Sea battles, strong women and slaves: who were the real Vikings?
Alex Diggins speaks to the historical advisers who helped bring 10thcentury epic ‘The Northman’ to life
Did the Vikings have tables? It’s a question even the most diligent scholars don’t lose much sleep over. But it troubled Neil Price. “Presumably they had them,” explains Price, author of The Children of Ash and Elm, a 2020 study of the Viking mind. “But there’s no archaeological record of them, so you have to guess what they looked like.”
You can see his dilemma: as one of the three historical consultants on The Northman, Price was on hand to ensure that Robert Eggers’s grimly magnificent Viking epic (filmed in Iceland) was as accurate as possible. But a key early scene takes place in a banquet hall – and it wouldn’t have quite the same effect if the characters were daintily picking from their laps. In the end, the crew avoided the issue with technical trickery. “There’s a lot you can do with lighting, shadows and where you put the camera,” says Price.
I’d hazard that most viewers are unlikely to notice the furniture. The Northman, a tale of family revenge starring Alexander Skarsgård as the warrior Amleth and told within a wild world of Norse mythology, has a Sturm und Drang styling. Yet despite this, almost every detail – from weapons to clothing pins – corresponds with a historical twin unearthed on an archaeological dig.
Indeed, The Northman (an adaptation of an early-13th-century Danish poem) is textured with authenticity. One moment with which Price is particularly pleased is the scene in which Amleth breaks into a burial mound to retrieve a sword. “Although nothing tells you this, all of the objects in that mound are a couple of hundred years older than the setting [the late 9th century AD].”
The Vikings are a shadow people: we know they existed, but how they lived, thought, fought, and loved is still obscure. Even the word “Viking” is an interpolation. Though it was used in the Scandinavian world to refer to raiding parties, no people thought of themselves as “Vikings”. In fact, the word doesn’t appear in The Northman.
“We know of the Vikings from three different sources,” Price explains. “The most immediate texts are those written about the Vikings, not by them. So we have a lot of rich sources from people who met them, but they normally didn’t say very nice things. In fact, that’s where a lot of our stereotypes about them come from.”
Violence was of course endemic in Viking culture, and Eggers does not shy away from the consequences of the warrior code for those caught on its peripheries. The Viking economy was built on slaves. The harsh weather and poor soil of much of Scandinavia made thralls captured in raids vital.
“There was this endless demand for labour,” says Jóhanna Friðriksdóttir, author of Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World, who also consulted on the film. “They had to produce all these ships and sails during this period of massive expansion. They were putting people to really intense manual labour in really bad conditions.
Women, in particular, had it rough. The Northman has two principal female characters: Nicole Kidman’s Queen Gudrún, who is Amleth’s mother, and Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga, a slave and sorceress, and his lover. Both are tossed around by the same male-driven cycle of ego, honour and violence.
Yet women could have enormous power. While the men were away raiding, many noblewomen ran their homesteads like modern-day CEOs, co-ordinating hundreds of people so the enormous work of feeding, clothing and putting the clan to sea could be completed. The Northman takes this agency one step further: in a brief scene, we see a female commander in battle. The evidence for this figure comes from a grave which appears to show a woman dressed in a warrior’s armour.
But among scholars, Friðriksdóttir says, it’s highly controversial. “It’s one grave and there are tens of thousands of excavated graves. So even if it turns out she was a female commander, I don’t think it’s the norm. This was before contraception, so it doesn’t make sense to take a woman on a raid because pretty soon she’s going to get pregnant.”
Though an intimate story, The Northman hints at a wider universe. Different languages and peoples are shown, and one scene – incidentally set in “the land of Rus”, or modern-day Ukraine – has slaves being divvied up between “Kyiv or Constantinople”. “Something that is often overlooked is that the Viking period stretched over 300 years across a huge territory,” says Friðriksdóttir. “This is just a small story in the northernmost part of it.”
This is a landscape rich in the familiar themes of adventure, heroism and tragedy. But it also promises something else: a fresh perspective on life.
“Their world-view was very different to ours,” says Price. “And what I particularly like about the film is they don’t care – it’s their world, and we’re just living in it.”
‘The Northman’ is in cinemas now