IN ANTICIPATION OF ROBERT EGGERS’ THE NORTHMAN, A SHORT HISTORY OF VIKINGS ON SCREEN.
WORDS BY TOM HUDDLESTON
The helmets. The beards. The longships. The looting, the pillaging, the red mist of battle. The gods. The runes. The bottomless barrels of mead. Viking iconography has long since passed into cinematic cliché. But how did it get there? And does any of this have a basis in historical fact, or is it all just Hollywood myth-making? As director Robert Eggers prepares to unleash his thunderous Dark Age revenge tale The Northman, we part the veil of history to recount the epic saga of Vikings on the silver screen…
The word ‘viking’ is itself a fiction, an 18th-century catch all term for the Norsemen and Danes who raided the coasts of Northern Europe from roughly the 8th to the 11th centuries. Probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon term ‘wicing’, or pirate, the word came into popular parlance when romantic tales of Nordic heroism caught the Georgian imagination following the publication of ancient texts like the ‘Gesta Danorum’ and the Icelandic ‘Edda’. Nordic imagery was also hijacked wholesale in the operas of Richard Wagner – it was in the staging of these Teutonic spectacles that the somewhat impractical horned helmet made its earliest appearances.
Hollywood’s first significant dalliance with Nordic lore arrived in 1928 with technical marvel The Viking, a stirring mini-epic that was the first film to be shot in Technicolor and feature a recorded musical soundtrack (though the dialogue is still provided by intertitles). A boisterous reimagining of real-life Norseman Leif Erikson’s legendary voyage to Vineland, aka North America, it’s notable for a blistering performance from silent B-lister Pauline Starke as Helga, an iron-clad warrior maiden who mercilessly friendzones her fellow barbarians and experiences a sexual reverie while having her wrist splinted.
But Helga would prove an outlier in the years to come: with precious few exceptions, women in Viking movies tend to be thralls, drudges and kidnap victims. A case in point: 1954’s Prince Valiant, a chaotic dog’s dinner of Arthurian fantasy, Wagnerian myth and tonsorial calamity based on a long-running comic strip so ethno-culturally dubious that Edward VII was a vocal fan. The film version features Robert Wagner as a noble, unfairly exiled Viking prince who sports a black pageboy bob so frisky that, in Wagner’s own words, “Dean Martin passed me on the lot and thought I was Jane Wyman.”
Prince Valiant may also feature the final non-ironic appearance of the horned Viking helmet. In fact, the Norsemen’s next major screen
