous necklace and cries tears of gold, so it’s not too much of a stretch.
But the other three goddesses, Sjofn, Snotra, and Fulla are much more obscure figures, usually classified as disir, goddesses who attend more important goddesses. All three are associated with Frigg and may in fact simply be alternative names for her (since the Norse gave many of their major deities multiple names) or aspects of her. But Sjofn does seem to be connected to love, and in the series she has the power to make people briefly fall madly in love (Bragi likes to call her the goddess of going both ways), and Snotra is connected to wisdom, so calling her the Goddess of Prudence is not a huge stretch. Fulla is described carrying Frigg’s box of treasures (basically her jewelry box) and acting as a general servant, so the series gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that Stacy/Fulla feels a compulsion to do housework, despite hating it.
Sjofn and Snotra, two of the minor goddesses who play important roles in the series
Shane Cortese’s Loki is a major antagonist in the series, a figure who ridicules or tricks the protagonists almost every time he appears. That draws off of Lokasenna, a poem in which Loki systematically insults all the Norse gods and goddesses. The series uses a 19th century theory that Loki was the personification of fire to make him the god of fire. Modern scholars are much less clear about Loki. The mythology never calls him a god; rather he’s a son of the giants, but he joins the circle of Norse gods when he becomes Odin’s blood-brother. In various myths he is by turns helpful, harmful, amusing, and malicious. For example he orchestrates Baldr’s death apparently out of amusement and then spitefully sabotages Frigg’s efforts to resurrect her son. There’s no scholarly consensus, although he does seem to fit into the broad archetype of the Trickster.
Loki the corporate lawyer telling a classroom of aspiring architects what their ultimate fate is going to be
Perhaps the most interesting supporting character is Thor (Derrick Hansen), a vulgar, violent, loutish drunken goat-farmer who loves his carpenter’s hammer. When he first appears, there’s a hysterical hammer-throwing contest. This treatment of him is very much in keeping with the myths, which frequently show him being tricked or embarrassed in various ways, but never actually defeated. It’s this comic element of Thor that has led scholars to theorize that he’s more a god for peasant farmers than a war god (as popular imagination has it); weather is directly connected to agricultural fertility, after all. In what is probably the singlemost clever episode of the whole series, Thor loses his hammer when he throws it at a neighboring gay couple he is feuding with over farm land; the couple agrees to return the hammer only if Thor and Odin will show up to their bachelor party in drag. The show milks a good deal of humor from an inherently comic myth, but it also finds real dramatic power in Thor’s struggle with his sense of emasculation and failure as a person, and the recovery of his hammer serves as a moment of genuine emotional healing.
Derrick Hansen as Thor
The show also slightly distorts the concept of Ragnarøk. In the show, it’s described as the end of the world for everyone, unless Odin can avert it. In Snorri’s Edda, however, it’s only the death of the gods (or at least most of them), not the end of the world. The gods of Valhalla die defeating their monstrous enemies, and the world of humanity continues. The idea that a religious system would have a myth about the inevitable destruction of its own gods is rather odd, so a lot of people have suggested that Ragnarøk is a Christian invention to help pave the way for the conversion of the population. That would make a lot of sense, but Völuspå, one of the clearest descriptions of Ragnarøk, comes from the Poetic Edda, which as I mentioned earlier, is usually thought to represent an authentically pre-Christian poetic tradition.
The show is at its best when it’s using gods and goddesses as a metaphor for the problems of interpersonal relationships. Odin’s search for Frigg, with its various false starts, is a nice metaphor for the struggle to find ‘The One’ you could spend your life with. Bragi is fated to have a passionate affair with Idun, the goddess of immortality, even if it destroys his other relationships. Hödr gets into a terrible destructive relationship with the goth-goddess Hel (queen of the Underworld). Sjofn is the goddess of love, and finds herself uncomfortable with being single; she uses sex to ‘build alliances’ to get what she wants and manipulate people, but real emotional intimacy comes much harder to her. Fulla, despite her self-sufficient appearance, must have someone to take care of. And Njord, the god of the sea, is a stand-in for every man who runs away from his relationships and responsibilities, in this case by literally hoping on a boat when he’s starting to feel too tied down. So the gods and goddesses of the show dramatize the various ways that humans misuse and screw up their relationships.
Because the show is focused on the four brothers, it does have a tendency to drift into a somewhat ‘laddish’ mentality, as the Brits and Kiwis say. While Odin’s pursuit of Frigg is the center of the show, the marriages and relationships in the show occasionally veer toward the ‘women are crazy bitches’ cliché, and the show has a lot of jokes about penis size and women as sex objects. It’s hard for me to decide if the show is trying to make a point about male sensibilities or just indulging them. But the characters are refreshingly frank about their sexual pleasures in a way that seems appropriate for pagan gods, and the show frequently finds ways to demonstrate its disapproval of Bragi’s exploitative relationship with women.
What starts out initially as just a goofy comic premise (the Norse gods are running around New Zealand and wacky hijinks ensue!) quickly develops into a surprisingly rich and well-acted story in which the gods become everyman, for good and for ill. The show drags a bit early in the second season; Hödr’s relationship with Hel gets incredibly angsty, and Bragi, whose sheer dickishness is one of the comic engines of the series, is mostly absent because Dean O’Gorman was off filming the Hobbittrilogy (he plays the dwarf Fili). But apart from that low point, the show generally has a great balance of humor and genuine emotional complexity and finds some surprising ways to reinterpret Norse mythology.
The show has had a rough history. It got cancelled after its second season, but was given a reprise when fans protested. After its third season, it got cancelled again. Syfy picked it up for re-runs, and that’s sparked rumors that it might get a fourth season. The third season ends with a beautiful sense of closure, so I’m not sure it really needs another season. There are a couple of petitions you could sign if you want to support the effort to get the show re-revived. There’s also a series of short Youtube videos about the characters. Hopefully The Almighty Johnsons hasn’t had its Ragnarøk yet.
Want to Know More?
You can get the Almighty Johnsons: Seasons 1-3 [Blu-ray]boxed set on Amazon. If you like the opening music, it’s the song “Oh My,” by New Zealand singer Gin Wigmore, off her album Holy Smoke. Check it out; it’s pretty good.
For a slightly different treatment, Heather O’Donoghue’s From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Mythsis not so much an explanation of Norse myth, but a history of it and its relationship to modern culture. For example, it explores Marvel Comic’s Thor title.
Oh, and if you are looking for something for kids, I cannot recommend highly enough D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths. I had it growing up and I loved it; I read it at least a hundred times. It’s truly an excellent introduction to Norse myths for children, and honestly not a bad one even for adults. The illustrations are marvelous.
The first season of The Vikings deals with the fall-out from Ragnar Lothbrok’s (Travis Fimmel) raid on Lindisfarne in 793 AD. As the show structures it, this was the first Viking raid on the British Isles. It’s followed up in a later episode with a second raid, which seems to be happening the following year, in which the would-be raiders are met at the beach by a royal official. Ragnar tries unsuccessfully to convince the man that they are merchants who wish to trade, but eventually his men prove impatient for violence and so they kill the official and most of his men. So as the series frames it, Ragnar is the first man to go Viking to the west.
Ragnar and crew on the English beach
What is a Viking Anyway?
As a side note, many people mistaken use ‘Viking’ as a synonym for ‘Norse’. ‘Norse’ is an ethnic and cultural term, much like ‘French’ or ‘Latino’ today. ‘Viking’ on the other hand, refers not an ethnicity but to an activity or occupation. Vikings are those who leave home and look to acquire resources to bring back home. These resources could be food, treasure, slaves, or anything else that might be valuable. But they were not inevitably acquired by plunder. Many sources make clear that Vikings traded as much as they raided, and in some cases probably decided which activity to engage in based on how powerful the other side was. In some cases they raided one day and then a few days later traded away the goods they had taken for things that were more useful. This means two things: 1) Not all Norse were Vikings, any more than all New Yorkers are stock brokers. 2) Since there is a little evidence of Norse women directly participating in raiding parties, it is a mistake to speak of ‘Viking women’, Lagertha notwithstanding, or even ‘Viking culture’.
Ok, Now That We’ve Gotten That Out of the Way
The show’s sequence of raids is in fact backward historically. While the raid on Lindisfarne is often talked of as the first Viking raid on Britain, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of the most important English sources for this period, tells us that four years earlier, a group of Norsemen landed at Portsmouth in Southern England. The king’s official rode out to greet them, assuming they were merchants coming to trade with the king. Instead they killed him. This incident is the earliest recorded incident of its kind. The Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin, living at Charlemagne’s court, claimed that the raid on Lindisfarne was unprecedented, so even if it was not the absolute first such attack, clearly it was one of the earliest of any importance. The Norse had certainly launched earlier raids down into Frisia and Francia, but it seems clear that the raids in 789 and 793 marked a turning point, because after them we have records of raids occurring every few years somewhere in the British Isles.
Lindisfarne
One of the major questions that scholars have wrestled with is why the Norse begin to raid more aggressively in this period. What changed in Scandinavia around this period? The Vikings’ answer is that Ragnar Lothbrok acted like a Norse Columbus, discovering that there were lands to the southwest that could be raided. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a ludicrous claim. But the question is an important one.
And, unfortunately, there’s no clear consensus on the answer. Some scholars have connected the beginning of the Viking raids to a shift in climate that made Scandinavia colder, thus creating pressure on the food supply and forcing some Norsemen to resort to aggressive raiding to acquire food and other resources. Others have suggested it might be related to political shifts in Scandinavia, as the slow emergence of small kingdoms may have driven dissenters out of Scandinavia; conversely, ambitious men might have started raiding seeking the resources that would allow them to expand their political power. One of the most interesting theories emphasizes the development of naval technology. Germanic boats dating to the pre-Raid period do not show unambiguous evidence of sails, but the surviving ships of the Raid period all have sails. As a result, it has been suggested that the Norse developed sails in the generation before 793, so that it was the development of sailing technology that enabled the Viking raids to occur. Unfortunately, that theory, as tempting as it is, depends on archaeological reconstructions of pre-Raid boats, and the evidence is unfortunately unclear.
So while the Vikings’ explanation for why the Viking raids started is wrong, it’s at least addressing a serious scholarly debate, either intentionally or unwittingly.
How to Crew Your Longship
Another hypothetical issue the show has addressed has to do with the way longship crews were organized. At the start of the series, Earl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne) apparently exercises tyrannical control over the Viking raiders. He owns the ships, sends the men out to raid without accompanying him, and then claims the majority of the plunder when they return home. I’ve already talked about what’s wrong with that model. When Ragnar seeks to raise a crew, he offers a very different model, in which all the men on the ship are equal. It’s not exactly clear what this means in practice, because Ragnar actually makes all the leadership decisions, but the suggestion is that the men are sharing the plunder or at least keeping what they take for themselves.
Historically, Ragnar’s model has a lot in common with the actual model used by Viking raiders, at least so far as we can tell from the sources. The ship was apparently owned by an individual, who acted as the captain and leader of the warband. He recruited men into a felag, a joint partnership, sort of like a temporary business partnership. The members were called felagi (cognate to the modern English ‘fellow’) and were expected to share both the risks and the benefits of the partnership on a roughly equal basis. The details are sketchy; the owner seems to have made the major decisions, but he might have consulted his felag for advice or to see how much risk they were willing to take. He was expected to share the risks his men took, particularly by leading them in fighting; his bravery set a standard for theirs. He also probably got a larger share of the plunder, since he owned the ship that made the whole thing possible.
What this means for the show is that the series is suggesting that Ragnar Lothbrok was the innovator who created the felag system and that his model caught on because it was more appealing to the Norse than Haraldson’s old system. It’s highly unlikely that the felag system had a formal inventor. Norse society, with its higher degree of egalitarianism probably simply evolved the system naturally. But it’s not inconceivable that one leader invented the system using practices that already existed (the use of the felag was not restricted Viking raids; it was a basic economic arrangement in many situations). Nor is it entirely inconceivable that the emergence of raiding felags might have contributed to the start of the Viking raids. So it’s not impossible that Ragnar Lothbrok might have invented a system that enabled the start of the Viking raids. That is, if Ragnar Lothbrok had been a real person, which he probably wasn’t.
It’s also worth pointing out that when Ragnar emphasizes equality on his ship, the series is engaging in the same sort of handwaving that 300 and Braveheart employ. They start a wonderful-sounding modern virtue, like ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’, but never actually define what that virtue actually means. The purpose of this is to align the modern viewer with the hero, because they both share a common value. Having established viewer identification, these shows and movies can then completely ignore the value whenever it’s not narratively important, which allows the show or movie to contradict its own stated values without addressing the problem. So Leonidas proclaims Spartan freedom despite the fact that he is the only Spartan who ever actually uses his freedom in any meaningful way. Wallace proclaims freedom and then is outraged when the Scottish nobles use their freedom to decide that they prefer Edward I. And in The Vikings, Ragnar declares that everyone on the ship will be equal and then proceeds to make all the important decisions himself. At the end of the season, despite his much-vaunted equality, he declares his ‘fealty’ to King Horic (even though fealty is an 11th century French concept involved in an explicitly hierarchical lord/vassal relationship).
This is a rather cynical exploitation of modern values, typically aimed at American males who presumably will just sit back and enjoy the violence and sex while not thinking about the way their values are being used to manipulate them. The Vikings, to its credit, does briefly wrestle with its own contradictions, when Rollo asks Ragnar about the leadership arrangements. Ragnar replies that they will always be equal, but then proceeds to make all the leadership decisions himself. The unfortunate effect of this is to emphasize that Ragnar is actually out for himself and doesn’t mean what he says about his brother. But maybe that’s why his brother isn’t sure he can trust Ragnar in the first place.
The best primary source for the Viking raids on England is the The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is actually 9 different records with a common source. It’s a very bald narrative, and there are lots of challenges to understanding it, but it’s a good source to read.
One of the more prominent elements of the History Channel’s The Vikings series is the early plotline about Ragnar’s determination to sail west to Britain. Like many other parts of the series, this is a mixture of fact and nonsense.
But before I can get into that issue, there’s another question that needs addressing.
Where do the main characters live?
The pilot sets the series in “Scandinavia”, which is pretty vague, allowing for anywhere in Norway, Denmark, or Sweden. The series makes regular use of footage (shot in Norway) of high, cloud-covered mountains with deep fjords. Since Denmark is relatively flat and low-lying, that would seem to put the series in Norway or Sweden somewhere.
Earl Haraldson’s village appears to be called ‘Kattegat’; in one episode characters talk about going to Kattegat from Ragnar’s farm. However, Kattegat isn’t actually a village; it’s the narrow body of water between Jutland and southern Sweden. (The series creators have acknowledged this fact and admitted that they took a liberty here.) Since Jutland is probably too low-lying for the scenery we’re shown, Kattegat is probably on the Swedish side, with the Vastra Gotaland district probably working best. That would fit into a few other clues the series gives, such as the marriage alliance Haraldson makes with the Svear earl Bjarni, since the Svear were the people living in central Sweden who ultimately unified Sweden. Also, the men of Kattegat travel to the eastern Baltic to raid, which was broadly the destination of Vikings from Sweden much more than Denmark or Norway. (This means, incidentally, that Ragnar’s community belongs to the same people as Beowulf’s Geats.)
Denmark, to the best of my knowledge, has no fjords like this
The Situation at the Start of the Series
In the pilot, it is established that Haraldson always raids into the Baltic, specifically into Russia. No one has ever gone to the west, because they don’t know that there is anything west of Denmark and Norway. They are convinced that there is just endless open sea to the west.
But Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) knows better. He has met a traveler who has told him there are lands to the west, and who has, for reasons unexplained, given Ragnar two exotic items that will help him navigate. The first is what the show calls a sun-board, a wooden disk with notches around the edge and a gnomon that sticks up. When floated in water to keep it level, it allows the user a crude way to determine latitude by the length of the shadow from the gnomon. The second is a sun-stone, a piece of light-polarizing crystal that allows the user to locate the sun through clouds or fog.
Whoever this stranger was, he was apparently very persuasive, because Ragnar is absolutely convinced that he can sail west. The show does nothing whatsoever to establish any basis for Ragnar’s certainty. As a result, he’s another example of the modern cinematic convention that faith/confidence is superior to scientific knowledge; he doesn’t need evidence because he’s got certainty, and certainty is always right, even when it’s nothing more than a hunch. So really, he’s just a spiritual ancestor of the cinematic Christopher Columbus.
Regardless, the series proves him right (because certainty is always reward in these stories). He sails west in the second episode and, after a mandatory moment of doubt when the ship is lost in the fog, he finds Lindisfarne monastery, raids it, and everything is set for his growing clash with the earl.
But Does Any of This Make Sense Historically?
Not really.
The idea that the 8th century Norse thought there was nothing west of Norway and Denmark is simply preposterous. The primary Norse navigational method was to sail along the coastline, and if you think about a map of Europe for about two seconds, you’ll remember that the west coast of Denmark extends in a south-westerly direction to Frisia (the Low Countries) and France. The Norse had been raiding and trading down into that region for centuries. That region had also had contact with the British Isles for centuries; the Angles and the Jutes, two of the three peoples who conquered low-land Britain, came from the region around Denmark and invaded by boat (just like everyone else who invades England). So the idea that the characters have no idea that the British Isles exist is about as silly as doing a film in which the English have no idea that Ireland exists.
Norse Navigational Techniques
The Norse were skilled navigators, far more skilled than this series lets on. Their basic navigational technique, as I mentioned, was simply following the coastlines. Experience was particularly important, because it allowed a sailor to know how many days north or south to go, where there were submerged reefs to watch out for, and so on.
They relied on the sun and the stars for navigation, as virtually all ancient and early medieval sailors did. They also understood how to follow currents; from Norway, prevailing currents take one straight toward the western side of Britain, for example, making getting from Norway to Britain relatively easy. They also watched birds (since the presence of birds gives clues about how close land is). In the second episode, Ragnar releases a raven to see if it will return; if it doesn’t that means land is near. That’s a trick mentioned in a source about the discovery of Iceland, so it’s genuine.
If you go online and do a Google search on Norse navigation, you’ll find a lot of discussion about sun-boards and sun-stones and how they were used. Some of these pages are even maintained by scientific institutions like the University of Chicago or teaching sites like the Mariner’s Museum. But it’s important to realize that these are science sites, not history sites, and an academic astronomer is not likely to be an expert on Norse history and archaeology. When you actually look at what we can genuinely prove about Norse navigational tools, you discover that it’s a lot iffier than all those web pages suggest.
First, let’s deal with the sun-board. All notions of a Norse sun-board go back to this:
A Norse bearing dial?
It was discovered in Greenland in the late 1940s by a Danish archaeologist. It’s half of a flat wooden disk (the image on the left is the back side of the image on the right) about 7 cm across (so the complete item would apparently have been about the size of a hockey puck), with triangular notches carved into the outer edge and space for a hole at the center. It was dated to c. 1200 AD. Almost immediately, a man named Captain C. V. Sølver (who presumably was a naval officer or ship’s captain with an interest in archaeology) suggested that it was a bearing dial, a navigational aid mentioned in late medieval Norse records but only in passing. He suggested that it was used with a gnomon to determine latitudes. And that was the starting gun for a race to prove that the Norse had a complex series of tools with which they navigated the North Atlantic. As far as I can determine, all subsequent claims about Vikings having either hand-held bearing dials or water-floated sun-boards are based on Sølver’s theory.
A hypothetical reconstruction of Sølver’s bearing dial
What gets overlooked in this was the response to Sølver’s theories by scholars of the day. They identified numerous flaws in his theory. His gnomon was a reconstruction, not something found with the disk, and the hole is too large for a proper gnomon (assuming that the gnomon didn’t taper, which it could have). More seriously, the disk has 17 notches on it, suggesting that the whole disk would have had 36 notches. Since a compass is based on four quarters, it has to have 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 markings, not 36, and as far as we know, the Norse only recognized 8 directions anyway (the four cardinal directions and those halfway between them). Additionally, our best Viking-era description of Viking navigation makes no mention of any such tool. And, I would add, the disk dates from about 150 years after the end of the Viking raids; just because the 12th century Norse might have had a bearing dial is not evidence that Ragnar Lothbrok could have had one 400 years earlier.
So if it’s not a navigational aid, what is it? The simplest explanation is just that it was a piece of decoration of some sort. But it’s also been suggested that it might have been part of a child’s top or, more intriguingly, a tool for tracking the number of parishioners who came to confession. (To me, it also looks like it could be a spindle whorl for a drop-spindle.)
What about sun-stones? Scientifically, they’re genuine. Certain types of crystal, including Icelandic feldspar, do have the capacity to amplify light in the way described in the series. There are references to them in late medieval Icelandic church records, and in a mid-14th century Icelandic saga, one is used to locate the sun. But what this proves is that sun-stones were known by the 14th century. It does not prove either that they were known to the Vikings half a millennium earlier, or that they were used as navigational aids. In 2013, the first evidence for the use of a sun-stone as a navigational tool was discovered on an English ship that sank in 1592. Is it possible that Ragnar Lothbrok could have used a sun-stone? Yes. Is there any actual reason to think that he or other Vikings did use such a thing? No. The series is relying not on actual facts here but on Internet wisdom.
The Ship
In the series, Floki (Gustav Skarsgård) builds Ragnar a knorr, or longship, on his own, in secret. The ship and the various equipment all look reasonable to my non-Norse-naval-archaeologist eyes. In recent decades, our understanding of Norse ship-building techniques has grown enormously, thanks to the work of many experimental archaeologists. And the show seems to have paid attention to at least some of this information. But there are still problems.
Floki apparently lives almost alone, with just Helga for company. I’m not sure how the two of them would manage to cut and haul all the lumber needed for a longship, especially the 60-ft keel. A long ship required a substantial group of skilled craftsmen, including both carpenters and smiths. So Floki has managed the equivalent of assembling a BMW out of spare parts. (In the pilot, he declares that he will get two good planks out a particular tree, which is remarkably wasteful, since he could actually get about 20 planks out of a tree.).
Also, the idea that he could build this ship in secret is rather silly. It’s a ship—it has to be built down by the fjord it will be launched on. But the men of Kattegat live along that fjord—it’s their main street. So he’s somehow secretly assembling his longship in the driveway of his house without any of his neighbors noticing.
When the ship is finally launched, Floki is incredibly nervous, uncertain if it will sail or sink. That’s plausible, since ship-building was not an exact science. Rather Floki has to rely on his past experience, his sense of how strong the wood is and how far it can flex, and so on. So I could imagine a lot of shipwrights breathing a sigh of relief when they realized that the ship they’ve just spent a small fortune to build is not going to sink.
The series gets another small detail wrong. When they raid England, Ragnar ‘parks’ the ship away from the shore and the men are ferried to the beach in a small rowboat. That would have been unnecessary for a longship. Longships were quite wide in the beam, but shallow in the keel. Because they were not very deep, they could easily be beached in shallow surf and then pushed into deeper water (they were quite light for their size). That was one reason why they were ideally suited to raiding; they can land and sail away very quickly.
The Gokstad ship; notice how wide and shallow it is
So once again, what we’re seeing in the series is a modest amount of attention paid to technical issues, such as the ship, while mixing in a lot of inaccurate ‘common knowledge’ and some total fabrication for dramatic tension.
Want to Know More?
Vikings Season 1 is available on Amazon. For a discussion of the military aspects of the raids on Britain, see my post here.
There aren’t a lot of accessible books on Norse longboats, although James Graham-Campbell’s The Viking Worldhas a good brief section on them. Five Viking Ships from Roskilde Fjordis a nice look at one of the most important archaeological finds, five Viking Age ships that were sunk in Roskilde Fjord in the later 11th century to create an artificial reef. Known today as the Skuldelev Ships, they were a cross-section of ships in use at the time, and thus an excellent window into Norse ship-building.
In my previous post on the History Channel’s The Vikings, I discussed the main characters of Ragnar Lothbrok, Lagertha, and Rollo, who are sort of a mishmash of historical and legendary characters. This post is going to focus on the last remaining major character, Gabriel Byrne’s Earl Haraldson, who is the main villain of the first season. For some reason he doesn’t seem to have a given name, being known only by his patronymic, which is pretty unlikely. Most of the important figures from this period are known by a given name and then a patronym (‘Haraldson’), loconym (based on a place—‘of Møre’, for example) or a nickname (‘Hairypants’, which is what ‘Lothbrok’ means). So this character should probably be something like Jarl Eirik Haraldson, and generally referred to as Jarl Eirik, instead of Earl Haraldson. Last names in the modern sense don’t exist in this period, and actually are a very recent development in Scandinavia. Iceland still employs a system of patronyms to this day.
Earl Haraldson is presented as being a stock oppressive ruler. In the pilot, he oversees the local community, has the power to make boys adults by giving them their arm-ring, presides over the local court system, and controls where all the raids happen. This last point is explicitly connected to his ownership of the boats used, but he also seems to have some sort of exclusive right either to own boats or control how they are used, because Floki has to build his boat in secret. In the second episode, he executes a smith for the crime of making an anchor for Ragnar. In the third episode, he apparently has the right to know where Ragnar is, and when Ragnar isn’t around, has the authority to take a hostage as surety that Ragnar will return. When Ragnar returns with riches plundered from a monastery, the earl simply declares all the plunder his property, over Ragnar’s objections and declares the boat his as well. In other words, the earl is a totalitarian ruler whose authority cannot be openly disputed.
In the context of late 8th century Scandinavia, this makes little sense. Norse society in this period operated on a much more egalitarian footing than other parts of Europe. Norse society was managed by popular assemblies termed things. Things had multiple functions; they were local markets, places to make business deals and marriage alliances, and simple legislatures. They had no executive officers, however, because Norse society had no clear notion of government as a public institution. Instead, enforcement of any of its decisions fell to those who would benefit from those decisions.
Jarls were local strong-men, men who controlled enough resources to have substantial influence. These resources might take the form of good farmland, wealth, boats, respect for fighting prowess, noble lineage, a priesthood, and so on. But they did not automatically convey the right to rule. Political authority required the general acceptance of the community, and that was achieved through a combination of generosity, wisdom, success in battle, intimidation, and good will. A jarl who governed as abusively as Earl Haraldson does would quickly find himself without any political support.
Byrne as Haraldson
Military support required significant bonds of loyalty between the leader, jarl or otherwise, and his men. The basic deal was that the leader of the warband would lead his men to victory in battle and they would fight to the death for him. After the battle was over, the leader took the plunder and then shared it out among his men, enriching them while also enriching himself. He was also expected to support his men in peacetime, usually by sheltering and feeding them.
But in the series, Haraldson does the exact opposite. He sends men out to raid in the Baltic, but apparently doesn’t go himself, so he was failing to take the military risks his men were taking, something that would probably have undermined his authority in a substantial way. When Ragnar returns from his first successful raid, the earl confiscates not only the majority of the plunder but also Ragnar’s ship. Yes, he does allow each man to take one item, but the whole emphasis in the scene is on the earl’s grasping, tyrannical nature. So rather than enriching his men he is stealing their property.
Haraldson takes the rest of the treasure and buries it in the ground, saying that Odin will allow him to take this treasure into the afterlife. This completely misunderstands the fact that many Norse treasure hoards were buried at some point. The Norse buried bodies with grave goods, sometimes quite lavish ones, which strongly suggests, although not conclusively, that the dead were expected to enjoy those goods in the afterlife. But there’s no indication that the Norse believed in some sort of “afterlife safety deposit system”, in which goods could be buried before death. Rather, burial of treasure was a means of keeping it safe during times of turbulence, with the intention of digging it up when things had settled down. So the earl’s burial of the confiscated plunder is just absurd. In the ground, it’s no use to anyone.
Haraldson also apparently puts his men through a rather perverse loyalty test. In the second episode, he tells one of his men that he can sleep with Siggy, the earl’s wife, if he wants to. The man goes into the earl’s bedroom, and Siggy invites him into the bed, but then attacks him. Haraldson walks in with guards and orders the man taken out and killed. Aparently, the earl is checking to see which men want to get busy with his wife, so he can kill them and prevent her from committing adultery. But the damage this would do to his reputation and the loyalty of his men would be enormous.
Sure, we can justify a lot of this by saying that the earl is a bad ruler; Norse literature has its share of abusive or stupid rulers. But almost no one other than Ragnar ever seems to challenge the earl’s right to do what he does, even when the earl and his men are not present. Everyone seems to assume that the earl has the right to do these things, when in fact he doesn’t. In the fourth episode, the earl asserts that Ragnar owes him loyalty simply because he is the jarl, which is false. Ragnar owes him loyalty only if he has sworn oaths of loyalty which Haraldson has justified with gifts of wealth and political support.
To get around this, the series invents a custom that the jarl performs an adulthood ceremony for 12 year old boys, giving them an arm-ring for which they must swear loyalty. This arm-ring is considered sacred and oaths sworn on it must not be broken. This is all sheer nonsense. Jarls and other leaders did give out arm-rings as a sign of favor or as reward for support, but they weren’t sacred objects or signifiers of adulthood.
What’s really going on here is that the series is resorting to the modern assumption that rule by nobility and kings must be abusive, because it’s not democratic. Hollywood has a long tradition of pandering to American political ideals by treating any other political system as inherently bad. What’s particularly frustrating about this is that the Norse were actually much closer to traditional American notions of the independence and the moral rights of the individual than most other medieval cultures.
Haraldsson’s chief skill is sitting menacingly
The Lack of a State
Another major problem with this series’ depiction of Norse government is that it assumes that Norse society, like modern America, has a notion of the state as formal institution with its own recognized coercive authority. The place where this comes through most clearly is in the trial scene in the pilot. In the scene, the earl conducts a court in a manner similar to a judge. There is an accusation that a man has killed another man in a quarrel over land. The man claims that he admitted the killing, so that it was not murder, but Haraldson points out that the man walked past two houses where he did not announce the murder, and thus must have intended to keep it secret, since the law specifies that a killer may pass the first house without announcing a killing if the victim’s relatives live there. Then Haraldson asks the community to vote on the man’s guilt, and says that the verdict must be unanimous. When the community condemns the man, Haraldson orders the man executed.
There’s so much wrong here it almost deserves its own separate post. The series has presented Norse law as operating as a primitive version of American or British law, with the earl acting as both the judge and the prosecutor, the community acting as the jury, and Haraldson’s men acting as the police force and executioners. This presumes that the earl has some sort of formal right to act as a judge and enforce the law.
But Norse society operated on a completely different model. Norse law was understood to be the possession of each individual, and thus was something that the individual enforced for himself. Crime was understood in terms of injury to a specific victim and that person’s kinsmen; if there is no injury, there is no crime (this is another reason that Haraldson’s confiscation of the boat is wrong—Ragnar has not injured the earl in any way). If a man injures someone, either physically or through taking of property, the victim acquires the right to avenge the injury by inflicting reciprocal damage to the perpetrator. If the perpetrator has taken the man’s cow, he is allowed to take goods of equal value from the perpetrator; if the man has caused physical injury, the victim and his relatives are allowed to inflict a reciprocal injury on the perpetrator or his relatives.
In this system, there is no judge, because the victim and his kinsmen have the right to act as the judge of their own injury. This means that the system treats every injury as a new injury, even if it was inflicted as a punishment for a previous injury, because each kin group thinks in terms of its own injury. So if Hrolf injures Svein, Svein and his brothers will attack Hrolf and injure or perhaps kill him. But that gives Svein’s relatives the right to kill Hrolf or his relatives, which gives Hrolf’s relatives the right to retaliate. This could be extremely disruptive to the community, but it was understood as legally and morally right. When Haraldson claims that secret killings lead to revenge feuds, he’s wrong; open killings lead to revenge feuds, and that’s seen as appropriate, because that’s how the law works. Secret killings were a problem precisely because no one knew who to take vengeance on. So when the dead man’s wife realizes he’s been killed, she doesn’t go to earl Haraldson; she goes to her husband’s family and rallies them (and perhaps her own birth family) to go after the killer.
Obviously, feuding could be a serious problem, so Norse law recognized an alternative. Each person in this society had a recognized cash value that was a reflection of their social status and function in the community. When an injury or killing occurred, the perpetrator could offer to buy off the victim’s right of vengeance by paying either a fraction of the victim’s value (for an injury) or the whole value (for a killing) to the victim or his relatives. If the victim accepts the payment, he is agreeing to forego his right of violent vengeance.
So the thing that deters violence in Norse society is the threat of reciprocal violence from the victim and his kinsmen. Once violence has happened, the community would either begin taking sides or start pressuring the two sides to reach a peaceful agreement about how much financial compensation should be paid. The jarl’s role in this, to the extent that he had one, would be to either support one side in the violence or help negotiate peaceful compensation (and then engage in violence against whichever side broke the agreement later on). He doesn’t maintain a police force because there’s no need; the thing that stops crime is fear of retaliation. He doesn’t act as judge because he has no formal right to get involved unless one party or the other seeks his support. There’s no trial, because none is necessary. There’s no jury here, because each man has the right to enforce the law for himself and his kin. In fact, there’s virtually no notion of the state as a formal institution at all.
A key element of this system was family solidarity. Men were unlikely to achieve vengeance if they did not have strong kinsmen and family alliances to support them. There was a powerful cultural pressure on men to stand in solidarity with their kinsmen, and men without relatives were in a very vulnerable position. This is why the tension between Ragnar and Rollo, and Rollo’s desire for Lagertha is such an issue. The two men ought to support each other to the death. When the earl tries to bribe Rollo to betray Ragnar, this is the sort of thing a Norse saga might have explored, so on this point, the series is capturing something of the spirit of Norse literature, although it’s getting the legal details wildly wrong.
Another example of the series getting Norse law wrong comes in the fourth episode, when Ragnar is accused of killing Haraldson’s half-brother Knut. Ragnar acknowledges the killing but insists that it was justified because he caught Knut trying to rape Ragnar’s wife. In other words, Ragnar shouldn’t be considered guilty, because it was justifiable homicide. But Norse law doesn’t have the same sort of notion of guilty or innocence that modern American law does. In Norse law, intention and motive is entirely irrelevant. It does not matter if Ragnar had a good reason for killing Knut, or if it was done in self-defense. All the matters is that Ragnar acknowledges the killing. Having killed Knut, he and his family are now legitimately the targets of Haraldsson’s vengeance. The earl doesn’t need the sanction of the court to kill Ragnar.
Haraldson confronting Ragnar about Knut’s death
What we’re seeing here is the series just making up whatever nonsense it wants to in order to advance its plot. Instead of trying to show the audience how a very different legal system operated, it just imposes modern American notions of justice back on Norse society, picking and choosing whatever historical bits sound interesting and ignoring the rest. That detail from the pilot about a killer being allowed to walk past one house without announcing his killing is an authentic element of Norse law, so the scriptwriters clearly know something about Norse law, which means they’re making conscious choices to misrepresent the Norse legal system.
And the sad thing is that it would have been easy enough to get the law right and still serve the series’ goals. The writers could have worked Ragnar’s killing of Knut into this plot in a very Norse way. Here’s all they had to do: the earl stews on Knut’s death for a while, and then launches the attack on Ragnar’s farmstead in episode 5, not to punish Ragnar because he’s a criminal, but to avenge his dead brother. This would have made Haraldson a more nuanced character and allowed Gabriel Byrne to demonstrate that he can do more than glower. American television has for some time recognized that audiences are interested in more complex villains, bad guys that the viewer can have a little sympathy for while still rooting for the hero to win. But for some reason, the Vikings hasn’t recognized this.
In 2013, the History Channel debuted a Canadian-Irish tv series, The Vikings, starring Travis Fimmel at Ragnar Lothbrok and Katheryn Winnick as his wife Lagertha. While the series has some problems, it’s a significant step up from the History Channel’s traditional “ancient buildings were produced by aliens” programming. There’s both good and bad things to say about the series, and there’s enough that I plan to do several posts about it.
The focus of the series is Ragnar Lothbrok, a typical Viking living somewhere in Scandinavia in the 790s. He is married to Lagertha, a “famous shieldmaiden”. Together they seem to run a small farm and have two children. They are ruled over by Earl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne), whose title should really be ‘jarl’ since that’s the Norse root-word for the English ‘earl’, but that’s a tiny quibble. The earl, who is a fairly stock-villainous character, owns the ships that his men use to go Viking, and he insists on taking them into the Eastern Baltic every year, to raid Russia. But Ragnar complains that the Eastern Baltic is plundered out, so he would rather go west. He’s heard rumors that there are countries there ripe for the picking. But the earl is extremely skeptical of these claims, and people think that there’s just sea to the west. And besides, it’s impossible to sail west because no one can calculate latitude and no one can navigate when it’s too cloudy or foggy outside, because Vikings navigate by the stars.
However, a stranger has told Ragnar there is land out west, and has given him two tools that will help him navigate. His friend Floki is a boatmaker and has secretly built a longship for him so Ragnar can assemble a crew and go wherever he wants. But the earl doesn’t want this, apparently because he’s a control freak, so Ragnar is going to have to do this on the sly.
Ragnar Lothbrok
The series’ creator is Michael Hirst, the screenwriter for Elizabeth and also contributed to Elizabeth the Golden Age. He’s also the executive producer for the Showtime dramas The Tudors and The Borgias. So this is a guy who’s seriously interested in history.
Hirst’s choice to focus on Ragnar Lothbrok is an interesting one. Lothbrok (or Lodbrok; they are essentially variant spellings of the man’s nickname, “Hairypants”) is a semi-legendary character from the Viking age. Historians use the term ‘semi-legendary’ when they can’t decide if someone is basically historical or basically fictional. According to different sources, he was the son of either a Danish or Swedish king and eventually became king of Denmark himself (or at least part of Denmark). He is reported to have raided widely in Britain and France, including attacking Paris. Various sources say he had three wives, Lagertha, Thora, and Aslaug, a Swedish princess whom he rescued from two giant serpents. He fathered a number of sons, all of whom seem to be genuine historical figures, and was supposedly killed by King Aelle of Northumbria by being thrown into a pit full of snakes, where he composed a famous poem before dying.
Finnick as Ragnar
This ‘biography’ appears to be a confused muddle of several different historical figures including three different kings and two Viking leaders, as well as possibly one woman. The historical events attributed to him are contradictory in terms of chronology, but most of the sources seem to place him in the early to mid-9th century. The attack on Paris happened in 845, and his sons reputedly invaded England in 865 to avenge his death. One of these sons, Bjorn Ironside, figures as a character in The Vikings, played first by Nathan O’Toole and in later seasons as an adult by Alexander Ludwig.
The series gives Ragnar a brother Rollo (Clive Standen). Rollo is loosely modeled on the Viking Hrolf, also called Ganger Hrolf (“Rolf the Walker”), who founded the duchy of Normandy in 911. There is no evidence for any connection between Hrolf and Ragnar in the sources; Ragnar seems to be a mostly Danish figure, whereas Hrolf is more typically associated with Norwegian families, including the Norse jarls of Møre or the Yngling dynasty of kings, who are also connected to Sweden, although one source claims him to be the son of a Danish noble. Are you starting to figure out how confused Norse sources for the 9th century are?
From what I’ve just said, it should be clear that Hirst has taken a very umm…lenient approach to the facts here. He’s taken a probably legendary character who would have been in his prime in the 840s, made him the brother of a man who was probably only born in the mid-840s, and pushed both of them back into the 790s. That means that his son Bjorn, who is 12 years old in 793, according to the series, will be terrorizing England when he’s 84.
Lagertha
And then there is the character of Lagertha. In the series she’s a ‘shieldmaiden’, which seems to mean that she’s a trained female warrior. Shieldmaidens occasionally feature in Norse literature, but there is no solid historical evidence for any formal practice of women warriors in Norse society. The whole question of whether Norse women carried weapons or fought is a complex one. Most of the women mentioned as fighting in the sources are Valkyries, essentially Norse angels who choose the dead for the god Odin. There are a few literary women who kill people, such as Freydis Eiriksdottir, who slaughters a number of women with an axe in the Saga of the Greenlanders, but she is not a warrior, just a killer. Stories about valkyrie warrior women marrying mortal men seem to be a masculine fantasy to demonstrate male sexual prowess (the way that many recent action films have included a ‘tough female fighter’ character, who ultimate yields to the male hero sexually).
Wincing as Lagertha
Archaeological evidence is patchy. A small number of female graves have included arrows, spears, and even swords, but scholars have debated how to interpret this fact. In some cases, it is possible that the grave originally held a male body that has now been lost, making the man’s weapon appear to be buried with his wife. In the case of swords, it has been argued that the woman inherited a sword because she was an only child, so that it might not be evidence of actually using the weapon, simply owning it. But on the flip side, the sex of the body is sometimes only established by the grave goods that accompany it, with the assumption being that bodies buried with weapons are men and bodies buried with cooking implements are women; this assumption was recently disproven in one case by DNA testing. What this means is that there may well be more women buried with weapons than scholars now recognize. Given that bows and arrows and spears can be used for hunting and for self-defense when men are away, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some Norse women did occasionally use weapons. But it is a huge step from that to a claim that there were ‘warrior women’ of the sort that The Vikings seems to be picturing.
The series appears to be drawing heavily on the Gesta Danoroum, written by the late 12th century Christian Danish author Saxo Grammaticus. Saxo’s work is an amalgamation of history, legend, and conjecture, all filtered through Saxo’s Christian viewpoint. (It’s also the source Shakespeare used for Hamlet.) Saxo mentions a few warrior women but usually in a way that makes it clear he is disapprovingly contrasting the pagan Danes of the past with the Christian Danes of his day. So his discussion of pagan Danish warrior women might be fictions intended to indicate how barbaric the Danes were before they converted, rather than evidence that pagan Danes included female warriors. By refusing to be mothers, warrior women were rejecting the proper, subordinate, role Christian society expected of them.
What he tells us about Lagertha is that she was a virginal warrior woman (note that the term ‘shieldmaiden’ implies virginity), whom Ragnar fell in love with. She set a bear and a dog on him, but he killed both and thereby got her hand in marriage. They had a son (not Bjorn Ironside) and two daughters. Then Ragnar abandoned her to marry the Sweedish princess Thora. Later, when he needs assistance, she leads an army to rescue him. He also at one point describes her as “flying about” the battlefield, which might be a reference to moving quickly, but has also been interpreted as literal flight, which would tend to support the notion that Lagertha is essentially a valkyrie rather than a mortal woman.
The decision to treat Lagertha as a real woman and as a warrior in her own right clearly owns a lot to contemporary ideas of strong female characters in film and television, and much less to an interest in historical accuracy.
So thus far, the hero of the story is semi-legendary, his brother and his son are real, but are half a century too early, and his wife is basically fictional. However, all of them have at least some basis in the sources of the period, so Hirst gets credit for using actual literary characters and real people rather than just making up his own.
Earl Haraldson is entirely fictitious. But I’ll talk about him and what’s so seriously wrong with his character in my next post.
If you’re interested in Norse women, the two books I’d recommend are Jenny Jochens’ Women in Old Norse Society and Judith Jesch’s Women in the Viking Age. Jochens’ book is very much about average women in the period, with a good exploration of their economic roles, while Jesch’s book does a nice job of looking at what various literary sources can reveal about Norse women. (Full disclosure: I studied under Jesch for a year as an undergraduate.)
Vikings are one of the most familiar elements of medieval history, and naturally they’ve proven popular with film-makers, as evidenced by the popularity of National Geographic’s recent drama series, Vikings. But when The 13th Warrior (1999, dir. John McTiernan) was released, it did quite poorly, earning only a little more than a third of its production costs. The movie was based on Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead, which in turn was based (as he admits in the appendix) on Beowulf and on the Risala of Ahmed ibn Fadlan, an Arab who traveled up the Volga on a diplomatic mission to the newly-converted Muslim Bulgars of the region in the year 921. Ibn Fadlan’s Risala is an account of his journey, particularly notable for his descriptions of the Rus, a group normally understood to be Norse traders.
What Crichton did was to take the Rus chapter of the Risala and attach it to the plot of Beowulf, with Buliwyf (Vladimir Kulich) as Beowulf and Ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas) acting as part of Buliwyf’s warband. Beowulf’s enemies are rationalized as a tribe of surviving Neanderthals, the Wendols. Buliwyf saves Hrothgar’s people, but is poisoned in the process and dies.
Most of the film is a pretty standard adventure fantasy, but the opening scenes draw heavily on the Risala and are therefore more based in actual history than the rest of the film. And it’s here that we get to interesting questions of historical accuracy. But to be clear, Ibn Fadlan did not travel into Scandinavia with a group of Norsemen; he simply met them during his travels on the Volga river.
Also, two small but important linguistic points: ‘ibn’ means ‘son of’ in Arabic. Ahmed is the son of Fadlan. His full name in Arabic formulation is Ahmed ibn Fadlan ibn Al-Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad, which means we know his paternal ancestry going back four generations. Students sometimes mistakenly refer to him as ‘Ibn’ as if it were a proper name. It’s really cognate with ‘Mac’ in names like “MacArthur’. The Norse have the same problem as modern students, referring to him as Ibn, much to his frustration.
Also, in popular terminology, ‘Viking’ refers to anyone person from medieval Scandinavia; it’s used as if it were an ethnic grouping. But a Viking is specifically a traveler who has gone abroad seeking economic resources; sometimes a Viking violently plunders people, but at other times he trades with them peacefully, probably often selling things he took violently a few days before. So it’s really an occupation that some men temporarily adopted, rather than a permanent identity. ‘Pirate’ is perhaps the closest English word, although Vikings did not generally attack other ships the way the crew of the Black Pearl do; rather they pillage small vulnerable villages and the like. Strictly speaking, Scandinavians are Norse, and Viking mostly applies to Norse who left Scandinavia (although a Norseman could certainly go Viking in Scandinavia). Also, there’s no such thing as a ’female Viking’, since there’s no evidence that women engaged in this activity. Not that 13th Warrior shows us any ‘Viking women’; I just thought I’d mention it because it’s such a common misconception.
The Rus in the Risala vs the Vikings in the Film
At the beginning of the move, Ibn Fadlan and his friend Melchisidek (Omar Shariff) (a character not found in the Risala, who for some reason has an ancient Hebrew name) encounter a group of Rus. They met Buliwyf (pronounced ‘boll-veye’, which I’m dubious about, but I’m not a linguist, so I’ll let it slide), and learn that the king of the Rus has died, and that Buliwyf is his heir. Buliwyf asks him to tell a story, and for some reason Ibn Fadlan starts to tell the Genesis creation account (the Muslim creation account is quite close to the Jewish account, but from the small bit that we get, it sounds a lot more like the Jewish version than any version a Muslim would likely tell). But before he can get into the story, Buliwyf gets into a fight. It’s not clear why the fight starts—perhaps the other man is trying to assassinate him. But the point of the scene seems to be to tell us that these Vikings sure are violent people.
Immediately thereafter, the film shows us the funeral of the dead king (described as “the old way”, presumably in contrast to the new way of Islam that Ahmed and Melchisidek follow). What the film shows is based fairly directly on the most famous section of Ibn Fadlan’s work, in which he spends 5 pages describing a funeral ritual he saw. The cinematic Ibn Fadlan sees a Norse ship with items piled on it, and watches as a woman in a white dress is raised up several times, declaring that she sees people calling her to them. Then she is led out of view and the boat is lit on fire. The film implies that she is killed. Throughout, the emphasis is on how strange the ritual is to Ahmed; he is told little about what the ritual means, although he is told that it ensures that the dead king will go to Paradise with gifts.
The scene is fairly faithful to the Risala as far as it goes, but it omits a great deal of detail. The full funeral ritual apparently took 10 days. The dead man was buried, and a boat was constructed (from the account, it’s not clear if it’s a functional boat or merely a symbolic one). Special clothes were made for the dead man, and mead was brewed. One of his slave-girls volunteered to die to go with the dead man. The body was dug up and dressed, and several animals were cut in half and placed in the boat with the body. The slave-girl was held up over a structure like a doorframe, during which she described what she saw. She drank mead, and then six men took her into a tent and had sex with her with others beat their shields loudly. Then two men strangled her while an old woman, called the Angel of Death, stabbed her in the chest with a dagger. Her body was placed next to the dead man. The man’s closest male relative stripped naked, and walked backward toward the boat, carrying a torch and covering his anus with his hand. He set fire to the boat and others joined in as well. When the fire was over, they erected a mound on the spot and erected a pole, on which they wrote the dead man’s name.
From this description, it’s not too hard to figure out why the film-makers showed only the small portion they did. The sacrificing of animals, the sex, the violent sacrifice of the slave-girl, and the naked man lighting the fire are all more or less jarring to modern people and would probably serve to alienate viewers. But just as in the Risala, in the film, there is almost no explanation given about what the details of the ritual mean, and in fact scholars are still trying to puzzle out what the ritual tells us about Norse beliefs for the afterlife. Both the real-life and the cinematic Ibn Fadlan are left with a sense that the Norse are alien in their beliefs and practices, and since he is our stand-in as the hero, it emphasizes that the Norse are alien to us as well.
The next morning, Ahmed witnesses the Norse morning hygiene routine. A bowl of water is passed around by a woman. The men take turns washing their hands and faces; they rinse their mouths and spit into the bowl, and one man blows his nose into it. Then it is offered to Ibn Fadlan, who pushes it away with concealed disgust. The point of the scene is again to emphasize that the Norse are not like Ibn Fadlan or us; they are crude and filthy.
This detail is also taken directly from the Risala. He tells us that the Rus had no shame about emptying their bowels and bladders, and they do not wash after sex or before eating. He tells us that in addition to washing their faces in the communal water, they also wash and comb out their hair. They are, he tells us, “the dirtiest creatures of God.”
The film reinforces the not-like-us trope in a third way. A teenage boy arrives in a boat. He stands still for a very long time, and Ibn Fadlan inquires about this; he is told that the Norse don’t know if the boy is real or not, and so he is politely giving them time to see he is real. So the film situates the Norse as people who believe in spirits and don’t trust their senses. Unlike the funeral and the washing routine, this last detail is made up nonsense.
So the film is giving us a mixture of fact (the funeral and the washing routine) and modern invention (thinking the boy could be a spirit), all of which is designed to emphasize how different the Norse are. But the first two elements are grounded in a historical source, and therefore might be considered “real” in a way that the third element is not.
However, there is a problem with the film’s reliance on the Risala; it assumes that because the Risala says it, it must actually be true. But this is to read the Risala in a very naïve way. Ibn Fadlan wrote as an outsider to Norse society; he was including things that he found remarkable about these people, and he included many details, such as the funeral rituals, that he did not understand. His lack of understanding shaped the way he saw things, and he probably omitted details when he thought them normal or when he assumed they were unimportant. So we cannot assume that his account of the funeral is complete. He may have exaggerated things he thought particularly odd. He may also be making up details: it’s not clear, for example, how he knows that the men had sex with the slave-girl, since it happened in a tent surrounded by a crowd that was making a lot of noise.
Furthermore, Ibn Fadlan’s deeper purpose is to depict these people as barbarians because they are not Muslims. Much of his account of the Rus emphasizes details about how non-Islamic they are. They tattoo themselves (forbidden in many interpretations of Islam), and they do not veil their woman but use them to advertize their wealth. They do not wash with running water as a proper Muslim would but with water in a bucket. They do not practice Islamic funeral rituals. They have sex in public with slave girls. The details he includes are cognate with modern American depictions of ‘savage Africans’ as barely-clothed, wearing bones through their noses, and engaging in cannibalism. So while the film accurately repeats some of what Ibn Fadlan tells us, we cannot assume that what Ibn Fadlan tells us is the unvarnished truth.
The foreign-ness of the Norse is gradually dissolved over the course of the film, as Ibn Fadlan and Buliwyf’s band gradually come to understand one another and learn to respect each other. This is not a lesson the historical Ibn Fadlan learned, because unlike Antonio Banderas, he did not travel with them into Scandinavia, but rather continued on his mission into what we would call Kazahkstan.
The Problem of Language
So a central theme of The 13th Warrior is the process by which people of different cultures get to know each other. The film underscores this in a very clever way through language. At the start of the film, Ibn Fadlan and Melchisidek are speaking English, in place of Arabic. When they encounter the Norse, they struggle to communicate. The Norse do not know Arabic, and Melchisidek tries Greek before discovering that one of the men speaks Latin (where he learned classical Latin is left unexplained—maybe they have a good public school system in 10th century Norway). So when Buliwyf speaks, he does so in modern Norwegian (standing in for Old Norse), his man translates into Latin, and Melchisidek translates into English for Ahmed and the audience. This serves to reinforce the cultural differences between us and the Norse; if no one translates, we literally do not understand them. (However, when the boy speaks to Buliwyf, the film partly forgets the translation issue, because suddenly Melchisidek can understand the boy and translates for him.)
When Ibn Fadlan gets roped into traveling with Buliwyf, though, he cannot initially communicate because he does not speak Norse and the others do not speak Arabic. But Ibn Fadlan is clever and observant, and he watches and listens closely, and while the Norse continuing speaking Norse, English words start slipping in, until eventually the Norse are speaking English to signify that Ibn Fadlan has learned Old Norse. In the key scene, he realizes that the Norse are making insulting jokes about his mother, and he begins to win their respect by confronting them. Later, Buliwyf demonstrates that he too has been paying attention, when he tries to write out the Muslim confession of faith after having seen Ibn Fadlan do it. While the speed with which Ibn Fadlan learns Norse is probably unrealistic, the fact that the movie confronts the language barrier and works it into the theme of the film instead of just ignoring it is impressive. It goes to show that when Hollywood wants to it can actually explore historical issues in an interesting way.
And of course, Beowulf is a must read. I’m partial to Beowulf (Signet Classics), which uses the Burton Raffel translation, which, in my opinion, is vastly superior to the popular but lingusitically inaccurate Seamus Heaney translation.I’ve taught Beowulf more times than I can count, and it’s meant to be read out loud, but Heaney’s version is incredibly clumsy when read out loud. He also introduces all sorts of Gaelicisms to the text that aren’t there by his word choice.
boxed set on Amazon. If you like the opening music, it’s the song “Oh My,” by New Zealand singer Gin Wigmore, off her album 
and 
are both worth reading. Both can be confusing, but also fascinating. If you want something more scholarly, the classic intro is H. R. Ellis Davidson’s 
but it’s getting a little old now. John Lindow’s 
is not so much an explanation of Norse myth, but a history of it and its relationship to modern culture. For example, it explores Marvel Comic’s Thor title.
is available on Amazon. For a discussion of the military aspects of the raids on Britain, see my post 
is a nice look at one of the most important archaeological finds, five Viking Age ships that were sunk in Roskilde Fjord in the later 11th century to create an artificial reef. Known today as the Skuldelev Ships, they were a cross-section of ships in use at the time, and thus an excellent window into Norse ship-building.
is available in multiple formats from Amazon.
is also available, in paperback and Kindle edition.
