The Vinland Sagas on City of Man Podcast

It’s a been a somewhat slow month here on the blog. Work, travel, illness, and some exciting personal developments have conspired to keep me from blogging much apart from announcing the publication of The Snipers and my commitment to John Buchan June. Fortunately there is plenty of that, and I hope y’all have enjoyed that as much as I have my reading and writing for it.

But mercifully I did find time last week to record another episode of City of Man’s ongoing Medieval Times series with my friends Coyle and David. The subject: the Vinland Sagas, concerning the family of Eirik the Red and their discovery and brief, violent settlement of North America around the year 1000.

In the episode we cover the background, including a refresher on just what exactly sagas are as a genre of literature, the Norwegian and Icelandic antecedents to the continuous westward sailing of the Norse, the personalities involved, the events of The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga, what to make of the sagas in historiographical terms, and geography, outlawry, ghosts, polygamy, religious conversion, sword-wielding pregnant women, and much, much more.

We conclude by asking why it was that the Norse settlements on Iceland lasted while those in Vinland didn’t. We also make plenty of recommendations for further reading and viewing, both good and bad.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Sticher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by listening in the embedded player in this post. You can find the episode’s page at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site, including links to our viewing recommendations, here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

Andvari's ring vs Sauron's ring

A happy coincidence: Yesterday morning saw the arrival of the latest episode of The Rest is History, in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk through Tolkien’s life and work. This was the morning after I read my two older kids the story of the cursed ring and the tragedy of Sirgurð and Brynhild in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen.

So I was primed to think about magic rings. (Not that it takes much.) Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion is excellent and thought-provoking, especially as they point out the ways in which Tolkien was essentially modern. Tolkien came of age among the World War I generation, and Holland and Sandbrook point out some interesting resonances of his work with that of more obviously modern writers like Eliot and Joyce, with whom Tolkien shares some surprising interests, sympathies, concerns, and suspicions—not least his suspicion of technology. That suspicion permeates Tolkien’s work but he articulates the dangerous allure of technology most fully and clearly as the Ring, and thanks to Green the original was already on my mind from the night before. That’s Andvaranaut, the cursed ring of the dwarf Andvari.

In the Volsunga saga, Regin relates a story to the hero Sigurð regarding the origins of the treasure guarded by the dragon Fáfnir. Having unwittingly killed Ótr, one of the three sons of Hreiðmar, the god Loki agrees to pay Hreiðmar for the killing and funds the repayment by stealing it from Andvari. He captures Andvari and will only ransom him for his entire hoard. Here’s the key moment in Jackson Crawford’s translation:

Loki saw all the gold that Andvari owned. And after he had taken all of it, Andvari still had one single ring, and Loki took that from him as well. The dwarf then hid inside a stone and said that this ring and the gold would cause the death of everyone who owned it.

In Reginsmál, a poem in the Poetic Edda, Andvari utters this in verse:

This gold
that Gust used to own
will cause the death
of two brothers,
and cause grief
for eight kings.
No one will enjoy
my treasure.

True to Andvari’s curse, the ring immediately works its baleful magic upon Loki, Óðin, and Hreiðmar and goes on to cause, in Green’s phrase, “ruin and sorrow” for many more.

This may be the original inspiration for Sauron’s One Ring, but, as I noted recently, Tolkien was annoyed by suggestions that his ring was merely the sum of his inspirations. (Per Tom Shippey, “People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases.’”) These passages highlight the key difference.

Both rings work evil: Andvari’s ring because it is cursed and Sauron’s ring because of what it is—what it was designed and made to do. It is an instrument, a technology designed to achieve certain ends. And like any technology, its relationship with its users is not one-way. As all technologies subtly warp their users’ needs and preferences to conform to what the technologies can provide, Tolkien brilliantly depicts the way the ring foreshortens and limits the options of those who use it, so that they only begin by using it and end up desiring it. As he wrote in 1944 regarding the methods used even by the Allies during World War II: “[w]e are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.”

Technologies are not neutral. The danger of technologies to all who use them rather than the danger of a curse—this insight is both the most modern thing about Tolkien and among the greatest lessons he can still teach us.

You can read some related thoughts—on the possibility of using Twitter for good—from back in the spring here, and here’s an excellent essay on Tolkien by Sandbrook at UnHerd. Here’s a seven-minute summary from Crawford of the whole complicated Andvari incident. And Roger Lancelyn Green is, for my money, the most underappreciated Inkling and his Myths of the Norsemen has been the ideal bedtime read for my seven- and five-year old. Do check it out.

The Northman

Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth in The Northman

Every once in a while I leave the theatre after a movie and, as I cross the parking lot, realize that I’m… not groggy, exactly, but disoriented. A little out of it. Like the real world has become strange to me, like I’ve been gone a long time. The nearest thing I can compare this sensation to is waking up from a deep sleep and a very convincing and involving dream.

The Northman is the first time I’ve had that sensation in many years.

As I’ve written here before, calling a movie “immersive” is a marketing cliché but in this case it’s true, and not far into the story it swallowed me up utterly.

Amleth, Prince of Denmark

The Northman tells the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), the only son of the Danish king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). At the beginning of the film, Amleth eagerly awaits his father’s return from the raiding season. Aurvandil sails back with a fleet laden with loot and slaves and celebrates uproariously with his son, queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), kinsmen, and hearth-companions, but he broods as well over the need to prepare young Amleth for the responsibilities of manhood—chiefly defending his family and people or, as another character puts it later, “kindness to your kin [and] hatred to your enemies.”

The king takes Amleth through an arcane nightlong rite of passage and rewards him at the end with a neckring and pendant, a sign of his new status. But as they leave the temple where they had passed the night, the king’s bastard half-brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang) ambushes and kills the king. Amleth, witness to his father’s murder and the depredations of the warriors loyal to Fjölnir, sees his mother being borne off by his uncle before he takes a boat into the open sea, vowing revenge.

“Years later,” as the film tells us, Amleth lives among a band of raiders plundering their way up and down the rivers of the Rus, modern-day western Russia and Ukraine. After a bloody raid on a Slavic village, Amleth overhears a group of slavers divvying up their wares for shipment to distant markets and customers—Uppsala, Kiev, and an exiled king named Fjölnir. Amleth probes for information. Fjölnir was one of several petty kings unseated and driven out by King Harald Fairhair of Norway and lives in Iceland now. “He killed his brother for nothing,” Amleth’s fellow raider tells him. “Now he’s a sheepfarmer.”

Amleth, driven on by the prophecy of a seeress (Björk) he meets in the ruins of the Slavic village he just helped destroy, seizes this opportunity to embrace his fate and seek revenge. He steals Slavic clothing from a corpse, cuts off his hair, and joins the cargo of the slave ship heading for Iceland.

Along the way Amleth meets a prophetess named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is not fooled by his disguise and, upon arriving in Iceland, he insinuates himself into the slave population of his uncle’s farm. There, he observes his uncle Fjölnir, who is not just any sheepherder but a goði or chieftain and priest of the god Freyr, his mother Gudrún, and her two sons by Fjölnir, and bides his time, working his way up and searching steadfastly for the right moment to avenge his father and rescue his mother. And it soon proves he will need supernatural help.

If any of that sounded familiar, it should. “The Northman is Hamlet,” as James Berardinelli puts it in his review. Both stories originate with the medieval chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, who told the story of Amleth and his quest for revenge in his Gesta Danorum or History of the Danes. Shakespeare did his own thing with the story. What The Northman’s writers and director have done is set it in a hazy part of the Viking Age (the film begins in 895) where a fictional family could fit in and fashion the story into a “lost saga.” And all of the best elements of the Icelandic sagas are here: murder and revenge, seasons of raiding in the Baltic, dueling, outlawry, mountaintop swordfights, violent contact sports, as well as magic, cursed weapons, and ghosts worked without blinking into the workaday life of an Icelandic farm.

Eerie, involving, and exciting, not to mention brilliantly acted and staged with plenty of grim surprises throughout—it’s great.

Kindness to your kin

The Northman is so dramatic and involving and so loaded with nice details that I could easily turn this into a trivia section or bullet list of things I liked or simply noticed. But to keep this review manageable, I’m going to focus on three fairly broad things that I liked about the film.

First, the film is technically excellent. This is no surprise for a film from Robert Eggers, but it bears mentioning. The cinematography, sound, music, and sets are all outstanding, as are most of the costumes (about which more below). It’s also clear that a scrupulous attention to historical detail went into the design and construction of everything shown onscreen, and while it’s not perfect (no historical film will ever be), it’s the best the Viking Age has ever looked in a movie. I especially liked the cinematography, which has a pervasive gothic atmosphere and is dark and moody where appropriate—especially a scene in which Amleth has to visit a, shall we say, hostile location in order to obtain a sword—but also lets some sunshine and green pastures in. The film has a texture that sells everything in it as real, even the most hallucinatory parts.

Second, I appreciated the film’s heavy emphasis on religion. You might get the impression from other modern Viking stories, like Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels or that Kirk Douglas movie that I can’t help but enjoy, that the Vikings were essentially boisterous frat boys or laddish soccer hooligans with a tendency to kill people and occasionally mention Oðinn. Not so here. Religion is, realistically, central. The ulfheðnar with whom we first find the adult Amleth raiding in the east stage elaborate rituals ahead of their attacks; Fjölnir becomes, as I mentioned, a priest of the grotesque phallic god Freyr, and we see several rituals underway in the temple that is his responsibility; and we see parts of Norse funerals and other rites.

The Northman also presents us with a religiously diverse Norse world. Slavic slaves engage in hedonistic nature worship and Fjölnir’s farm has a number of Christian slaves—a realistic detail made all the more powerful by its subtlety. And there are both cultural gaps (one Icelander’s attempt to explain the Christian god underscores how little the Norse understand it) and cross-pollination, not to mention rivalry within even Norse heathenism. The chief deity in Aurvandil’s temple is Oðinn, while Fjölnir honors Freyr. This gives us an unusually realistic picture of unsystematic and ritual-oriented worship.

Much of the scenes of Norse religious ritual are, of necessity, speculative reconstructions. As Jackson Crawford has noted, the Christians who eventually wrote many of the stories from the Viking Age down apparently didn’t have much of a problem with mythology but weren’t going to include a how-to on sacrificing slaves to Oðinn. But Eggers and his team’s speculations seem reasonable to me, and unabashedly present the Vikings as weird. To us.

And that’s the third and final aspect of The Northman that I want to praise: Eggers refuses to soft-peddle the Vikings. Right from the beginning we see the key role slave-trading played in the Norse world, the extremes to which raiders would go to bring home a haul of good cargo, and the human cost of this much-romanticized lifestyle. (Watch a Slavic family try to slip their children out the backdoor of their hut when the Vikings arrive and see if your breath doesn’t catch just a little bit.) The film depicts horrific violence bluntly but not gratuitously, with some of the worst violence left to the imagination. This, too, captures the spirit of the sagas, which report shocking murders and mutilations with an almost journalistic blank face. And the principles guiding the characters—kindness to kin, hatred for enemies, honor, and, above all, fate—are their principles, not ours, and are not softened or adjusted for a modern audience.

What The Northman presents is a world in which violence and ruthlessness exist alongside admirable qualities, a juxtaposition anyone who has read any of the sagas will recognize. Even our heroes behave in ways modern people would find off-putting if not deplorable. And that’s a good thing. The Northman takes us entirely outside ourselves, into a world that doesn’t affirm us. In addition to entertaining, thrilling, and chilling us, it should also disturb and challenge us—as any good-faith encounter with the past should.

Hatred for your enemies

As I mentioned, the movie isn’t perfect, but I can dispense with most of my complaints briefly. For one, there’s probably too much yelling. If you watch it you’ll see what I mean. For another, while Eggers wisely dials the perverse ambiguity of The Lighthouse way down, there’s still perhaps a pinch too much of it, but most scenes in which this plays a role work just fine. And there are the inevitable lapses in historical accuracy or intrusions of anachronism. Most of these are minor or easy to miss—such as a shaman wearing the Ægishjálmur, a symbol popular among neopagans but most likely originating hundreds of years after the Viking Age, inscribed on a piece of birchbark on his head—but they’re there.

My biggest complaint was one I anticipated with the release of the first trailer back before Christmas: I’d still like a little less dirt on everybody, a little more hair care, and a little more color in the clothing. The costuming shows us a sharp distinction between different groups—slaves, warriors like the ulfheiðnar in the Kievan Rus, and nobility like Fjölnir—but the contrast may be a little too sharp. The Northman doesn’t reach Monty Python levels of gloom, filth, and matted hair, but it dabbles in all of those things. In a film that otherwise evinces such care in presenting historical people on their own terms, this seemed like too much of a concession to the Game of Thrones aesthetic.

But if that’s my biggest complaint, count me happy.

Conclusion

Throughout this review I’ve been more concerned with how The Northman brings us into its at simultaneously familiar and strange world, and what I appreciated about the filmmakers’ approach. But let me here, at the end, acknowledge again the outstanding performances by the cast and the surehandedness of Eggers as a director. Forceful, moody, well-acted, and completely involving, The Northman is an artistic masterpiece.

Mound-dweller sighting in The Northman’s new trailer

Ian Whyte as the Mound-Dweller in The Northman

Update: You can read my full review of The Northman here. While I don’t directly address the mound-dweller scene in my review, let me endorse it and say it was one of the film’s highlights.

Yesterday a second official trailer for The Northman appeared on YouTube. As with the original teaser released before Christmas, which I wrote about here, this new trailer doesn’t provide a lot of plot specifics but does offer an abundance of intriguing snippets mostly conveying the same impression as the teaser—murder, revenge, and plenty of bloodletting along the way. It also offered something new, something not seen in the teaser: a mound-dweller.

At the 0:55 mark in the trailer we get three shots in two seconds. First, in a match cut from a deranged-looking Willem Dafoe, the corpse of a helmeted man enthroned in deep shadow. His eyes open. Next, presumably the same figure hunkering down behind a shield and raising a sword, a typical early medieval attack stance. Finally, an over-the-shoulder of the helmeted figure bearing down on the hero, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) as they fight in a tight, gloomy space surrounded by barrels, jars, and at least one shield, all within what looks like the gunwales of a ship.

It’s not much, but oh, how much it suggests. These two seconds show an instantly recognizable encounter with a mound-dweller—the ghost of Old Norse literature.

Caveats and corpses

I use the word ghost advisedly, since ghosts as the Norse conceived of and described them in the sagas are wildly different from the floating, translucent spooks you can simulate with a bedsheet. First, and most importantly, they are corporeal. These ghosts have bodies and can—and sometimes must—be killed a second time. In this respect they are more like zombies, undead revenants that can be killed. Unlike zombies, they are often swollen or grown to enormous size: “big as a bull” is a common description.

Second, it’s not typically hard to locate a mound-dweller. Just look for the mound or barrow where the undead was buried; this will usually be a local landmark. (Old Norse ghost-hunting shows would end after one episode, but probably be much more entertaining.) The mound-dweller, true to its name, could in a sense be said to “live” in its barrow.

Finally, mound-dwellers are almost always hostile. The bedsheet ghost or poltergeist might content itself with moaning at night or trashing a room. Mound-dwellers can be devastatingly destructive, killing cattle and any people it can catch.

Beyond that, there’s some variety in how these ghosts are described and how they behave, something reflected in the terminology. A commonly applied word is draugr, a general term for an undead revenant. I want to avoid implying that there’s a precise taxonomy to these creatures, but two other words for draugar are suggestive of different kinds:

After-walkers

The first, the aptrganga (literally the “after-walker,” i.e. walking around after he’s dead), roams around, usually at night, causing trouble and killing people or damaging property before returning to its barrow. These are the most fearful and destructive ghosts.

A famous is Víga-Hrappr or Killer Hrapp, a man who appears in Laxdæla saga or The Saga of the People of Laxardal. A pushy neighbor and household tyrant, Hrapp actually drives his neighbors to combine against him for mutual support. He finally dies—in bed, weakened but still malicious, and asking to be buried sitting upright so he can watch the house. These are all bad signs. The saga writer goes on:

But if it had been difficult to deal with him when he was alive, he was much worse dead, for he haunted the area relentlessly. It is said that in his haunting he killed most of his servants. To most of the people living in the vicinity he caused no end of difficulty and the farm at Hrappstadir became deserted.

One of the saga’s heroes, Hoskuld, disinters Hrapp and reburies him farther from everyone’s farms. “Hrapp’s haunting,” the saga writer tells us, “decreased considerably after this.” That’s not enough assurance for a lot of people, including Hrapp’s widow, who refuses to move back, so Hoskuld himself moves into the area. It’s Hoskuld’s son, Olaf the Peacock, who finally rids Laxardal of Killer Hrapp.

One evening the farmhand in charge of the non-milking cattle came to Olaf and asked him to assign the task to someone else and ‘give me other duties’.

Olaf answered, ‘I want you to look after your own duties.’

The man replied he would rather leave the farm.

‘Then you must think something is seriously wrong,’ Olaf said. ‘I’ll accompany you tonight when you tie the animals in their stalls, and if you’ve any cause for complaint, I won’t blame you. Otherwise you’ll pay for causing trouble.’

Olaf then took the spear known as the King’s Gift in his hand and went out, the servant following him. Quite a lot of snow had fallen.

They reached the cowshed, which stood open, and Olaf told the servant to go inside, saying. ‘I’ll herd the animals inside for you and you tie them in their places.’

The servant went towards the door of the cowshed but suddenly came running back into Olaf’s arms.

When Olaf asked what had frightened him so, the servant answered, ‘Hrapp is standing there in the doorway, reaching out for me, and I’ve had my fill of wrestling with him.’

Olaf approached the door and prodded with his spear in Hrapp’s direction. Hrapp gripped the spear just above the blade in both hands and gave it a wrench, breaking the shaft. Olaf made a run at him, but Hrapp let himself sink back down to where he had come from, putting an end to their struggle.

Hrapp having cheated by sinking into the ground and ending the fight, Olaf goes to the place where Hoskuld had reburied Hrapp and opens the grave, in which he finds eerie confirmation of the previous night’s struggle: “Hrapp’s body was perfectly preserved and Olaf found his spear blade there.” Olaf has the body burned and the ashes scattered at sea, ending the haunting.

The outlaw Grettir the Strong fights and kills two draugar in the saga named after him. The second, a shepherd named Glam, freezes to death and returns as a ghost to terrify the farm where he died. When Glam enters the farmer’s hall at night, Grettir confronts him, cuts off his head, and stuffs it between the corpse’s legs against the buttocks.

The mound-dweller proper

But the first of the two draugar that Grettir fights in his saga belongs to the other subset: it’s a haugbúi, a mound-dweller devoted to protecting its mound and grave goods. Told of Kar the Old’s haunting and terrorization of the countryside, Grettir resolves to kill the ghost—not by waiting to encounter it in the wild, by accident, but by entering the mound and confronting it:

The night passed; Grettir appeared early the next morning, and the [farmer], who had got all the tools for digging ready, went with Grettir to the howe [barrow or grave mound]. Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; Audun implored him not to go down, but Grettir bade him attend to the rope, saying that he meant to find out what it was that dwelt there. Then he descended into the howe. It was very dark and the odour was not pleasant. He began to explore how it was arranged, and found the bones of a horse. Then he knocked against a sort of throne in which he was aware of a man seated. There was much treasure of gold and silver collected together, and a casket under his feet, full of silver. Grettir took all the treasure and went back towards the rope, but on his way he felt himself seized by a strong hand. He left the treasure to close with his aggressor and the two engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed. The howedweller made a ferocious onslaught. Grettir for some time gave way, but found that no holding back was possible. They did not spare each other. Soon they came to the place where the horse's bones were lying, and here they struggled for long, each in turn being brought to his knees. At last it ended in the howedweller falling backwards with a horrible crash, whereupon Audun above bolted from the rope, thinking that Grettir was killed. Grettir then drew his sword Jokulsnaut, cut off the head of the howedweller and laid it between his thighs.

Most prized of the treasures Grettir recovers from Kar’s mound is a sword, and many of the stories in which heroes break open mounds do so either with the result of or, as with the shieldmaiden Hervor in The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, for the express purpose of getting a sword.

Conclusion

Again, I want to emphasize that Norse literature doesn’t present a Linnaean taxonomy of supernatural creatures, and you should have noticed some overlap and sloppiness in how the passages quoted here describe these creatures. Kar the Old, though explicitly a mound-dweller, apparently also leaves the mound sometimes, driving people out of the area just like Killer Hrapp. And Killer Hrapp, a clear case of the after-walker, is dispatched like any mound-dweller—disinterred and destroyed.

The three terms I’ve unpacked are not apparently completely interchangeable, but there is enough overlap to allow for using them loosely. What mattered more to the saga writers and the generations of Icelanders who handed these stories down was the stories themselves. And those stories have inspired generations of storytellers and writers since, including myself.

The ghosts in The Saga of Grettir the Strong and other sagas directly inspired my first published novel, No Snakes in Iceland. In that story, set on a farm in late 10th-century Iceland, the brother of a prosperous farmer drowns in a frozen river and, following his hurried burial in a mound, returns to terrorize his brother’s farmstead and those of the surrounding valley. He rides the house like a horse, kills cattle and men, and, in his bloodiest attack, breaks into the farmstead’s hall itself. The novel’s narrator, Edgar, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and poet living in self-imposed exile, reluctantly accepts the task of killing the ghost. This proves harder than even Edgar anticipates, and also reveals that there is much more going on among these farmsteads than the attacks of a ghost.

But rather than the roving, cattle-throttling variety, The Northman’s ghost seems pretty clearly to be the mound-dweller proper—and not just any mound-dweller, but one buried enthroned, in fine armor, aboard a ship loaded with goods. What we get in those two seconds of the trailer is strikingly reminiscent of Grettir’s battle with Kar the Old in his mound. Further, the actor playing the mound-dweller, Ian Whyte, a stuntman and former basketball player, stands over seven feet tall, so the filmmakers have clearly also gone for the “big as a bull” characteristic for this mound-dweller. It’s hard to tell from what we get in the trailer, but it should be fantastically intimidating.

I don’t know at what point in the film Amleth’s raid on the mound will take place, or what he will seek there or why (though I’d be surprised if a famous sword doesn’t come out of it), but I’m most looking forward to encountering this ghost.

More if you’re interested

One of the sagas I mentioned here, The Saga of the People of Laxardal, is collected with other goods ones in the excellent Penguin volume The Sagas of Icelanders. It’s Keneva Kunz’s translation in that volume that I quoted from above. It and The Saga of Grettir the Strong are also available in individual volumes from Penguin Classics, as is Eyrbyggja Saga, another saga with a detailed ghost story. And Jackson Crawford’s recent translation of The Saga of Hervor and Heiðrek in Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes includes the strikingly different encounter with a mound-dweller that I allude to above. You can also read most of these for free online at the Icelandic Saga Database, whose translation of Grettir I quote above.

On YouTube, Jackson Crawford offers a concise but detailed breakdown of Old Norse ghosts using the story in Eyrbyggja Saga, with his usual careful attention to the sources, here. If that’s only whetted your appetite for this stuff, he also has an excellent hourlong interview on mound-dwellers, trolls, and other such creatures with University of Iceland Professor Ármann Jakobsson here.

The Northman arrives in theatres next week. Check out the new trailer either embedded above or on YouTube here. And if you can’t get wait or simply want more mound-dweller in your diet, please give my novel No Snakes in Iceland a read.

Men of Terror

Imagining what it was like—Angus McBride’s depiction of Olaf Tryggvason’s final moments at the Battle of Svolder

Old friends or longtime readers of this blog will know that one of the most important questions I bring to my historical study, and the question that bridges the gap between my academic work and my love for writing fiction, is What was it like? Instinctual and unarticulated, this question drove my earliest interests in history, and my formal study always ran parallel to my imagining being there. Then I read John Keegan and, later, Victor Davis Hanson, and their work gave substance and form to those instincts, allowing me to shape my work, from my graduate thesis onward, deliberately to pursue answers to What was it like? in addition to everything else of big-picture importance in historical research.

William R Short and Reynir A Óskarson’s Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat fits snugly into that important interest of mine, pursuing the same question—or set of questions—with regard to warfare in the Viking Age.

I say set of questions because Short and Óksarson don’t stop with imaginative you-are-there reconstructions or interpretations, but collect as much empirical, scientific data as possible on as wide an array of topics as possible in their research into Viking combat. This includes not only collecting archaeological evidence about, say, the build and strength of Viking Age people, but also mining the literary sources, most especially the Sagas of Icelanders but others where necessary, for information on what kinds of weapons and gear were used, and how.

So, for example, based on the numerous violent incidents described in the sagas, Short and Óskarson are able to show that Viking swords were used for slashing or cutting an overwhelming majority of the time and only rarely for thrusting. Furthermore, these data correlate with the design of the thousands of surviving Viking Age swords, which almost always have cutting edges on both sides—some of which, they note, are still sharp a thousand years later—but less tapered, more spoon-shaped points that would be less suitable for stabbing. Here the archaeology and literature back each other up.

Short and Óskarson are also, however, alive to the limits of the available sources and data, and are rightly cautious in their conclusions. They frequently invoke what they call “the coin-toss problem.” Imagine flipping a quarter three times and attempting to derive reliable statistical conclusions about the results of coin tosses from those three examples. While the vast number of surviving swords make conclusions based on attacks described in literary sources more reliable, in many other areas their conclusions have to be much less certain. There is, for instance, exactly one surviving example of a Viking Age helmet, making extrapolation and sweeping conclusions about the design, use, and commonness of helmets unwise. Here one must look more closely at descriptions of helmets in literary sources—all the while keeping in mind that many of these post-date the Viking Age by centuries.

This is a delicate balancing act, but Short and Óskarson are admirably judicious in their use of all available sources and refuse to draw unwarranted conclusions. I have to say that this was enormously refreshing, especially when it comes to contentious topics like Hollywood’s favorite Viking, the “shield-maiden.”

But their willingness to embrace the difficult work of squaring what we know from often fragmentary archeological knowledge with the literary sources and all their potential flaws is not the only strength of Short and Óskarson’s book. They also bring a great deal of practical, empirical knowledge to their analysis. Through research conducted through Short’s “experimental archaeology” group Hurstwic, the authors tested their conclusions using reconstructed Viking Age weapons, armor, and clothing. This includes measuring the force of sword blows using scientific instruments, the cutting power of various Viking weapons using animal carcasses, and even much simpler experiments. The sagas recount great heroes swimming fully armed and armored. Is this possible? Short and his collaborators found out by suiting some swimmers up and dumping them in the water. Inexperienced swimmers sank almost immediately, but some Scandinavian participants accustomed to cold water swims carried on just fine. Fascinating, even exciting stuff.

After early chapters on sources, methodology, and their attempt to understand the Vikings from the inside out (about which more below), Men of Terror settles into a series of chapters exploring specific topics—the numerous kinds of weapons used throughout the Viking Age as well as armor, shields, dueling, raiding, naval combat, mass infantry battle, and grappling or “empty-hand” combat. Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with pictures of surviving archeological examples, drawings or reconstructions based on research, maps and photos of actual locations of fights and ambushes in Iceland, pictures of Hurstwic experiments and reenactments, and charts laying out all kinds of data—average blade length of surviving swords, the causes and results of duels in the sagas, the relative lethality of attacks with different kinds of weapons, and more.

These weapon by weapon and tactical chapters, with their mix of literary and archaeological research as well as real-world experiment, make up the bulk of the book. But one early chapter is perhaps the most valuable and sets the tone for all the rest: Short and Óskarson’s chapter on “the Viking mindset.”

This, too, is speaking my language. I’ve invoked Chesterton’s vision of “the inside of history” here time and time again. Short and Óskarson drive straight at this, seeking to understand the warriors of the Viking Age on their own terms rather than importing the ideals of the present day to the past. I use the phrase their own terms deliberately: Short and Óskarson work through some key Old Norse vocabulary—most especially drengskapr, manliness, and orðstirr, word-glory or fame—to establish why Vikings did what they did. They follow this up throughout the book by staying on guard for the intrusion of their own modern mindsets, always aware that what strikes them as most “efficient” or “likely” may never have occurred to a man of the Viking Age. This is a selfless, genuinely openminded approach to understanding a long-departed culture, and it’s one of the things that makes Men of Terror especially good.

I could go on much longer, but hopefully this has given you a taste for this excellent book. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in the Viking Age or medieval military history at all.

More if you’re interested

I discovered Short and his organization Hurstwic through Jackson Crawford, who has interviewed Short on his YouTube channel. These interviews are excellent resources in and of themselves. Here are Part I and Part II. If this “mindset” or “inside of history” approach resonates with you and you have an interest in the Viking Age, especially the literature thereof, let me also recommend Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die, which I read this summer.

The Vikings

This week, Historical Movie Monday is pinin’ for the fjords. The film is The Vikings, a 1958 bigscreen epic starring Kirk Douglas, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, and Janet Leigh.

“I drink to your safe return in English ale. I wish that it were English blood!”

— Kirk Douglas as Einar

The history

AD 793—like 476, 1066, or 1914—is one of European history's ineradicable points of periodization. Historians debate how important the date is, point to this or that precedent that proves its relative unimportance as one part of a long process, while opponents note how much demonstrably changed after it, and little by little its importance is further cemented. In this case, the year marks the traditional beginning of “the Viking Age.”

While western, Christian Europe—the world of Charlemagne—had prior contact with heathen Scandinavia through trade and travel, 793 is the year raiders attacked the undefended monastery of St. Cuthbert at Lindisfarne on the northern English coast. In a lightning strike from the sea, a small band of Norse raiders surprised, assaulted, plundered, and escaped from the monastery with a huge haul of valuables—including especially human property.

While there are arguably slightly earlier Viking attacks, the raid on Lindisfarne, with its indiscriminate violence, shocked Christendom. The great English scholar Alcuin of York, in a contemporary letter, described how “the pagans have desecrated God's sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street.”

Despite prehistorical ties of ancestry, culture, and custom, by 793 the Norse were utterly alien to their victims in Christendom. They were still polytheists who honored heathen gods like Oðinn, Þorr, and the grotesquely endowed Freyr, sometimes with gruesome human sacrifice reenacting Oðinn’s sacrifice of himself to himself, enthusiastically practiced slavery and concubinage, and recognized no limits or boundaries to their aggression. Might made right, a point made abundantly clear in the legends and myths they told about themselves. Heroes like Volsung, Sigurð, and Ragnar Loðbrok took what they could, where they could, showed no mercy—not even to their own children if they proved weak—and all died violent deaths.

Over the 250 years after Lindisfarne, raiders from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—the “Northmen”—repeatedly attacked along the entire coastline of western Europe and struck deep into modern-day Russia along the Volga and the Don, all the way to the Black Sea, where they were hired as mercenary bodyguards to the Roman emperor in Constantinople. Within a century of Lindisfarne they had reached Iceland, and by the year 1000 had landed in a region they called Vinland before cutting their losses in the face of repeated attacks by the native inhabitants, frightening dark-eyed people they called the skrælings—the Native Americans of northwest Canada.

Due to their proximity to Scandinavia—just a few days’ sailing across the North Sea—the British Isles were the most frequently attacked of the Vikings’ targets. Ireland’s first city, Dublin, was founded as a trading post by Vikings, and of the numerous small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms dividing Britain in 793, all but one, Wessex, fell to Viking attack and settlement, and Wessex only survived thanks to the vision of king Alfred the Great and a complete reordering of its society to defend itself against the invaders.

But like their ancient cousins who had overwhelmed the Roman Empire, the Norse were gradually absorbed from underneath by their victims. One of the most successful Viking warlords, Hrolf (Latinized as Rollo), successfully maneuvered the king of France into offering him a duchy that became known as Normandy. By the time his descendent, William the Conqueror, invaded England, the Norse influence on Normandy remained only in placenames and the big, rugged physiques of its nobility.

Christianization is directly related to the petering out of the Viking Age: whatever the motivations of Norse lords for their conversions, as Christianity took root, the random violence and pragmatic theft dwindled, and Scandinavia began to look more and more like France, Germany, and England—three regions the Vikings, a seemingly existential threat, had once challenged and changed, only to be changed in turn.

The film

Kirk Douglas produced and starred in The Vikings, which came out in 1958. He had done the same for Paths of Glory the year before and would do so again for Spartacus two years later. Like those two films, The Vikings was based on a novel and was packed to the gills with action. Like those two films, Douglas reserved the juiciest part for himself. And like those two films, he excelled in it. One might call these films “vanity projects” if they weren’t so good.

But of these three, The Vikings is probably the film most about the action for its own sake. It doesn’t have the cerebral, meditative quality of the Kubrick-directed Paths of Glory or the ideological passion of Spartacus. But what The Vikings does well, it does very well indeed.

Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar, Janet Leigh as Morgana, and Kirk Douglas as Einar in The Vikings

The film tells a convoluted story worthy, if not quite up to the standard, of Shakespeare. After a brief prologue with wonderful titles based on the Bayeux Tapestry (and narration by Orson Welles), we meet the rampaging Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine), who, within ten seconds of his introduction, kills an English king and—it is heavily implied—rapes the freshly widowed queen. We then see her at the coronation of her late husband's brother Aella as king of Northumbria, a petty tyrant played with arch, greedy effeminacy by Frank Thring (Ben-Hur’s Pontius Pilate). During the ceremony, the queen reveals to a priest that she is pregnant with Ragnar’s child. She hides this fact and, when the child is born, ships him off to a continental monastery for his own safety.

Years later, Aella, perched in his magnificent castle (about which more below), is consumed with defeating the Viking menace, embodied in the still vigorous Ragnar and his son Einar (Douglas). We meet them through Egbert (James Donald, The Bridge on the River Kwai’s Major Clipton) after Aella rather pointedly asks why it is that Egbert’s lands never get raided by the Vikings. Egbert, it turns out, is a traitor, who has sold out his lord and the rest of the kingdom for peace with the Vikings. He escapes to Norway and arrives at Ragnar's home in the first of several stunning sequences of longships sailing into the fjords.

James Donald gives a perfectly awkward fish-out-of-water performance as Egbert when he arrives in Norway, where he settles in with the Vikings and gives the viewer a window into their world. Ragnar spends the time between his raids on Britain partying in his hall, which is created in magnificent and authentic detail, and pestering Einar to be more worthy of him by fighting and plundering more. Einar is vain of his appearance—“He scrapes his face like an Englishman,” Ragnar tells Egbert to explain to us why Douglas didn’t grow a beard for the role—and proud of his conquests and feats, physically and sexually (though always in a 1958-appropriate manner).

Later, while out hawking, Egbert and Einar have a run-in with a slave, Eric. Eric sics his hawk on Einar, who loses an eye in the attack, which is genuinely violent and disturbing. The disfigured Einar is only prevented from murdering Eric on the spot by the old lady who casts runes in Ragnar’s hall. The two will be rivals for the rest of the film.

Also thrown into the mix is Morgana (Janet Leigh, two years before Psycho), a Welsh princess betrothed to the ageing Aella. Ragnar sends a longship to intercept Morgana on her voyage to Aella’s castle and abducts her as a bargaining chip, but Einar—being portrayed by a lusty Kirk Douglas—decides he has to have her and won’t take no as an answer. Eventually, Eric is able to effect an escape from Ragnar with Morgana’s help, and it is to Morgana that he tells his tragic story—he was sold into slavery as a baby, when the ship he was on was captured by the Vikings. No bonus points for guessing whose son he turns out to be.

I rewatched The Vikings last week to prepare for this post and can’t be sure if I’m remembering these story elements and plot devices in the right order—and it doesn’t really matter. The Vikings is high melodrama of the kind Shakespeare delighted to construct, with secret identities revealed, love triangles, tortures and mutilations, violent duels, and a high body count by the end. Ragnar meets his grisly end in a pit full of ravening wolves, there’s a great high-seas chase that ends in a fogbank, and a brutal climactic battle in Aella’s coastal stronghold that ends with a duel to the death. It’s all immensely entertaining.

The film was a major international production, with a budget over $3 million and location shooting in Norway, Brittany, and—of all places—Yugoslavia. Douglas hired Richard Fleischer, with whom he had previously worked on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, as the director, and Fleischer’s work here is excellent. The scenery, especially the sequences filmed in the Norwegian fjords, is stunning, and the sets are great. The film’s score, by Mario Nascimbene, is rousingly bombastic even if the main theme gets a bit repetitive after a while.

Tony Curtis's gams, front and center for an unfortunate amount of screentime

The performances are good, not great, but again, they’re not really the point. Tony Curtis seems miscast for the first two-thirds of the film until he looks sufficiently roughed up and bearded at the end, when he has to be taken seriously as a warrior. Until then, his prettiness—which I think was only ever an asset as The Great Leslie—and the horrible shorts he’s forced to wear just don’t work. Frank Thring is hamming it up, to good effect. Janet Leigh is passable as the beautiful princess.

Where the actors don’t excel, I think the writing is to blame. The story is fun, but the dialogue is often really obvious. Witness that early scene in which Aella is crowned king of Northumbria. As Aella, enthroned, is presented with a ceremonial sword, part of its hilt falls off and the entire court reacts with stunned silence. Egbert steps forward, picks it up, hands it back to the bishop, glances at Aella, and says, “A bad omen.” Okay. Got it.

The two best performances are those of Kirk Douglas—naturally, since the film is basically constructed for him to show off his charisma and physicality—and, surprisingly, Ernest Borgnine, who is fully believable as a bluff, hearty Viking warlord. His final scene before being chucked into the wolfpit, a scene in which he briefly believes he will be killed in a manner that will keep him out of Valhalla, is excellent.

The film as history

Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar in his hall in The VIkings

The Vikings is based on pulp novelist Edison Marshall’s novel The Viking, which is itself loosely based on elements of Ragnars saga Loðbrokar or The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, which describes the life of Ragnar, who married the long-lost daughter of Sigurð the Dragonslayer, and his eventual capture and death in a pit of snakes at the hands of the devious English king Ella. Ella—Ælla in Anglo-Saxon and Aella in the film—is a real person, having ruled Northumbria for a few years in the 860s before dying in battle with the Vikings at York in 867. This is how fuzzy and incomplete our sources for this place and period are.

Ragnar Loðbrok (literally Ragnar Shaggypants) exists at the hazy edges of history and legend; I’m personally inclined to believe him entirely legendary, like Robin Hood, but we can’t really know for certain.

The rest of the story and its character are fiction but, as George MacDonald Fraser writes in his Hollywood History of the World, it is “fiction against a carefully researched historical background, shot wherever possible in the proper locations, and presented with feeling for its subject.” The film “is what a historical epic should be: an excellent film in its own right, and a striking evocation of period.” Fraser also praises

the film’s atmospheric quality: it is the North on film, rough and cold and raw and beautiful to see, the longships gliding in sunlit triumph up magnificent fjords or slipping away into clammy mist, the gangers carousing in the coarse splendour of their hall, the minute detail of costume and weapon and custom, the triskelion shields advancing over dune and promontory.

“The North on film” is exactly right. The great strength of The Vikings is its evocation of a time and place, a different world. It gets the tone exactly right, and the details—the costumes, sets, props, and customs—almost exactly right.

The clothing, weapons, and other bits of material culture are just about right for the era—the mid-9th century—and Ragnar’s hall in all its beer-swilling chaos is great. The production team took special care to recreate the longships, the signature vessel of the Norse, and the many sequences in which they appear take full advantage of them.

Seen here: not 9th-century fashion

The Vikings themselves are depicted with respect but not blind admiration. Ragnar is a rapist, probably many times over; Einar would be if he got the chance. They like to have a good time and they’re incredibly violent. Neither of these traits is muted or blunted. Viking religion also gets a good depiction, I think, with the myths—the thing most modern people focus on—taking a backseat to ritual, custom, sacrifice, and divination. I struggle to get students to understand that extinct religions were more—much, much more—than the neatly catalogued mythologies they get from Edith Hamilton, Neil Gaiman, or Rick Riordan. The Vikings understands this and enacts its drama accordingly.

Of course the film isn’t perfect, historically speaking. While the combat is mostly good, the realistic shield-wall (skjaldborg) fighting gives way to an Errol Flynn-style mano-a-mano sword-on-sword fight, something that just didn't happen in that era and with those weapons. The Anglo-Saxons also never built stone castles, making the entire showdown at Aella’s fortress (actually a 13th-century castle in France) an impossibility. It’s unclear whether—or, if so, how—runes were used for divination, and the handfuls of Viking funerals for which we have evidence, including the famous Rus funeral witnessed by Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, didn’t happen like the one in this film, which is singlehandedly responsible for the way Viking funerals are usually imagined now. And, perhaps most obviously, in the dead giveaway of all historical films made in the 1950s, 9th century women didn’t wear those pointy underwire bras.

But despite some non-fatal shortcomings The Vikings is a fun historical adventure, an engaging swashbuckler with authentic Viking trappings, and succeeds better than any other film I’ve seen at—to borrow Fraser’s words—evoking an atmosphere of what C.S. Lewis called Northerness: “like a voice from distant regions . . . something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote).”

More if you’re interested

Jackson Crawford, whom I've mentioned here before, is a specialist in Old Norse language, literature, and culture. He published a new translation of the Saga of the Volsungs with the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrok last year. It’s excellent. Check it out if you want a literary immersion course in the world of the Vikings and of Ragnar Loðbrok specifically.

Among the many, many books on Norse history and culture that I recommend are A History of the Vikings, by Gwyn Jones; The Age of the Vikings, by Anders Winroth, who gives a charming and informative one-hour talk on this book here; The Vikings, by Robert Ferguson; The Vikings, by Else Roesdahl, now in a third English edition; and Viking Age Iceland, by Jesse Byock. 

And I always recommend going to the earliest sources we have, in this case The Sagas of Icelanders, a great selection of Icelandic sagas, oral stories passed down from the Viking Age that dramatically depict life in that violent era; and, for the opposite side, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which can be just as dramatic with its spare, dire record of Viking attack year after year.

Next week

Medieval March will continue! Thanks for reading.

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes

This is a good time for Norse myth—or at least it should be. Thor is one of the most popular parts of the central cast of the Avengers series, TV is loaded with Viking or Norse-themed programming, and last year geek darling Neil Gaiman released Norse Mythology, his own retelling of some Norse legends. 

Unfortunately a lot of this pop culture is just Norse-flavored. The Thor, Odin, Loki, and Asgard of the Marvel franchise are entertaining but considerably different from their original versions. TV shows like Vikings have serious historical problems. And even Gaiman's Norse Mythology, an entertaining enough read, limits its focus to the gods—and not just to the gods, but to the subgroup of the Æsir—and his depictions of their personalities owe more to the characterizations of Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston than to the dark and often inscrutable gods of the eddas. 

An excellent short introduction

I was really pleased, then, with a new book I read last week by Carolyne Larrington: The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, from Thames & Hudson. I found the book on the recommendation of Dr. Jackson Crawford of UC Boulder, about whom more below.

I was already familiar with Larrington thanks to her excellent recent translation of the Poetic Edda (a.k.a. the Elder Edda) for Oxford World Classics. She's an accomplished expert in the field and clearly loves the material, which is a good combination when approaching something as diffuse, arcane, and incomplete as Norse myth.

What we know is based almost entirely on the Poetic Edda and another work by Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda, and it is apparent from both that we don't have all the stories the Norse told about their gods and heroes. What we do have is episodic, allusive, and varies wildly in tone, sometimes within the same stories. Larrington retells the myths carefully, noting often what we do and do not know about the fuller mythology, and retelling them mostly on their own terms, without a lot of modern reinterpretation. Where she does offer "explanations" of certain tales, she is appropriately undogmatic.

A few things I appreciated about Larrington's book:

• Short, well-told summaries of the major myths, with good explanations of things first-time readers of Norse mythology would need to know.
• Larrington uses the original spellings of the gods' and heroes' names throughout, including the letters eth and thorn: thus Oðinn instead of Odin and Þorr instead of Thor. This seems like a minor detail, but I think it helps distance the reader from comic books or modern interpretations and open them to the originals.
• Sidebars on interesting side stories or other topics.
• Over 100 illustrations, many from Romantic era books with anachronisms like winged helmets, but the pictures are a welcome help in imagining the stories. Many others are photographs of archaeological finds like the Lewis chessmen, rune stones, or the Oseberg ship or reproductions of original medieval or early modern Icelandic drawings.
• Larrington is refreshingly frank about the unappealing nature of the Norse gods. Where Marvel's Thor is a well-intentioned but arrogant young warrior who learns humility and self-sacrifice and Odin is a wise—and, well, godlike—old man, the real Þorr is an unapologetically violent bruiser who kills people for humiliating him and Oðinn is a malevolent trickster who first favors then traduces mere mortals in order to stock his hall with warriors.
• Larrington includes excellent summaries of several major human heroes, including Volsung, Sigurð the dragon-slayer, and Ragnar Loðbrok. 

All in all, an excellent short book, and a great introduction to the topic. I recommend this heartily as a first stop.

More if you're interested

Check out all of the books I mentioned above, but especially the original sources for our understanding of Norse mythology, the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda.

In addition to Larrington's translation of the Poetic Edda, the aforementioned Jackson Crawford has an excellent new translation available from Hackett Publishing. As a bonus, he includes his adaptation of the Hávamál, "The Sayings of the High One," the Cowboy Hávamál, a western-inflected interpretation inspired by his grandfather. You can listen to Crawford read it here.

Another book Crawford recommends in the video linked above is the longest and most complicated of the Icelandic sagas, Njals saga, or The Saga of Burnt Njall. I read the Robert Cook translation he recommends while I was working on the first draft of No Snakes in Iceland after college. It's a wonderful book, one I've been meaning to reread for years.

Fortunately, Crawford has just completed a six-part summary retelling of Njal's Saga for his YouTube channel. You can watch all six parts below. Check it out!

Part I: Hrút and young Hallgerð
Part II: Gunnar's rise
Part III: Gunnar's fall
Part IV: Njal's sons
Part V: The burning
Part VI: Kári