Kevin J. Harty, ed.,
The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages
Jefferson ,
North Carolina , McFarland, 2011.
Harty is a very well-known film scholar (and remarkably,
also a head of department in a big US university), but his speciality
has long been medieval films. Amply learned, he is also witty: hence his title The Reel Middle Ages for an early but
still invaluable book. In the past his emphasis is has often been on the riches
of Robin Hood movies --- he made the count over seventy, in a range of
languages (Spanish did well) – and the fewer and rather more recherché films
about King Arthur. But he is an indefatigable traveller to conferences and film
libraries around the world and here, like a Viking himself, he sails off on a
new journey, co-ordinating a set of essays that make clear the substantial
contribution made to film by stories about the Vikings, not only in the USA by
any means. It is the first essay-collection on the Vikings in film and there
are some major figures writing here, many of them well-known for their work on
the Arthur myth – Joan Grimbert, Alan Lupack, Elizabeth Sklar, Daniel Hoffman
and the excellent radically-oriented writing team of Laurie Finke and Marty
Shichtman.
Most of the essays deal with important single films -- The Vikings of course, The Long Ships, and less well-known ones
like the Scandinavian Shadow of the Raven
and the sf-oriented Outlander. But
some essays take a different approach as in Asterix
and the Vikings and the Terry Jones vehicle Erik the Viking and there are also wider-ranging treatments, on
women in these films, on the American receptions of the sub-genres (by Harty),
and a typically thoughtful survey by Lupack.
As Harty notes in his introduction, the Vikings were a big
nineteenth-century theme – Andrew Wawn in his major book argued the Victorians
invented the Vikings -- and there are quite a few very early films as result. But the theme has continued, and
clearly touches a nerve in the USA
with its capacity to be a transatlantic frontier myth. This
essay-collection is an important and
laudable voyage into the turbulent, and in several ways quite complex, waters
of the Viking movies.
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