The Vikings on Film: Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages

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.