Reviewed by: Simon Trafford (simon.trafford@sas.ac.uk)
The History Channel’s Vikings TV
series is a remarkable phenomenon. Although it has never had quite the budget,
viewing figures or fame enjoyed by Game of Thrones, it has been a
notable critical and commercial success worldwide, not only encouraging distinctly
similar sprawling medieval epics (the BBC’s The Last Kingdom) but even spawning
a successful parody (Norsemen, created by the Norwegian television
company NRK). Nevertheless, Vikings stands as merely the latest in a
long and extremely colourful tradition of cinematic and televisual evocations
of the vikings (a tradition recently explored in Kevin Harty’s splendid edited
volume The Vikings on Film). Where it differs from all its predecessors,
though, is in the sheer scale of its engagement with its subject: when its
sixth and final season concludes later this year, we shall have seen 89
episodes – nearly 70 hours – of the adventures of Ragnar Lothbrok, his heirs and associates. There has never been such a whole-hearted
commitment to re-creating the world of early medieval Scandinavia on screen, lending
a depth and scope to its vision that, whether or not we agree with all the
decisions taken by the show’s creator, David Hirst, can only be commended. Some
of the ideas, sources and inspirations that went into the making of the
immersive world of Vikings have previously been discussed in brief by
the programme’s historical adviser, Justin Pollard, in a glossy popular
publication produced by the History Channel, but such a large-scale imaginative
engagement with the past merits full, serious and critical scholarly attention.
In this book, edited by Paul Hardwick and
Kate Lister, Vikings receives the friendly but rigorous hearing it
deserves. After a foreword by Pollard, and the editors’ introduction, this
collection comprises eleven chapters, bringing together historians,
archaeologists, and specialists in cultural studies and medieval reception: a
formidable array of scholarship is brought to bear, although the collection
might have been strengthened still further with a contribution by a saga
specialist. Nevertheless, with such a disciplinary spread the book incorporates
a very satisfying diversity of perspectives and ranges widely across the ample
material provided for consideration by the series.
The first three chapters explore various
aspects of the source materials for the story of the (semi-) historical Ragnar
Loðbrók, their transmission and their
re-imagining in the hands of the series creators. Before Vikings, it is
reasonable to say that Ragnar was not an especially prominent figure in the
non-specialist imagination, but this has not always been the case: the opening
chapter, by Stephen Basdeo, explores the birth of modern enthusiasm for the
romantic Northern past in Georgian Britain, demonstrating the currency of
English translations of the thirteenth-century Latin poem The Death-Song of
Ragnar Lodbrok in the founding works of this tradition. As a figure in both
British and broader northern European history, Ragnar served a useful purpose
for scholars attempting to propound an English identity with a significant
Scandinavian component, and he enjoyed – if only temporarily – a wider
familiarity with the reading public.
The next chapter, by Donna Heddle, goes
back to the medieval sources, not just for Ragnar but for the vikings more
widely, illustrating the free and, Heddle believes, successful play made with
them by the creators of the series in a tripartite conversation between the
evidence of saga and other medieval sources, strongly-entrenched pre-existing
popular conceptions of vikings, and the messages that the series writers were
attempting to convey. This analysis of the relationship between historical
‘truth’ and the dramatic vision conjured by Vikings continues in a fascinating
chapter, ‘Fantasizing history’, by Eleanor Chadwick, which unpacks ideas of
‘authenticity’ and ‘anachronism’. Chadwick takes the reader through an
examination of the tensions in producing an exciting drama that must to some
extent deliver on gory audience expectations fostered by two centuries of
romanticised stirring viking narratives, while still respecting the sources on
which – correctly or incorrectly – its claims to realism are supposed to
depend. These problems come into particular focus as the show engages in the
difficult trick of providing the violent, rapacious, barbaric vikings of
popular legend at the same time as allowing for more ‘enlightened’ heroic
figures such as Ragnar, with whom a modern audience can identify. Considering such
themes in the series as its depiction of the blood-eagle ritual (the historical
truth of which has been debated at length), Chadwick shows how its makers have
emphasized the telling of meaningful stories over accuracy to an alleged but
specious ‘original’, and in so doing have echoed what the saga-writers
themselves did, an authenticity of form rather than of content.
The central section of the book is
dedicated to four chapters that consider different aspects of the depiction of
gender in the series. Katherine Lewis examines masculinity, once again placing
the series in dialogue with the sagas and comparing how male identities are
constructed and performed in each. Acts of raiding and fighting are crucial in
both cases, although Lewis notes how the series repeatedly shows that the
performative nature of maleness among the vikings both engenders anxiety in the
old or incapacitated and also offers opportunities for its female characters –
and especially Ragnar’s first wife Lagertha – to occupy stereotypically male
positions. In so doing, this subverts traditional popular images of the vikings
as, in Lewis’s words, the ‘poster boys of toxic masculinity’. In the next
chapter, Shane McLeod tackles the show’s ‘shield-maidens’ directly, noting
their popularity: Lagertha, in particular, is one of the show’s most celebrated
characters and an online favourite, the heroine of any number of memes and
GIFs. McLeod’s question is what evidence, if any, there might be for warrior
women in the historical and archaeological record. This became, of course, a
question of considerable contention and debate in 2017, when a group of
scholars re-interpreted one of the burials accompanied by weapons at the Viking
age site of Birka in Sweden as that of a high-status female warrior. The
identification remains contested, and Lagertha fans will perhaps be
disappointed that McLeod, whilst allowing that female viking warriors remain ‘a
tantalising possibility’, is clearly swayed by the large-scale absence of any
mention in the written record of their appearance on battlefields.
For all that fighting and battle are
central to the action in Vikings, one
of the strengths of creative engagement with the early medieval world on this
scale is the attention that has been paid to questions that, while manifestly
important in themselves, have received scarcely any notice in most other
televisual and cinematic encounters with the vikings. In her chapter, Lillian
Céspedes González brings a welcome turning-aside from violence to explore the
portrayal of motherhood in Vikings. Mothering in Viking-age Scandinavia is
neither especially well evidenced nor well understood, but, as Céspedes
González shows, it is nevertheless a recurring and significant theme in the
show, as the writers and producers take advantage of their imagined medieval to
think through ideas that are relevant to contemporary society, not least the
challenges facing the harassed and over-stretched working mother.
The next chapter, written jointly by the
editors, Kate Lister and Paul Hardwick, tackles sexual violence, a subject
which – perhaps unsurprisingly – also appears in a number of the other
contributions. Rape has regularly been portrayed among the staple behaviours of
hypermasculine vikings in pop culture, although the poverty and character of
the medieval records render sexual violence in the Viking age almost entirely
opaque and outside our knowledge. It is notable that, of all the book’s
chapters, this is the one that most brings forward Vikings not just as a
response to the early medieval past, but also as an intertextual dialogue with
all the other representations of the vikings as an artefact of popular culture
in print, on screen and online. The handling of sexual violence in the series
is certainly one of the most pointed and divisive test-cases of the Vikings
production team’s delicate efforts at balancing pre-existing expectations of
viking behaviour with contemporary sensibilities; in this case the rejection of
rape culture. While Lister and Hardwick find plenty to praise in the show’s
nuanced approach to gender, they note that it remains firmly enmeshed ‘in a
popular cultural milieu in which sexualized violence and coercive sex are a
given norm’.
Crucial to creating the convincing character
of Vikings are the sets, landscapes and material culture that immerse the
viewer in a world that seems lived-in and has depth. It is thus entirely
appropriate to see three contributions devoted to the characters’ interactions
with their physical environment. Howard Williams and Alison Klevnäs explore
relationships between the living and the dead: Vikings, they note, is
strangely lacking in the funerary monuments that were and are a characteristic
feature of the landscape of Scandinavia. Instead the dead become a presence
through the handling and display of bones, be it the animal and human charnel
displayed in and around dwellings or the skull of Jarl Borg’s long-dead first
wife, carried and consulted by the Jarl in a number of episodes, including,
crucially, just before his blood-eagling at the hands of Ragnar. The chapter on
‘Nature and supernature’, by Aleks Pluskowski, continues the investigation of
the richly associative imaginative world in which the action of Vikings
is situated but turns the focus towards human relations with animals, the
natural environment and the wilderness. This reveals the show’s rather
simplistic dichotomy of the civilized/Christian on the one hand and the
barbarian/pagan on the other playing out through an environmental metaphor. The
viking characters in the series, Pluskowski suggests, are positioned (following
a familiar cinematic trope) as more instinctively in tune with the natural
world by virtue of their barbarousness; Anglo-Saxons, Franks and other
‘civilised’ characters are, by contrast, distanced physically, emotionally and
spiritually from the nonhuman environment. The last of the
archaeologically-focused chapters sees Alex Sanmark and Howard Williams (in his
second contribution to the collection) discussing the treatment of judicial
practice in Vikings, concentrating in particular on the ceremonial spaces in
which such business is transacted, the thing-sites. Although the Viking-age
thing (ON: þing) has long been celebrated as a supposed proto-democratic
assembly, their sites and operations have only rarely been represented in
previous dramatisations of the early medieval Scandinavian world. In Vikings
they are thoughtfully handled, building upon what is known historically and
archaeologically but also applying intelligent conjecture to create a convincing
visual spectacle. Sanmark and Williams particularly applaud the fact that in repeated
presentations of assemblies across the course of its successive seasons, the
show depicts them not as static and given but as changing and adaptive
performances that reflect the growth of centralised power and aspiration. As
the profits from raiding roll in it is evident that for Ragnar and his
successors, þings can only get better.
The book concludes on a sombre, but
extremely important note, with Richard Ford Burley’s contribution on the
appropriation of ‘viking’ identities by white nationalists (specifically in
North America, although it is obviously a broader problem). Ford Burley asks
what the series can do to avoid complicity, making a number of suggestions for
active rejection of co-option by right-wing extremists.
Simon Trafford
Institute of Historical Research
