Go A-Viking

It’s hard to make a good Viking movie. When it comes to seafaring adventurers on the screen, pirates always seem to reap more booty. Oh, sure, there have been skull-and-crossbones clunkers that capsized in theaters - think "Swashbuckler" (a movie about a swashbuckler starring a 49-year-old Robert Shaw?!), "Nate and Hayes" (pairing an uncomfortable-looking Tommy Lee Jones with that kid from "Caddyshack," Michael O’Keefe), "Yellowbeard" (a Monty Pythonesque misfire featuring Graham Chapman), "Pirates" (with a shamelessly hammy Walter Matthau), and "Cutthroat Island" (star Geena Davis lost at sea as a ballsy buccaneer) - but there have also been a number of gems in the treasure chest, including "Captain Blood," starring a very young, very dashing Errol Flynn, "The Crimson Pirate," with Burt Lancaster at his most robust, and, before they started repeating themselves, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films starring Johnny Depp.

But we digress. If we’re going to screen Viking cinema in the moviehouse, we first have to appreciate the uniquely contradictory history of Vikings.


From the eighth to eleventh centuries, during Europe’s Dark Ages, raiders from Scandinavia commanded the high seas and inland waterways from Greenland to the Caspian Sea. In time, they became known as Vikings, after Viken, an area of southeastern Norway. Some accounts say that "viking" was a verb used to describe a temporary avocation for young and adventurous Scandinavian farmers who felt the call to try their hand at marauding and plundering. The phrase to "go a-viking" meant to go to sea on raids.


In the 1988 book The Hollywood History of the World, author George MacDonald Fraser, a novelist who created the Flashman series of farcical swashbuckling books and wrote the screenplays for the popular, frenetically comedic "Three Musketeers" and "Four Musketeers" films of the 1970s, noted, "Hollywood, like God and His angels, took little notice of the Dark Ages." The Stone Age had its "One Million Years B.C." starring cavewoman Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. The Old Testament gave us "The Ten Commandments," with Charlton Heston, and "Samson and Delilah," starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr (Groucho Marx remarked that he couldn’t enjoy a movie "where the leading man’s tits are bigger than the leading lady’s"), while the New Testament produced "King of Kings," with Jeffrey Hunter as a blue-eyed Savior. Ancient Greece presented us with Richard Burton as "Alexander the Great," and the Roman Empire gave us Charlton Heston as "Ben-Hur," Marlon Brando as Marc Anthony in "Julius Caesar" and Richard Burton as Marc Anthony and Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar in "Cleopatra."



"After the Technicolored lights of Rome went out," Fraser wrote, "there was a gap of almost a thousand years which the cameras barely touched, before the next Age of cinema. This is not surprising; the intervening centuries are unfamiliar ground to all but the specialists, with few of those instantly recognizable historic symbols which the cinema requires. But one at least…which Hollywood has presented with style and authenticity - the dragon-headed longship surging out of the mist to pour its helmeted berserkers into the camera, flourishing their axes as they storm ashore in cross-gartered fury, while tonsured priests, peasants and livestock scatter and take to the hills."

Before going any further, we should get one thing straight. No historical depiction exists of a Viking warrior wearing a horned helmet, nor has any Norseman’s helmet with horns been archaeologically unearthed. Considering the style of close-quarters combat favored by Vikings, horned helmets would have proven a cumbersome hazard. According to the staff at Straight Dope website, "Horns provide nothing more than a good handhold to steady your work while you’re slitting someone’s throat."

The possibility that helmets adorned with horns may have been used in Norse cultures for religious or ritual ceremonies remains unproven, so just who first painted this romanticized picture of Viking raiders? Ancient Roman writers described Northern Europeans as wearing a variety of outlandish ornaments on their heads. Historian Plutarch noted that the Cimbri, a Germanic tribe from Northern Europe (below), wore "helmets made to resemble the heads of wild beasts," horns included.




The Gothic League, or Geatish Society, created in the early nineteenth century by Swedish poets and authors as a social club for academics, advocated the contemplation of Vikings and Norse mythology - often illustrated with horned helmets or, in the case of Norse gods, winged helmets - as examples of high and moral aspirations, unaltered culturally by contact with non-Nordic, or non-Germanic, peoples, a nationalistic concept later adopted by and twisted by Nazi Germany.



The clichéd image of Vikings in horned helmets has been popularized in the comic strip "Hagar the Horrible" and in the 2010 hit film "How to Train Your Dragon"...


...not to mention the perpetuation of that image right here in the moviehouse backyard by the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings and the parade of successive mascots…











(Minnesota was awarded the National Football League’s fourteenth team franchise on January 28, 1960...

...Eight months later, after tossing around such names as the Chippewas, Miners and Voyageurs, the team officially became the Minnesota Vikings to honor the state’s Scandinavian-American heritage and culture.)

The unglamorized truth of the matter is that the Viking warrior was typically protected by a simple, conical helmet of leather and iron, a leather vest and a wooden shield. They fought with spears, heavy swords and battle-axes.

What particularly singled out the Vikings in the expansive range of their military and commercial voyages was the genius and mastery of their shipwrights. Joseph Roquemore, author of 1999’s History Goes to the Movies, noted, "The elegant, nimble warships drew very little water and proved remarkably versatile: unmatched for river fighting, coastal raids, and battle on the open seas, they were trim enough for portage around fortifications, inland shallows, and waterfalls." The storied shipbuilders would bind sections of the vessels with sturdy spruce roots, giving the dreaded longships a strenuous flexibility that left them nearly indestructible in the worst of squalls. Steered with a side rudder and powered by oars and a single sail, a longship could cleave ocean waves at ten-knots speed.

Initially, longships could carry 80 able-bodied warriors. The great vessels of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were manned by much larger crews. Regardless of the numbers onboard, Viking warriors would repeat tried-and-true tactics on every foreign raid. Once they beached their ships, they quickly built camps and fortified them with earthen and log barricades. They attacked in shoulder-to-shoulder phalanxes or from large wedge-shaped formations called "Swine Arrays" or "Bear Snouts."

Dr. William Fitzhugh, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution, maintains that the Vikings "weren’t out to kill everyone in the countryside but rather to find a way to live and set up shop." Commenting on their feared raids, Fitzhugh said, "They had to find food, and they couldn’t carry their food with them. They had to live off the land, so they drove people out and took whatever money and other valuables people had. And, of course, the church and monasteries…constituted the major sources of wealth at that time."

One of the most infamous Viking raids occurred in A.D. 793 at Lindisfarne, a monastery in northern England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded, "In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of Northumbria. There were excessive whirlwinds, lightning storms, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and…the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne." For the monks, according to Fitzhugh, "the attack represented the vengeance of Satan on the Christian outposts of Europe."

A Northumbrian scholar wrote, "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race…The heathens poured out the blood of our saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets."

Every eyewitness account - not surprisingly from Christian victims - emphasized the ferocity of Viking assaults, singularly unleashed by a subgroup of Norse warriors called berserkers. Our adjective "berserk" comes from "berserksgangr," Old Norse for "bear-shirts." Bare-headed, they wore animal skins and fueled their frenzy with handfuls of psychotropic muscarine mushrooms. According to the early thirteenth-century Ynglinga saga, berserkers "rushed forward without armor, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or wild oxen, and killed people at a blow, but neither fire nor iron told upon them."

(For a strikingly accurate, contemporary depiction of the berserker, look no further than the late John Matuszak's portrayal of stoked offensive linesman O.W. Shaddock in 1979's "North Dallas Forty." "Tooz," in real life a threatening defensive linesman for the NFL's Oakland Raiders, is pictured at far right below.)

Joseph Roquemore wrote, "The bear-shirts were fearsome, but by all accounts only slightly more fanatical than run-of-the-mill Norse warriors."

Back home, returning from raiding expeditions, a Viking would settle back into the plodding existence of a day-to-day farmer. The Norse lived in sod-roofed houses and raised cattle. "And they obeyed their wives - always," Roquemore noted. The married woman wielded weighty influence within the community. She controlled domestic chores with a silent determination so strict that historians described the husband as completely docile in the face of the severe practicality and will of the Norse female.

By the end of the eleventh century, their assimilation into indigenous populations throughout Europe ended the Vikings’ so-called reign of terror. Fitzhugh commented, "The Vikings were great at absorbing people. They needed slaves, they needed people to help row, they needed people to help maintain their lifestyle. They regularly set up small villages…where they could overwinter or stay for months at a time, and they needed people to help run those establishments…if you were able to put yourself back into the camp of a raiding Viking group, you probably would find Italians and Spaniards and Portuguese and French and Russians…It wouldn’t just be blond, blue-eyed Norsemen."

"The end," Fitzhugh noted, "probably came about as a result of tired Vikings who had become citizens of many places in Europe. They had become Christians back in their homeland…and the economy had become such that you could get along much better as a trader rather than a raider."

Roquemore wrote, "Awful memories of their raids gradually faded, surviving only as plot elements for long narrative sagas written in the ancient runic alphabet…" He pointed out that the historical paradox existing between the notoriety of Vikings as the most barbarous warriors of all time and the fact that their sole, lasting contribution to European civilization was literary.

"No matter what you think of it," Fitzhugh said, "the Viking period was a kind of hinge in European history. It was the time you went from early history and classical civilization into what we know as modern Europe and a modern world, in which people are exchanging ideas and moving around rapidly and exploring new frontiers, looking for new resources and new connections. When we look into the future now, I think we implicitly look back to the Vikings as the origin of this kind of human endeavor to find new horizons, go to new places, use new technology, meet new people, think new thoughts…this is the inspiration of the Vikings…we can look to space, to the oceans, to explorations among our own peoples, finding new ways of getting along, mixing, and sharing." (Not surprisingly, NASA dubbed its two ambitious missions in the 1970s to probe the surface, atmosphere and possibility of life on Mars the Viking program.)

But we digress. (To be continued…)