Gone Medieval - The Northman: How to Put Vikings On Screen

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

The Northman now showing in UK cinemas is an action-filled epic that follows a young Viking prince on his quest to avenge his father's murder. Its director Robert Eggers has described it as the ���most accurate Viking movie ever made." But what does "accuracy" mean for a historical blockbuster? And how is it achieved?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Professor Neil Price, an archaeologist specialising in Viking Age Scandanavia. He was one of the historical advisors on The Northman and explains what they did to get the period just right for modern audiences.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. A new film about the Vikings has just come out. It's called The Northman. And its director, Robert Eggers, has said that this is the most accurate Viking movie that's ever been made. And that's quite a claim. But could it be true? And to me, of course, that statement raised a million different questions. like what do we actually mean by historical accuracy in film but for the Viking Age especially is it the physical representations of the past so buildings clothes and an object

or is it more about the world views the society they lived in religious beliefs and personal and political relationships now Eggers said that to achieve this particular ambition he worked with the greatest historians and archaeologists in the field and that's certainly true because he engaged, among others, archaeologist, Professor Neil Price, as one of his consultants. So for today's episode, I'm really delighted to have Neil here with me to talk about his role in this movie and also how the Viking world is portrayed within it. And for those of you with an interest in the Vikings, Neil might be a familiar name. He is the author of the recent and very successful book, Children of Ash and Elm,

a History of the Vikings, which I can highly recommend, by the way. But he's also one of the leading authorities on Viking Age archaeology. is based at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where he is Professor of Archaeology. Among other projects, he leads an ambitious 10-year research project called The Viking Phenomenon, which explores some very fundamental questions like who the Vikings were and where they came from. So, Neil, thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval Today, and coming along to talk about your role in this film. Hi, Kat, good to talk to you, and thank you for having me on.

So, obviously, you're a very qualified person to try and. and help sort of achieve this grand ambition. So I wanted to talk to you a bit about that role in a minute and some of these topics the film raises. But first of all, can you just briefly sort of recap the Northman, the premise of it? What's it all about? Well, it's set in the late 9th, early 10th centuries, and it's based on a story recorded by the Danish historian Saxo

in the early 13th century, though with much older roots. The young prince Amlith witnesses the murder of his father by his uncle, who also abducts his mother. And Amleth swears revenge, and that's a vow that follows him the rest of his life, from the northern aisles of Scotland to the rivers of Eastern Europe and finally to Iceland. And you may think that sounds familiar, and that's because it's a version of the tale that much later inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. Okay, so in terms of your role then, what exactly did you do? Were you involved in the storyline or was it more in the sort of actual production of it? What was the sort of historical consultancy that you did? Not really with the storyline. I was one of three main advisors on the Northman. There were also specialists in some very specific things like textiles. I started by commenting on the script in several versions. Lots of Zoom calls. I sent hundreds of images of objects and objects. buildings and clothes and so on. And I visited the set during pre-production in Northern Ireland

to talk with the director and producers, particularly the designers, propmaster, the armourers and so on, lots of people. And all of those conversations continued by email afterwards and also in person when we found ourselves in the same cities. There's quite a challenge involved in all of that, as you mentioned earlier. And the director Robert Eggers has become known for his attention to detail in historical movies. The Witch, which was set in Puritan, New England, and the Lighthouse, which is set in the 1890s. But the demands of this movie were very different

because it's simply not possible for any historical advisor to give him that level of information about the Viking Age because we don't have it. So the challenge for all of us was to stick as closely as we can to the evidence that we have, but also to deal with the fact that there are inevitably gaps in our knowledge sometimes very large ones, as you know. And fortunately, Robert was very on board with that.

And did you at any point find it a challenge for being, you know, a leading expert in the field to then be involved in this, which ultimately, you know, the end result you don't have any control of, you can advise as much as you like, but, you know, the outcome could go anywhere, couldn't it? And still it'll have your name attached to it. Did you find, from your sort of professional side, did you find that challenging?

Not really. Partly I trusted Robert because I've seen his two previous films. and they're fantastic, I think. And this consultancy work for all the consultants was not just question and answer. It was an interaction. And exactly as you said earlier, this question of accuracy, which I think for most people tends to mean, did they get the belt buckles right or the weapons or whatever.

And yes, we tried very hard with that. But it's actually much more. And in all of Robert's movies, and especially the Northman, that kind of accuracy is in service to a different kind of authenticity, a search for a mindset and a view of the world. It's an immersive movie. And, you know, that's the kind of thing that I particularly work with in my research as well.

So I was in heaven working on this. But in terms of that kind of loss of control, my name's in the credit somewhere at the end, but I didn't make the movie. I'm fine with that because that's what my role is. I'm not the director, you know, it's a job. And I think the opportunity to bring our ideas into something like this, to a new audience, to say,

this is really what we think the Viking Age might have been like. And working with someone who seems to share those ideas and also wants to communicate them was exhilarating, actually. That was really, really great to hear. And I think I just wanted to get back over that a little bit more because, I mean, in that same statement that he made, that this saying that this is the most accurate Viking movie ever made, he also said that there hasn't been an accurate movie before.

I discussed this a little bit on social media with various people, and that's come up quite a lot. You know, a lot of people saying, well, well, maybe he's right, because the bar is set quite low, and we don't actually have this before. I mean, would you agree with that? Is this essentially the most accurate Viking movie and is there just so much rubbish out there already?

I don't want to sort of criticise other productions or anything, but I do think this is the most concerted effort to bring an idea of a Viking Age reality to the screen. With all the caveats of educated guesses and filling in the gaps and imaginative speculation or being informed, It's also something that's very much in harness to Robert's creative vision. So I think that I can put it like this, for better or worse, depending on who you talk to, in Viking studies, I think I've become known as a researcher who enjoys the use of reconstructions,

mainly visual ones, the kind of exercise of controlled, deliberate imagination that they represent. And you can see where I'm going with this, because this is a two-hour-plus living, moving, breathing, reconstruction. I'm really pleased that that attempt to bring a kind of other reality to the screen seems to have succeeded to judge by the reviews that have started coming in now. But, you know, viewers can be the judge of that. Yeah, so I wanted to get back to some of those things a bit later on in terms of those Viking worlds and things. But one of the things, just picking up on the reviews, having just read, I know that the first ones have only just come out really, but reading through them.

Violence is obviously a big part of this movie. And pretty much every review you read will pick that up, describing it things like brutal and relentless, oozing with revenge-fueled ferocity, blood-soaked, and so on. But also a lot of them are describing this then as the brutal reality of Viking history. So it seems like a lot of the reviewers are picking up on the violence and saying, well, but yes, of course, because that's what it was like. So how could you portray it without that violence? And I wanted to just ask your understanding of this, how this relates to our understanding of the place of violence within the Viking world. And in, again, that sense of historical accuracy, because this really presents the Viking whole world as something that is very bloodthirsty and very violent, which is sort of traditional view.

Is that really what we sort of think? Does that fit with what we understand as the role of violence in Viking society, do you think? I think first, it's worth adding that those same critics refer to it also as strange, unsettling, mystical and beautiful. So there's that as well. It has to be said the Northman is a very violent film. indeed, it's not for the faint-hearted. But it's not gratuitous. It is, after all, a story of revenge.

But the film also asks about the consequences of that behaviour, which sometimes manifest in quite unexpected ways. So even in a setting that fits that stereotype that you were talking about, there's a long sequence with a raid on a village. It's appeared in some of the trailers and so on. Those Vikings do appalling things, and they're shown to be appalling. and those are not people that anyone in their right mind would want to be.

That's a very clear message that comes through there. And I don't think that the actual historical time that we call the Viking Age is best served by pretending that it wasn't violent. The raids really happened. Even the Icelandic sagas are hardly all about peace and love. But that has to be contextualised, and I mean, real Vikings were a tiny minority of the population. I think, as one critic has put it, human and animal love, in the film are treated with the same levels of respect and indifference.

And I think that's about right. It's a very alien film in that sense. There's also a strong sense of the links between violence and fate. It's a strong theme in the film, in the Norse sense. The film's marketing tagline, one of them, is Conquer Your Fate, and that has a very specific meaning in this movie. So I think the violence is contextualised. And so you mentioned a little bit now just then about animals

and about spirituality, and you talked a little bit about this, there's a religion. And that is absolutely a theme that you realise very quickly will be running through the whole movie. And it sort of sets in right from the start. And there's a really nice image to do with a sort of spinning of fate and you've got actual weaving happening on screen and, you know, actually accurate tablet weaving, which is great to see right at the start. But then you sort of have that, obviously, that's how that relates to the spiritual world. So, and obviously this is part of your research as well. And your expertise is very much this religious world of the Vikings. And one of the things that I liked was how that was intervove in the whole time. And it wasn't

sort of treated as a special thing, you know, in that sense that you'd modern times go to church on the Sunday. It was just this sort of how it was a part of everyday life. You also mentioned animals. There's a lot of animal imagery there as well. I mean, were these the things that you were very keen for them to get right when you talked about the sort of religious beliefs of the Vikings. Yes, they were. And I mean, you know they're quite strong themes in my own work. But actually, I think that's one of the reasons why they came to me as one of the advisors, because that was the thing from the beginning they wanted to talk about anyway. I know that Sean, the Icelandic poet and novelist,

who was the co-writer of the screenplay, he'd read some of my earlier work, and Robert had as well. So that sort of immersive view of something that isn't really religion at all, it's just something utterly real and unquestioned. It's simply part of life. Actually, is there in his previous films as well, and that was, I think, the core of what he was, wanted to bring to the Viking Age. So it was very much a meeting of the minds in that sense.

As a one character that comes up quite early on is this female spiritual woman, religious woman, the Cirrus, who's played by Bjork in the actual film. Can you tell me a little bit about her role and how that fits to what we understand about actual beliefs in the Viking Age? I don't want to give spoilers or anything, but she is a Cirrus. She appears in the ruins of a Slav village that's been destroyed by a raid. And her role is to connect this theme of fate that runs through the film. And it's effectively to remind the adult Amleth of what he once found to do, which is to avenge his father, save his mother and kill his uncle.

So she's a connector. And she's also one of the many elements in the film where it's left up to the viewer to decide, is this person even real? or is she a vision or whatever. It's that part of that, again, that immersive worldview. I think it's great that she's in the film as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's such a character as I really needs to be seen, I think.

But that brings me also a little bit on to ask you about women in this film and the roles of women. Other Vikings shows have obviously dealt with this idea of women, women warriors, what women were in Viking Age society quite strongly. And probably most well-known to people would be the show of Vikings' by Michael Hurst. It's been praised, I suppose, in some ways, for bringing some strong female characters into what's usually seen as a very male-dominated world, but also criticised for going too far in the other direction, so presenting this very sort of 21st century worldview,

where women could also be warriors. And of course, that's also impacted on how certain types of academic work has been received. So thinking now of the very famous or infamous, which we say maybe Birka warrior woman case that you've been involved in, so most of our listeners will probably have come across at this warrior grave from Birka in Sweden that was identified as biologically female through ancient DNA, sort of leading to a whole discussion of whether female women were warriors in the Viking Age. And that's obviously a big part of your own research. So obviously when you were then faced with advising on a film like that,

was that whole idea the role of women, whether or not women were going to be warriors here too? Was that something that you were very keen to get right? We had no discussion at all about female warriors. Actually, they were never a part of the drive of the plot at all. The female characters sort of came out of the script kind of fully formed, and I think the central women in the Northman are complex, rounded people who use their agency to the limits of their ability to do so, sometimes in surprising ways.

They're certainly not appendages of the men in a stereotypical way, though the patriarchy and the misogyny of the time is very clear in the film. I think these characters are not strong women. I think they're believable ones. I think that's an important distinction. But there are also women and men with little or no agency at all, the enslaved play a big part all the way through the film and others at all points of the social scale. So I think the movie tries to present the Viking Age as a whole, as a society, for better or worse. You mentioned the Birker female warrior, although female warriors are not a thing in the film. She is actually in there. You can try and spot her,

if you like. I don't know if Robert put her in there as a favour, but I'm very glad he did. Fantastic. And there's other little things like that as well, and you can see this. I'm not giving a spoiler here, but you can actually see it on some of the promotional images. There's a character with filed teeth and decorated teeth, little things like that. I mean, did that sort of come from you or from the other consultants, do you think? I think from all of us, it's hard to sort of say who did what, there's a sort of constant flow of information. But those little details, yes. But one of the things that I really like about the movie

is that very little of that kind of thing is actually explained. It's just there in the background, and there's sometimes in the deep background, almost out of focus. And there's this, we talked about authenticity and accuracy earlier. There's a sort of process of absorption that these things are communicated to the viewer cumulatively, just by sheer weight of everything going on. So you get an impression of the time that it's not based on someone saying,

there's something on your teeth. What is that? Do tell me, you know, there's no exposition. I actually read a review this morning that Robert Eggers wastes no time on exposition for anything that the characters already know. That's left to you to find out. So there's a kind of cumulative process of all those little details. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts and they were designed to be reused?

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Which I think is very, very effective. It sort of struck me as a very bleak world. It's quite sort of, it's very harsh. It's very tough. It's very sort of, I don't know, sometimes I felt that it didn't necessarily give us the sort of richness of existence in the Viking world. It's very much a negative aspect in many ways.

Did you feel that way at all? Or do you think that's not really a problem? I think it gives us one aspect of the Viking Age. It's a bleak story. It's a story of revenge. not a happy subject. And I think in that sense it follows many of the Icelandic sagas. I mean, it is that kind of laconic, quite dry, but nonetheless very deep narrative. I think it's something that rewards reviewing. So I wasn't so worried about that. You asked about violence earlier.

It's not only about this, as you put it, blood-soaked mission of revenge, which it certainly is. I mean, it's complete carnage. It's about what that does to people. Is this a good idea? Is it worth it? what does it cost? And I think it undermines many of those tropes of masculinity that you get connected with the Vikings. So I would probably agree that it is quite a bleak picture, but bleak in some unexpected ways as well. I have to say that coming out of it,

I felt this sort of very masculine storyline was maybe not the one we needed about the archaicator. I was very positive about all the other ways that the Viking Age was represented. But do you think that sort of masculine Viking story, is that still very representative of how? how we understand the Viking world? I think the key to that is that you need to see the film to the end.

It's a deconstruction of that. I think it is true to say that a certain view of masculinity was part of Viking Age codes as well, but only part of them. And obviously, as you say, it's a part of how the Viking Age has been repurposed by all kinds of different people today. Follow that through the movie and see where it takes you. So into thinking then, back to this sort of idea of different versions, the idea that this is better than others

because there haven't been so many good films. I know that you're not a sort of specialist in the history of Viking movies or anything like that, but how do you feel this differs from other depictions? And is there anything that it sort of perpetuates or, you know, that it's a very sort of tags on to what other people have done in depicting the Vikings in movies in the past, do you think?

I think it gets rid of the idea that everybody was a Viking. I don't think actually anybody has noticed that the word Viking isn't used. It doesn't appear. And while those kind of real Vikings are certainly there, so is everybody else. I mentioned the enslaved, the very big part of the film, but also the farmers and everyone else. Most people in the Viking Age stayed at home and never did any harm to anyone, and they're in the film as well. I do think that the Northman conveys complexity, the fact that the people of the time were individuals, just as varied and complicated as we are.

I think that's a good message to send, and it also gets across this sort of unique view of the world. I think that that kind of mindset that Robert has tried so hard to capture and I think succeeded, this sense of an alien world with alien values that makes no concessions to what we might think about it. That is something really different about this film. But it's done using elements of things that people, will find familiar.

So I think that sort of package is really effective. I was also interested because when I, before I sort of actually went to see it, I was thinking of what my expectations were. And I think certain other programmes like the Vikings, the drama show Vikings, has created a very specific visual identity or visual framework for how people depict Vikings. And it's things like the hairstyles and it's the tattoos

and it's all of that. And it was quite nice to see that this didn't really do that, quite so much. It didn't sort of feel like he had to tag along because I think sometimes you sort of create this image in people's minds of what the Viking looks like and then you sort of have to perpetuate that because that's what people expect. So do you think that is because they went to such lengths to look at the actual material culture that it doesn't sort of just perpetuate that sort of same visual image of the Vikings? I hope so. It's partly the material culture but it's also the material culture in its context and it extended to the

actor's experience. So Alexander Skarshgord, who plays Amlath, he's spoken about the fact that he wore the same pair of replica shoes for the entire movie and they gradually fell apart and the costume designer sort of repaired them in the evenings every now and then. So he's spending the movie acting in bad shoes, which is what his character would have worn. And there's a review I read yesterday that said that after an initial banquet scene, there isn't anybody in the movie who looks warm, comfortable or adequately fed. And I know that for some of the actors, I mean, the physical experience was extreme making this film.

And I think that comes out. You see it. We know lots about things like malnourishment in childhood and inadequate diets and so on. I think that really comes out in the film. You feel it. The idea that you kind of sense that there is no nice, warm trailer to go back to when you're doing this,

this is where they live. And it doesn't stop. That's a really valuable thing to communicate. It does that very well in the sort of landscape setting. And I'm thinking now of a village in Iceland, for example. It does look very bleak. And that's obviously that is the reality, especially in Iceland. It is quite a bleak environment.

It's very harsh. It's very cold. And you can see that from how it's built. And I think there's a lot of attention is put on on how to create the buildings, how to get the living conditions. And that landscape setting, I think, comes across really well. Is that something you agree with us as well? Do you feel that that sort of landscape that these Vikings lived in

is actually really well represented in the story. I do. I also think the Icelandic tourist board is going to be ecstatic about this film. It's just such beautiful landscapes, but very harsh and unforgiving. And they're not just scenic backdrops. You feel that they are actually windswept and cold, and you need insulated buildings, and you better put that fur cloak on, otherwise you're going to freeze. It's not a film that tells you how to react.

That's up to you. And the landscapes and the setting of the farm and so on, it's almost an actor in its own right. It conveys the sense of what is going on and how people are feeling, very much as it does in the sagas as well. Are other saga narratives particularly used in the equation of this story?

There are episodes from sagas, yes, I don't want to give too much the way, but Gritty's saga comes into it quite dramatically at one point. Robert and his co-writer, Sean, they're very well versed in the sagas. They know about the differences between, say, the family sagas and the legendary sagas. They're aware of all.

what they're making and what they're not. So it's something that they drew on for the film, but it doesn't follow any particular tale directly. And even the story of Amlith, you know, they make it their own. So, Neil, obviously you're an archaeologist, and archaeology plays a big part in this, but did that have some limitations as well? We talked about the role of archaeology and accuracy and things like that.

I mentioned that there's a lot of necessary guesswork, you know, filling in the gaps, things that we have to speculate about. I think it's important to note that although Robert has been far too kind in talking about the historical advisors, research itself is contested. You know, academics differ amongst themselves. So this isn't sort of the only Viking Age. It's the view of particular researchers. And Robert himself was very conscious of the limitations, the source-critical limitations in the material that we have.

So one of the things he noted was that the clothing, which I think is fantastic in the film, They've worked so hard on it. So much of what we know about it actually comes from burials. And Robert was saying that it's possible that a Viking Age time traveller who saw the movie, their first question might be, why is everybody dressed like dead people? I don't think that's the case, but it's a risk, and we all knew it. So all of that kind of scholarly uncertainty is built in there as well. And I think that is really important to emphasise too.

Yeah, I think that's such a good point, actually. And it's quite rare, I would say, in movies like this, archaeology actually to play such a big part because it's, I think the easy way is to just go straight for the sagas and go straight for those sort of literary narratives. But actually to see so much attention to the archaeology is brilliant from an archaeologist's point of view, at least. Yeah, I think also it's a two-way thing. I remember particularly talking to Linda Muir, the costume designer, and she created these wonderful outfits. Some of the characters are royalty, so that, you know, this is really high-end clothing. And there are scenes of sacrifice in the film,

the blot, this idea of animal sacrifice that involves the sprinkling of blood. And she was saying, you know, there's no way they're going to wear this stuff to act like this because their clothes would be ruined and you're not going to get it out. And she said, I think they must have had special clothes to perform these ceremonies in. And I'd never really thought about that. But the more she talked about it, and bear in mind, there's no proof at all. But that's really logical, actually. So in the film, they wear sacrificial clothes.

And they're stained with old blood. they've been doing this before again and again. Think of a priest's vestments. There's nothing strange about the concept. It's entirely from the imagination of the costume designer. But in conversation with the advisors, it's like, that's a really good idea. And I think she's right.

So that kind of thing, it goes in both directions. It was a really fulfilling experience. And again, there's nothing in the movie that tells you that. Nobody says, now I shall put on my sacrificial clothes. You just see them with all the stains. And you think, what is that? You absorb what is going on. without being told.

That's really interesting because that almost becomes the sort of experimental archaeology. I mean, this is the sort of thing we do. You know, we make things and we create them, we try to use them. And I think if a film can do that sort of thing, then that's wonderful, isn't it?

Yeah, it's just fantastic to work on this. But so Neil, just to sort of round up then this, do you think that this particular movie, so it's a Northman, will actually have an enduring impact on how the Viking Age is understood by the general public at all? It's hard to say,

but I certainly hope so. It's not the same Viking age as we've seen on TV or in other movies, though elements of it are superficially familiar. What I hope is that people will get an impression of an ancient reality, quite a different, quite a frightening reality, and that it might challenge their ideas about what it was like to live at that time and maybe also challenge how they think about it now. I think that was great.

I think as an outcome, surely that's all we can hope for, isn't it, for a bit of entertainments that's set in the Viking Age. Fantastic. Neil, thank you so much for taking part today. This has been at Neil Price talking to me about the new movie The Northman, which Neil was a consultant for. Thank you, Kat. It's been a pleasure to be here.

Brilliant. So thank you all for listening. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. And also to our newsletter, just look in the episode note. support how to subscribe to Medieval Mondays. Thank you so much for listening.

We'll be back again soon.