Over the last decade or so, there has been a boomlet in popular culture in dramatic depictions of the Vikings, the modern name for the pre-Christian Norse inhabitants of Scandinavia. They’ve inspired countless recent films and TV shows, from Vikings, based on the sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok, to Robert Egger’s incredibly historically accurate The Northman. Norse paganism is even practiced in America, and within the US military. But despite their popularity, it appears we cannot cope with the truth about Vikings.
The reality is that the true Vikings were far stranger to modern sensibilities than we wish to acknowledge, a fact reflected in our aversion to the highly realistic but alien world on display in The Northman — which enjoyed less-than-stellar box office returns. By contrast, Vikings did brilliantly, despite taking many dramatic liberties with both history and anthropology in service of today’s culture war. It’s clear that nobody is interested in watching a visual dissertation on Scandinavian Iron Age culture.
The pagan raiders in Vikings reflect the passions and priorities of the modern world. This perhaps explains their attraction: Vikings can be reshaped to our sensibilities in a way the more concrete Christian European civilisation that they ravaged could never be. We know the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the heart of the troubadours, while the God of the medieval world still reigns supreme even today. But the Vikings are comparative ciphers, mostly perceived through the mute witness of archaeology and the propaganda put down by their Christian enemies.
The sequel to Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla, highlights and extends the series’ malleable vision of reality. It is firmly grounded in rich historical detail and actual figures from the late Viking Age, but it rearranges and transmogrifies them to a large extent. The series revolves around the interlocking relationships and entanglements between three characters, Lief Erickson, Harald Hardrada and Freydís Eiríksdóttir. Yet the execution is not of true Viking history, but a fictional drama set in a Viking-themed universe of our imagination. Erick the Red’s children were born 45 years before Hardrada, and we know Lief died when the future Norwegian king was five years old. Vikings: Valhalla glosses over these details, as Lief becomes Harald’s younger protégé and Freydís Harald’s enthusiastic but troubled lover.
But these are not the only liberties taken in the show. Freydís becomes a shield-maiden, one of the ubiquitous female warriors from the original series. Though there are descriptions of female warriors in the sagas, the extant historical and archaeological evidence does not reflect a surfeit of women bearing arms in the Viking world. Fighting was generally the affair of men in the Viking Age, and raiding, in particular, was the province of adolescents who had to establish their bonafides and make their way in the world.
The presence of shield-maidens in the two Vikings series is due to 21st-century Western penchant for “butt-kicking babes” in film, often inexplicably depicted by svelte model-actresses like Frida Gustavsson, who plays Freydís. Gustavsson as an archer is a striking image, but standing 185cm high and weighing 61kg, her fighting prowess against large powerful men is totally implausible. At least Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth in the genuine fantasy series Game of Thrones, seems a creditable warrior, weighing 25kg more than Gustavsson.
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