A brutal hockey-like sport played to the death. Berzerkers dancing and screaming 'til dawn pre-raid. Shallow, stealthy longboats. Though the narrative may be the stuff of legend, the Viking Age detail in The Northman is rooted in history, and writer-director Robert Eggers took pains to get it as close to the real deal as possible.
The Northman is the bloody Nordic tale of Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) on his fate-determined quest to avenge the murder of his father, King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and be reunited with his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). It's a tale you've heard before, probably through Shakespeare's version, Hamlet, unless you're well-versed in the Icelandic Sagas.
Although his films blur the line between reality and magic, Eggers has become known for his intense attention to historic detail with films like The Witch, set on a Puritan family farm in 1630s, and The Lighthouse, set in an isolated lighthouse in the 1890s — both in New England.
In The Northman, Eggers turns to the Viking Age (c.750-1050 CE) in the Nordic countries, making sure to get as far away from dumb horned helmets as possible. We asked Eggers, Skarsgård, and an esteemed archaeologist who worked on the film to dig into the artefacts, literature, and legends that inspired those in the film, so you can smugly explain it at the pub after you've seen it.
How to build a Viking world
Over decades of bloody revenge plans, The Northman moves through impeccably detailed Nordic locations (built and filmed in Iceland and Northern Ireland), with wooden buildings decked out with shields, garments, and carts, inspired by various artefacts and literary sources. First, in the North Atlantic in A.D. 895, we careen through a stronghold fort, wherein lies the royal longhouse of King Aurvandil War-Raven and Queen Gudrún, held up by intricately carved pylons. Later, we're dragged through a one-shot berzerker attack on a Slav village, where families attempt to flee their wooden houses.
This level of accurate historical detail isn't new for Eggers — for The Witch, production designer Craig Lathrop built the farmhouse using techniques and tools from the 17th century. For The Lighthouse, Eggers’ team pored over 19th-century lighthouse keeper manuals and photographs. The massive scale of The Northman had Eggers reduce his team's use of traditional building techniques without compromising on detail.
“Timber is very expensive in Ireland. But the thing is, we are working at a level with such excellent craftsmen that the finishes — as in the paint job to make it look realistic — these craftspeople do it better than anybody," says Eggers. “If we're making, say, the Viking city on the hillside, the buildings that were further away from camera, the exposed timbers will be plaster painted to look like wood that's been taken and moulded off of wood. But anything that got close to camera would be real wood."
Writing the script with Icelandic poet, novelist, and Björk collaborator Sjón, Eggers recruited multiple experts to advise on the production of the film. These included archaeologist and leading Viking Age specialist Neil Price, who has written several books on the subject.
"When it comes to things like the fort, for example, 'fantasy' is too strong a word," Price says. "Robert decided what kind of place he wanted it to be, and then we built that based on bits of places from around the North. The way in which the trunks of trees are laid along an earthen bank to make the fortification wall, that's from several sites in Denmark and Sweden. The gantries along the top, they're kind of conjectural, but we know pretty much what they looked like — and that's also from sites in Denmark and Sweden."
The decorations within Aurvandil's royal hall, which made me audibly gasp when watching the film, are inspired by artefacts found in one of the most famous and well-preserved Viking burial sites to date, the ornately carved Oseberg ship, found in 1904 outside Tønsberg in Vestfold, Norway.
The large majority of armor, clothing, and weapons in The Northman are inspired by artefacts found in different Viking graves and carvings — and no, the Valkyrie in the film is not wearing braces. Amleth's fateful sword, narrative-wise, actually comes from before the Viking Age, so Eggers says there was more room for creative flair. It was based off a few different swords, including the 6th-7th-century Sutton Hoo sword found intact at the famous burial site near the English town of Woodbridge (yes, the one that inspired Netflix's The Dig).
"It was a palimpsest; every scene is like that," says Price. "There's very few things which are from one particular place, because we have to work with fragments."
The cast of The Northman, led by Skarsgård, spent a significant time rehearsing historically informed ways of interacting with these recreated objects; for example, how to row a Viking longboat — one of the most terrifyingly effective means of conquest in history.
"It's a Robert Eggers film, so everything was 100-percent accurate," says Skarsgård. "The boat was built exactly the way a longship would have been built a thousand years ago with the right type of wood, the right type of nail; it was just an extraordinary piece of art.
"It was surprisingly easy to row. They're very shallow; that's also why the Vikings could go up shallow rivers and attack where most people didn't expect to be attacked by longships. We had to practise a lot to be in sync…We obviously had to do it ourselves. Robert would not let us have a little motor or be towed or anything."
For most of the film, Amleth plans his revenge while posing as an enslaved man on a farm in Iceland owned by his uncle, Fjölnir, now a chieftain. Built as closely to a turf-covered Viking Age farm as possible, Price says it's the most accurate of all the sets in terms of building technique. The grass was even planted a year before the shoot so it would be the right type of grass from Iceland, even though they were shooting in Northern Ireland.
"Robert doesn't go in for exposition at all, so you just absorb it," Price says. "You may remember there are some tapestries, you see people washing them and you see one on the wall. They're from Aurvandil's hall, in the beginning of the film. But Fjölnir has come down in the world. He's ended up on this farm in Iceland, and the tapestries are too long for his walls, because his house is smaller. And if you look, they're kind of bunched up in the corners, because he's just cramming them in there."
Also on the farm, The Northman includes an ancient Icelandic sport, a hockey-style game called Knattleikr, in a particularly brutal and pivotal scene in which Amleth is forced to play a violent sport for the pleasure of his masters.
"Some historians think that they didn't actually keep score; it was all about who's the last man standing," says Eggers. "It was an incredibly violent game."
With all this historic detail happening on screen, Eggers' films tend to be a multi-sensory experience for the modern viewer. As Mashable’s Kristy Puchko writes, “Further pulling us into Amleth's perspective is Eggers's tendency to build visual worlds so carefully detailed that you can almost smell them. And that smell is knowingly repugnant. Amleth's is a world not only of blood and sweat, but also mud, rotting flesh, and shit." Hitting another sense, The Northman score features lead instruments from the Viking Age, including lyres made of horsehair, as well as traditional musical techniques like throat singing and kulning.
So, why does accuracy matter so much for a fictional film like The Northman?
"For me and my collaborators, we all know what the bar: It's accuracy. That aligns everyone," says Eggers. "It also cuts down on time, because we know one of the things that this does for the audience is that it hopefully makes it more transportive and immersive, because the atmosphere is an accumulation of details. If we're drawing from research, then we can get to more details quicker...But then also, because I'm interested in not just the physical world, but what's inside the Viking Age mind, I feel like I can't really express that honestly without seeing how they express themselves visually."
The historical accuracy doesn't stop with the set decoration or props, but goes further into the Viking mindset. Well, one, for the most part: the Viking man.
To be Amleth, or not to be, that is the question
The elevator pitch for The Northman is essentially "Hamlet but Vikings," but the inspiration for Shakespeare's tale actually came from the Nordic character of Amleth, featured in the Icelandic Sagas, a large collection of medieval Icelandic literature. Yes, he's a legendary figure, but stories like this always play an important role in anthropology.
"One of the things that excited me when I started reading the Sagas is the modernity of it, and the fact that the characters have, like, such ambivalent everythings," says Eggers. "The heroes of a lot of these Sagas can be kind of psychopaths and outlaws and so making him this antihero was really appealing for all of us."
Amleth is obsessed with revenge and the idea of being bound to his fate, having to decide between "kindness for your kin and hatred for your enemies." Like Hamlet, he’s consumed by vengeance, but unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, Amleth has no issue seeking it.
"Amleth has no problems with revenge, whereas it's an existential crisis for Shakespeare's Hamlet," says Eggers. "But one thing that is in both Hamlet and Amleth that we didn't really do (but was something that me and Alex were both particularly interested in, and Sjón as well) was that he feigns madness. [In The Northman], he doesn't do that, but when he's disguised as an enslaved person on the farm, he feigns being a dullard. Mainly, Sjón and I based him on some other saga heroes like Grettir."
"Amleth has no problems with revenge, whereas it's an existential crisis for Shakespeare's Hamlet."
Price gives a great rundown of the history of the Amleth tale. "The relationship between the Amleth of the movie and all the literary Amleths is quite loose," he says. “The first really developed story we have is in the early 13th century from a Danish history book. It's an episode in this bigger history (there are some earlier things, but they're a bit fragmentary). Then, the Icelandic Saga Amleth is much, much later. Then you've got Shakespeare doing his own thing, which is not really very close to the Norse Amleth. So, Robert's gone back to the source, but he's also made it his own. He hasn't just made an Amleth movie; he wanted to set that in a believable Viking Age, one that was also anchored in as much realism as he could give it."
In Eggers' films, this divide between the real and unreal is often not clear — hello, mermaid from The Lighthouse — which is where being historically accurate gets tricky. But this works when your story is set within a society like that of the Vikings, which had no boundary between these two states of being.
"There was no line between those two realities in the Viking age,” says Eggers. "Sometimes when historians use the Sagas to try to back up archaeology, some people will say, how can you possibly use that, there's like an undead person or a troll? It's like, well, yeah, but that was reality for them."
"There was no such thing as an agnostic or atheist Viking. All that stuff was as real as the grass you're standing on."
Skarsgård did his own research into the character of Amleth and his belief in fate, ritual, and the constant presence of Norse gods and spirits. This was something intertwined with Viking daily life and taught from birth, not an elective belief system.
“It was important to understand Amleth and his relationship to the spiritual world, the supernatural, because that is such a big part of the movie, and what drives him: the dream of being reunited with his father in Valhöll, what his fate is, and what he has to do,” says Skarsgård.
“It was very helpful to read about the spiritual life that the Vikings believed in, the Norns of fate that would weave the fates of each and every man,” he says. "It was important to understand that back then, there was no such thing as 'believing' in these creatures or spirits. There was no such thing as an agnostic or atheist Viking. All that stuff was as real as the grass you're standing on.
"That's a concept that's quite foreign to us where we talk a lot about belief systems...But to them, your neighbor might turn into a wolf when there's a full moon and run around the woods, then come back and be your former neighbor the next morning, and it's absolutely normal."
Unleashing the beast within
In both Viking history and The Northman, ritual is as vital to people in the 8th to 11th centuries as breathing. Eggers is no stranger to the power of ritual being inextricably linked to existence, especially in The Witch. One scene in The Northman that Price says showed a pretty accurate Viking ritual is when Amleth and his group of berzerkers prepare to invade the Slav village. (Price says there's a scholarly split over the specifics of berzerkers, but this kind of ritual "was a sort of dance to get yourself in the mood to going into battle.")
This scene sees the group of warriors shuffling through ritualistic choreography around a fire, then descending into primal howling, unlocking levels of ferocity necessary to commit violent atrocities in the near future. But it's also about a form of shapeshifting — a prominent ability in Viking lore.
“I'm speaking in generalizations here, but there werewolf and bear warriors in the Viking Age that were the elite warriors of their time,” says Eggers. “They were also on the fringes of society, like, the king would want them to be his bodyguard and at the very front lines of his army, but you wouldn't want your daughter to marry a berzeker.
“These warriors were part of a war cult where they would perform a ritual spear dance — this is one notion; some people believed other things, but this is what we went with in the film; our historians liked the best, and I liked the best — is they perform a ritual war dance that's kind of shamanic. Through this ecstatic ceremony, they in — in their minds, but literally, in their minds — they turn into kind of werebears and werewolves, these beasts on the battlefield that make them basically invincible."
According to Price, rituals like the one seen in The Northman have been represented in pieces of art from the Viking Age and written descriptions from the Byzantine world about people fighting Vikings. "They talk about them moving like animals, making noises like animals, which is what they do in the film. I'm really pleased with that," he says.
"We have these metalwork images of men dancing, dressed in bear or wolf skins with spears, and some of them have this strange headdress. It's like a headband with horns. These are not horned helmets, OK? They're really not,” says Price. “There's a challenge not to make them look ridiculous — because men leaping around howling is, you know, it could go wrong — and to make them terrifying."
Skarsgård says the beginning of the berzerker ritual scene was choreographed, but the transformation part was left up to the actors.
“It was very cathartic. I was excited about those scenes,” says Skarsgård. “It's a ritualistic trance, almost like a dance they go into, the berzerkers, in order to kind of awaken the inner beast. So we had to rehearse that bit, but then the second part of it, we didn't rehearse at all, and that was quite unusual...I had to just dig deep, try to find that more atavistic side, and let it out somehow."
Skarsgård compares this blurred line between human and animal, between suppressing and unleashing one’s inner beast, to the works of Francis Bacon, whose exhibition Man and Beast just finished up at the Royal Academy in London, where The Northman premiered.
“I wish I'd seen that before shooting the sequence, because it felt a lot of Bacon's paintings are about that: the friction between man and beast, and the beast within...how you're trying to hold onto your civility and your humanity but the animal comes out,” says Skarsgård. "Some of them it just explodes out of the body, and that reminded me a lot of that transformation, that scene in which Amleth sheds his humanity and becomes Bjǫrnúlfr (or 'bear-wolf'). The beast comes out and he doesn't try to fight it but actually lets it out, which was quite a trip."
If you want to see the result of this ritual for Amleth, it's one of the most violent scenes in the film:
Of course, this level of unleashing the beast comes with some uncomfortable modern associations, and The Northman is, in a sense, an examination of Viking men (among weirdly pristine women), and masculinity. Price has written at length on Viking masculinity, noting in an article, "Beyond the stereotype, there is a cold truth to Viking male violence. At the height of the 9th-century raids, Viking armies shattered the political structures of western Europe: the loss in blood and treasure was immense, thousands were violated and enslaved. There were parallels at home, too, not just in the form of civil warfare between rival petty-kingdoms, but also in domestic violence...Today there are those who tend to glorify the Vikings in their male, militaristic incarnation, but this is a mistake; they were no heroes, at all."
"The thing is that they do terrible things and they are seen to do terrible things, and that's important," Price tells Mashable of The Northman. "Robert and I talked about this a lot. I personally really don't want anybody to come out of that scene and want to be a Viking."
When you’re absorbed in gruesome Viking raids, family drama, and a decades-long quest for revenge, maybe you won't be concerned with the detail in the longhouse’s carved pylons. But that’s the point. You’re meant to simply arrive in this Viking world without a cheat sheet and try to survive. Authentically.
The Northman is now showing in cinemas in the UK, out April 22 in the U.S.
