The Northman

THE MOST ACCCURATE VIKING FILM EVER MADE?—YOU DECIDE!

A review of Robert Eggers’ The Northman

by

Kevin J. Harty

La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

 

Vikings have been appearing on the big and small screen in feature-length and made-for-television films for over a hundred years, and the more than 80 entries in any Viking filmography include a decidedly mixed bag of cinematic offerings.  There are would-be Hollywood Viking blockbusters, such as Richard Fleischer’s 1958 The Vikings—a star-vehicle for Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, and Ernest Borgnine—and Jack Cardiff’s 1963 The Long Ships, which featured Richard Widmark as a Viking warlord matching wits with a Moorish prince, played by Sidney Poitier, to find a fabled bell made of gold. One of the better critical responses to The Long Ships is simply the title of an essay by Don Hoffman, “Guess Who’s Coming to Plunder?” There are campy Viking B-movies, such as Roger Corman’s 1957 The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent and the unintentionally hysterically funny 1971 Turkish film Tarkan Viking Kani directed by Mehmet Asain.  There are animated Viking films for children, such as the three films (2010, 2014, and 2019) in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise. There are serious Viking art-house films from Hrafn Gunnlauggsson and other Icelandic and Scandinavian directors that summon up a more authentic medieval Nordic past.  There are Viking horror films and sci-fi features, such as Marcus Nispel’s 2007 Pathfinder and Howard McCain’s 2008 Outlander.  There are cinematic attempts to dramatize encounters between indigenous people in North American and the Vikings who landed in Vinland around 1000 CE, such as Charles B. Pierce’s 1978 The Norsemen and Pam Berger’s 1994 Kilian’s Chronicle, or to chart Viking travels into Slavic territories and to other destinations even farther east, such as Richard Thorpe’s 1960 The Tartars and Jerzy Hoffman’s 2003 When the Sun Was God.  Mighty Thor has popped up as a superhero in the Marvell cinematic franchise.  There are even Viking comedies, such as Herodes Falsk’s 1983 Prima Veras Saga am Olav Hellige and Terry Jones’s 1989 Erik the Viking. And there are Viking films that portray a world waist deep in blood, the most violent until now being Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2009 Valhalla Rising.

            Adding to this varied Viking cinematic history, we now have Robert Eggers’ The Northman, which according to pre- and post-release press notices intends to be “the most accurate” Viking film ever made—there is not a horned helmet in sight.  The plot is simple, and familiar enough.  A young prince vows vengeance against his uncle who has murdered his father and then abducted and married his mother. The film’s source is the Ur-version of the tale of Hamlet, also the source of an earlier, little-known and much less ambitious Viking film, Gabriel Axel’s 1993 Prince of Jutland. Eggers shot his film in Northern Ireland and in Iceland, and the scenery is breathtaking.  The cinematography succeeds in capturing the beauty and the horror of the story that the film tells. The musical score is always haunting.

            King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns home from a successful raid loaded down with chests of treasure and trailed by a column of collared slaves. Ravens will play a continued important role in the film.  He is greeted by Amleth, his young son (Oscar Novak), and his wife, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). Amleth’s initiation ritual into manhood follows under the guidance of Heimir the Fool (Willem Dafoe), further establishing a pattern of identification between Viking warriors and their animal avatars that threads its way throughout the film.  The initiation ritual ends abruptly when Amleth’s uncle, Fjölnir the Brotherless (Claes Bang), kills his brother, declares himself king, and makes Gudrún his bride and queen. The boy Amleth barely escapes with his life. 

Time passes quickly, and the now grown Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) is a buff, ripped Viking berserker armed to (and, in one scene, with!) his teeth mercilessly raiding Slavic villages for the joy of the blood-sport, for treasure, and for slaves who are sent off to such faraway places as Iceland, where Fjölnir has taken up residence as a dethroned king turned farmer. In a narrative ruse that nods to Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator, Amleth disguises himself as a slave and joins the human cargo bound for Iceland to avenge his father’s murder and to rescue his mother. Also aboard the ship is a Slavic seer, Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy).

                                         Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth the Berserker 

 

Not unexpectedly, once in Iceland, Amleth is mistreated as a slave. When he saves the life of his stepbrother, Gunnar (Elliott Rose), during a game of knattleikr, an especially brutal and violent lacrosse-like Icelandic Viking sport, Amleth receives slightly better treatment, but with the warning that he “will always be a slave.”   After the game, Amleth, with the aid of his now lover Olga, sets in motion his plot to avenge his father, rescue his mother, and kill his uncle.  A middle-of-the night meeting with the local He-Witch (Ingvar Sigurðsson) enlightens Amleth further about his destiny—Olga will bear him twin sons, each a king in his own right—and provides him with a charmed sword (think Viking Excalibur) that can only be unsheathed at night and at the Gates of Hell, a volcanic cave filled with fiery lava.  Amleth returns to Fjölnir’s farm, sword in hand, and launches a campaign of physical and psychological warfare against his uncle and his retainers, learning some unsettling truths about his mother in the process, until he and Fjölnir meet naked in a final last battle at the Gates of Hell.  Strip out the volcanic component of that battle, and viewers have a cinematic echo of the final battle between Arthur and Mordred at the end of John Boorman’s 1980 film Excalibur.

            In a number of interviews, Skarsgård has allowed that he always wanted to make a Viking film.  In the HBO series True Blood, he played Eric Northman, a Viking vampire from the Middle Ages.  He is the son of noted Swedish actor, Stellen Skarsgård, who was Cerdic, the blood thirsty leader of the invading Danes in the 2004 film King Arthur.  The younger Skarsgård also played Nicole Kidman’s abusive husband in the HBO series Big Little Lies.  And while Skarsgård makes a convincing berserker and warrior, the outstanding performance in the film is delivered by Kidman.  In her confrontation with her now-grown son, she delivers a monologue that is truly Shakespearean. No unwilling or vaguely involved Gertrude is she. Even Lady Macbeth pales in comparison. She instigated Aurvandil’s murder and laughed with delight when Fjölnir carried her off as a more than willing bride. She even happily bore him a son, Gunnar, whom Amleth had earlier selflessly rescued from certain death on the knattleikr playing field.

 

                                                      Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún

            

           Eggers has developed a following among moviegoers because of his two previous films.  Both The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019) are small period films that evoke the horror, magic, and mystery of seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century New England. Eggers goals for his Viking film are clearly more ambitious; The Northman does not offer viewers another moody glimpse into some out-of-the way corner of New England.  Beginning with its runic intertitles, The Northman posits an expansive Viking world that is unapologetically pagan and that stretches across Europe from Russia to Iceland.  Christianity is dismissed offhand in a brief conversation between two of Fjölnir’s soldiers as a fringe religion whose God hangs from a tree. 

The film’s world is also unsparingly brutal.  In the Viking raid, those villagers not dragged off as slaves are hacked to death or are herded into a barn and burned alive, be they men, women or children. Women especially are victims of brutality even when they are allowed to live as slaves, but Gudrún, Olga, a second seer (played by Björk), and a Valkyrja astride a white stallion (Ineta Sliuzaite) do have genuine agency.  If Umberto Eco is correct in asserting that we constantly “mess up” the Middle Ages, The Northman does so in a way that has a contemporary echo given the savagery now on display daily in Ukraine at the hands of the country’s so-called Russian liberators. Critical response to the film has, deservingly, been overwhelmingly positive. And, with a script co-written by the Icelandic poet and novelist, Sjón, The Northman is certainly a cut above most Viking films in its attention to detail, both small and large. 

 

The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers from a script co-written by Sjón and Robert Eggers. A Focus Feature/United Artists Production. 137 minutes. 2022. Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, and Willem Dafoe.

Vikings: Valhalla

IN THE END, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BLOOD:  

Jeb Stuart’s Vikings: Valhalla (2022)

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty

harty@lasalle.edu

 

Umberto Eco once explained the continued interest in the medieval and in medievalism in one simple sentence: “People seem to like the Middle Ages.” And television producers seem to like the Vikings. Vikings: Valhalla, Jeb Stuart’s eight-part series streaming on Netflix (with two more seasons promised), is a sequel to Michael Hirst’s six-season Vikings, which aired from 2013-2020 on The History Channel.  Both series were complemented by The Last Kingdom, which aired for six seasons beginning in 2015 and was developed by Stephen Butchard for BBC2 and Netflix from Bernard Cornwell’s series of novels, The Saxon Stories.

Vikings told the story of Ragnar Lodbrok (Travis Fimmel) and his family.  Ragnar rises from being a simple farmer to a Viking king who terrorizes early medieval England and France.  The series follows his adventures and later those of his sons and their followers in England, France, Scandinavia, Russia, and across the Mediterranean. Ragnar’s capital is the fictional Kattegat in Sweden.  The original series condenses roughly a century of history and includes historical events such as the Viking sacking of Lindisfarne Abbey in 793 and their siege of Paris in 845. Characters and their interactions are a mix of the historical and the fictional. The major tension in the series is religious—with the pagan Vikings encountering the equally violent Christian Saxons and French.

The Last Kingdom recounted the role that a fictional Dane, Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Dreymon), plays in both furthering and frustrating attempts by Alfred the Great (David Dawson) and his heirs to unite England as a Christian kingdom.  The pagan Uhtred is the very definition of courage, integrity, and righteousness. Alfred and his Christian followers run the gambit from the overly pious to the truly villainous. Again, there is a mix of the historical and the imagined in a series that spans some six decades, although the at times unbelievably long-suffering but always-loyal Uhtred seems ageless throughout.

Both Vikings and The Last Kingdom seem content to be little more than action-adventure series, Vikings: Valhalla less so. For starters, the main character is Leif Erikson (Sam Corlett), who along with his father Erik the Red, is much more well-known than Ragnar Lodbrok and his sons.  In the series, Erik is mentioned frequently, but never appears. Vikings: Valhalla opens on November 11, 1002, with the so-called St. Brice’s Day Massacre, when Aethelred II (Bosco Hogan), known as the Unready, orders the killing of all Danish settlers in England, be they Christian or pagan, as a “solution to the Viking problem.” This third Viking series has then an immediate political agenda.  We are indeed in eleventh-century England, but the script contains less than subtle parallels to genocides and ethnic cleansings in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries that were “solutions” to eliminating racial and ethnic differences.  The earlier two series featured clashes between Christian and pagan, in which the Christians usually came off as the less sympathetic characters. In Vikings: Valhalla, religious fanaticism and its resulting sectarian violence are the narrative’s driving force. Again, the Christians generally come off as the villains in that narrative. 

Leif arrives in Kattegat as King Canute of Denmark (Bradley Freegard) has summoned all Vikings to avenge the massacre. Leif and his sister Freydis (Frida Gustavsson) are Greenlanders, and, as such, the butts of some jokes suggesting that they are the Viking equivalent of country bumkins.  Leif and Freydis have come to Kattegat unaware of the massacre. But they are steadfast pagans, and they seek their own revenge on the Christian Viking (Leifur Sigurðarson) who years earlier raped and branded Freydis on the back with a cross.

In the series, Leif arrives at Kattegat after Vikings have already established a settlement in what is now Newfoundland, and after Christianity has come to Greenland, though neither event is mentioned.  Vikings: Valhalla is also not hesitant to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Rather, because of his prowess as a sailor, Leif is swept up in the plan to avenge the massacre and conscripted by the devout Christian Olaf Haraldsson (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) to captain the invasion’s lead ship. Indeed, the series labels him Leif the Lucky, but for reasons different from those recorded in the sagas.

Kattegat here, as it was in several of the later seasons of the original Vikings, has become a matrilineal society ruled by Jarl Haakon (Caroline Henderson). Like her counterpart back in England, Emma of Normandy (Laura Berlin), Haakon is a thoughtful, just, and wise leader in contrast to her Christian and pagan male counterparts who are political animals, and often not very successful ones. Haakon adds further diversity to the series’ cast in that she is a woman of color—the daughter of a Viking marauder and an African mother whom he encountered in his voyages around the Mediterranean.

The scenes in each episode switch back and forth between England and Sweden.  Leif defuses a near mutiny on the voyage from Sweden to England. Vikings sack Kent. Aethelred dies, and he is succeeded by his immature and impetuous son Edmund (Louis Davidson).  The Vikings move against London pulling down much of London Bridge and defeating the English.  Back in Sweden, Freydis journeys to the pagan shrine at Uppsala to seek her destiny. We subsequently learn that she will be “the last daughter of Uppsala.” On her journey, Freydis encounters the series’ most fanatical character Jarl Kåre (Ashbjørn Krogh Nissen), a wild-eyed berserker intent on exterminating all pagans and destroying all traces of their religion.  Kåre will dog Freydis’s steps for much of the rest of the series as he nearly succeeds in destroying all that is pagan. In a final battle, Freydis, now a shield maiden, beheads him.

But before that deadly encounter, various plots and intrigues find Canute landing back in Denmark to fight the Vends, Sweyn Forkbeard (an always-snarling Søren Pilmark) landing in England to rule as regent, and Olaf seeking support from Canute’s wife Ælfgifu (Pollyanna McIntosh) to become the first King of Norway after his army and that of Jarl Kåre succeed in annihilating the pagans at Kattegat. Jarl Haakon’s plan for the capital’s defense includes the sacrifice of a willing young pagan (Adam John Richardson) to the gods who is assured that he will immediately enter the Halls of Valhalla—cf. the motivation of some contemporary suicide bombers.  On a more strategic note, Leif organizes a defense of Kattegat from possible attacks by land or by sea.  Haakon and many of her followers are killed, and Kattegat falls to Olaf, but only briefly since Sweyn soon arrives with the Danish fleet.  The first season of the series ends with a close-up of an enraged Leif covered in blood from head to toe bellowing over the loss of his beloved Liv (Lujza Richter) who died at his side in the final battle for Kattegat.

 

Sam Corlett as the blood-covered Leif in Vikings: Valhalla

The Viking legacy in popular culture is often an uneasy mix of the heroic and the violent.  The historical Leif is remembered annually on Leif Erikson’s Day (October 9) in half a dozen states and one Canadian province, and there are separate legislative attempts in both the United States and Canada to acknowledge the day nationally. The final shot of season one of Vikings: Valhalla is of a blood-covered Leif looking more like a berserker than the storied heroic European who brought Christianity to North America.  The most recent feature-length Viking film, Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2009 Valhalla Rising, was as violent and bloody as it was meditative.  Notices for Robert Eggers’ The Northman, due to be released in the United States on April 22, certainly suggest that the film does not shy away from depicting violence.

Since the late nineteenth-century American embrace of the Viking narrative as a pre-Columbian founding myth, the Vikings have often been elevated to an heroic status that glosses over any association that they may have had with violence.  Vikings: Valhalla opens and closes with massacres.  It depicts ethnic cleansing, sectarian strife, even a young willing martyr to his cause.  Throughout the series, pagans and Christians constantly fight, blood is spilled, limbs are hacked off, and the body count crises.  In some cases, characters recover from their initial wounds only to be killed in later battles.  Modern parallels are less than subtle. Television (and film) producers may indeed like the Vikings, but any attempt to sanitize their exploits is clearly no longer in vogue.  

Compared to Vikings: Valhalla, both the original Vikings and The Last Kingdom were restrained in their depiction of violence. Vikings was content to retell the multi-faceted history of Viking incursions across Eastern and Western Europe, albeit with a decided mix of fact with fiction. The Last Kingdom offered a fictional hero, a sort of updated Prince Valiant, whose nobility and steadfastness stood in stark contrast to the supposedly more civilized Christians whom he fought against or served.  Vikings: Valhalla, however, uses the character of Leif Erikson as a hook to ground its narrative in the familiar and then abandons any attempt to portray Leif as he is usually portrayed in the sagas or in popular culture.  In future seasons of Vikings: Valhalla, we can only assume that Leif as berserker will exact vengeance for the death of Liv. He will be a source for continued violence, and he will bear little resemblance to the supposedly heroic first European to land on the shores of North America.

 

Vikings: Valhalla created by Jeb Stuart for Netflix.  Produced by Metropolitan Films International and MGM Television. Season one of three, each with eight episodes, streaming from 25 February 2022 on Netflix.

Nadja Leonhard-Hooper: The Collision; Amanda Keating: The Martyrdom (2022)

Everything Old Is New Again—Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim on the Off-Broadway Stage:
A Review of Two Headed Rep’s Production of Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s The Collision and Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom at New York’s 59E59 Theaters.

Kevin J. Harty

La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

 

1501 Woodcut by Albrecht Dürer of Hrotsvitha

presenting a copy of her Gesta Oddonis to Emperor

Otto the Great as the Abbess Gerberga looks on.

 

The tenth-century German canoness, Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, can lay claim to many firsts. Among other distinctions, she is the first Germanic woman writer. She is the first woman historian. She is the first writer since antiquity to compose dramas in Latin. She is the first woman Germanic poet. She is the first Western writer to comment on Islam.  But, despite these many accomplishments, we know little of the particulars of her life, other than that she was a canoness at the Benedictine Abbey in Gandersheim in the tenth century, that she was a pupil of the Abbess Gerberga, that she was well-informed about the politics of the Ottonian courts, and that her works—the so-called Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Liber Tertius—were either ignored or lost for half a millennium until they were published in an 1501 edition with woodcuts by Dürer. The Liber Primus (The Book of Legends) contains eight hagiographical legends. The Liber Secundus (The Book of Drama) contains six feminist Christian dramatic responses to the Roman comedies of Terence. The Liber Tertius contains two historical works. The first charts the rise of the Ottonian dynasty, while the second records the history of Gandersheim Abbey. Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s The Collison imagines what the life of a cloistered medieval woman might have been like, and Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom presents a new adaptation of what is generally considered Hrotsvitha’s funniest and most successful “comedy,” Dulcitius (the Passio Sanctarum Virginum Agapus Chioniae et Hirenae), about the martyrdom of three Christian virgins during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian.   

The Collison, and What Came After, or, Gunch is set in a tenth-century abbey in Grebenstein.  The abbey is poor, understaffed, and overshadowed by the nearby abbey of Gandersheim. There is, at least initially, an abbess, two nuns (Sister Anise and Sister Gudrun), and a troubled and troubling novice named Gunch (“How do you solve a problem like Gunch?”). The abbess seems a stern disciplinarian—a by-the-book kind of nun. Anise and Gudrun struggle to do their best. Gunch seems hopeless. She can neither read nor write, prizes her pet chicken, and seems more concerned with earthly pleasures than heavenly ones.  The abbey is also more than a bit of an also-ran.  Illuminated manuscript editions of the Bible fly out the doors of the abbey in Gandersheim—72 complete Bibles in three years.  Grebenstein’s record is only 69 such manuscripts.  Not helping matters is the fact that the plague has killed off a dozen nuns at Grebenstein, so the abbey is in danger of dissolution.

Gunch soon becomes central to the plot when a meteor falls from the sky and lands right on top of the abbess, whose remains—feet only displayed from under the edge of the meteor—suggest the fate of the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy’s house lands on her in The Wizard of Oz.  A second much smaller meteor than falls, lodging a triangular shard of rock into Gunch’s head.  After lingering for several days, Gunch dies, only to be almost immediately resurrected in what holds the potential for being a first-class miracle.  Resurrected Gunch is a nun on speed.  Suddenly she can read and write—and is ambidextrous. Using both hands, she copies and illuminates three complete Bible manuscripts in two days—“two pages per minute.”  So industrious does she become that the abbey runs out of vellum.  But further complicating matters is the fact that Gunch’s manuscripts deviate from the accepted Biblical narrative.  That she has the animals naming Adam—not vice versa—in a move reminiscent of Ursula Le Gunn’s 1985 short story, “She Unnames Them,” may be the least heretical, blasphemous, and plainly obscene textual emendation that she introduces into the copies of the Bible that she dashes off armed with a quill in each hand.

From the start, the play relies on farce and slapstick to propel its plot.  The resurrected Gunch only raises the comedic level.  The abbey has become a source of scandal to the villagers in Gandersheim, so the Bishop of Worms is headed to the abbey for a visitation meant to sort things out and to punish any offenders.

 

Emma Ramos (Sister Gudrun), Layla Khoshnoudi (Sister Gunch), Lizzie Fox (Sister Anise) 

in The Collision. Photo: Ashley Garrett

 

And the male presumption is that every woman is guilty of whatever crimes and sins she may be accused. The bishop is the stock misogynistic authority figure who is found in Hrotsvitha’s plays, and the fate that awaits the three nuns is not unakin to that faced by the three Christian virgins in Hrotsvitha’s Dulcitius. The three nuns hatch a farcical plot to deceive the bishop and to stave off their deaths, which, of course, fails.  But there is a sort of happy ending when the bishop is killed by a rock that falls on his head (in a lapis or saxum ex machina ending?), and the sisters survive to live another day.

The Collision has some theatrical potential, but it is, for starters, too long. It also seems unsure of its genre. Elements of the farcical bump heads with comments on religion, especially on the role women can play in the life of the Church, and with asides on narrative theory—"a story is a snake, and we are mice inside it still alive.” Leonard-Hooper may want to mimic a Hrotsvitha play by mixing comedy with reflections on serious religious issues, but her play consistently fails to do so with any success. The idea of three nuns trapped in a medieval abbey when a giant meteor falls and flattens the abbess offers ample material for a short comedy skit, or a longer Gothic tale of horror. Leonard-Hooper unfortunately hasn’t written either such a skit or such a tale.

Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom is a more successful homage to Hrotsvitha.  The play’s full title outdoes that of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade in length: The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irena, by Hrotsvitha, the Nun of Gandersheim, as Told throughout the Last Millenium by the Men, Women, Scholars, Monastics, Puppets, and Theater Companies (Like This One) Who Loved Her, or: Dulcitius. Hrotsvitha’s play is the story of three virgins whom the Emperor Diocletian wishes to marry off to his loyal retainers, provided the three women renounce Christianity.  The women refuse, and they are soon imprisoned in a kitchen by Governor Dulcitius who intends to rape them.  Under the cover of night, Dulcitius sneaks into the kitchen but is struck mad by God, so the governor, in a scene of pure slapstick (tenth-century or otherwise), starts to fondle and embrace the pots and pans in the kitchen.  When he emerges, he is disheveled, covered with soot—in a medieval moment of the use of blackface, which Keating cuts from her adaptation of the play—and totally unrecognizable to his soldiers or to anyone else.  Diocletian then turns to another lieutenant, Sissinus, who, after much difficulty, finally manages to burn the two older virgins at the stake and to have the youngest killed with an arrow shot through her neck. Dulcitius is a comedy in both the traditional and in the medieval sense.  Villains are comically portrayed, easily flustered, and totally inept. There is, as I noted, an element of pure farce and slapstick in the kitchen scene.  And most importantly for medieval audiences, there is the ultimate happy ending.  The three virgins eagerly embrace their martyrdom because it immediately promises an everlasting heavenly reward.

In adapting Dulcitius, from a new translation of the original Latin text by Lizzie Fox, Keating breaks the play up into discreet scenes, each presenting parts of Hrotsvitha’s script from productions staged in different time periods from the medieval to today.  The play then becomes a sort of multi-media college lecture on Hrotsvitha and the historical reception of her play. Further emphasizing the narrative and didactic components of the adaptation, each of the scenes in Keating’s play is followed, as the fourth wall disappears, by a direct address to the audience filling them in on the history of stage productions of Hrotsvitha’s play.

The play opens with Hrotsvitha herself stage center preparing to submit the script of her play to the Reading Committee of the Men’s Monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg.  (The most complete text of the works of Hrotsvitha is the Emmeram-Munich Codex, which dates from when Hrotsvitha was still alive or from shortly after her death.)  Happily, the monks find nothing troubling or heretical about the script, and they give it their imprimatur and nihil obstat. In the next scene, we are in fifteenth-century Buda under siege by Ottomans.  A group of nuns decides to put on Dulcitius to inspire the citizens of Buda to resist the invaders.  To do so, they change the names of the villains in the original play to those of various Ottomans leading the attack on Buda. Keating’s adaptation of her source takes a position in one of the continuing debates about Hrotsvitha’s plays: were they written to be performed, or were they closet dramas? From Keating’s point of view, Hrotsvitha’s plays were indeed performed in the tenth century and have continued to be so, even today. To speak directly to their audience, the Hungarian nuns translate the play from Latin and adapt the script further to reflect the real concerns of that audience, who potentially face mass martyrdom should the Ottomans succeed in capturing Buda.

The next scene in The Martyrdom takes us to a French production of Dulcitius in 1880s’ Paris which used marionettes to stage the play.  The production was inspired by Anatole France, who had previously written a novel that adapted one of Hrotsvitha’s plays. More importantly, the production addressed the late-nineteenth debate between French and German scholars about whether the play was ever staged, or even stageable. The Germans thought not, with one scholar going so far as to suggest that, because she was a woman, Hrotsvitha could not have even written the play and or any of the other works attributed to her. The French answer was obviously the opposite, and this production using puppets suggested that attempts to attack Hrotsvitha in general, or her work in particular, were simply very poorly disguised examples of nineteenth-century European misogyny.

A rebuttal to misogyny also informs the next scene in Keating’s play which is taken from a 1914 production of the play in London by the Pioneer Players.  The group was founded by Edith Craig, the daughter of the famous stage actor Ellen Terry, who was a member of the production’s cast. The production’s script was based on the first translation of Hrotsvitha’s work into English published under the pen name Chris(topher) St. John by Craig’s lover, Christabel Marshall. This production had all the markings of a suffragist call to action, Craig and company being outspoken advocates for the rights of women to determine their own destinies and to vote. The women in Hrotsvitha’s play may have died for their faith, but their spirits live on to inspire women in the early twentieth century in their struggles for equality.

A feminist agenda also underlies a 1960 production of the play at the University of Michigan under the direction of Sister Mary Marguerite Butler, then a graduate student in theater. Butler’s doctoral dissertation, subsequently revised and published as a monograph, attempted to ensure that Hrotsvitha would finally receive her rightful place in the canon, while also offering Hrotsvitha’s life and work as a role model for college-age women at the time.  Keating’s adaptation then concludes with her own production itself in a moment of pure metadrama.  The actors bring the play to its finale by reciting a litany of praises for Hrotsvitha and her plays from across more than a millennium.

As I indicated earlier, The Two Headed Rep’s production of The Martyrdom has all the hallmarks of a multi-media college lecture on Hrotsvitha and her groundbreaking career as a woman dramatist and writer.  As such, it is a timely and useful reminder of how literary history has consistently silenced the important voices of people whom the canon has marginalized.  Hrotsvitha’s name means “strong voice.”  Too often the strong voices of women like Hrotsvitha have been relegated to footnotes or to incidental mentions.  As we continue (belatedly) to open up and reconstruct the literary canon, Hrotsvitha’s is a strong voice that needs to be heard and that tells us a great deal about the less than quiet lives of desperation which at least some medieval women led.

    

The Collison by Nadja Leonard Hooper and The Martyrdom adapted by Amanda Keating from a translation of Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim’s tenth-century play, Dulcinius, by Lizzie Fox. Directed by Molly Clifford. With Lizzie Fox, Halima Henderson, Layla Khoshnoudi, and Emma Ramos. Presented by Two Headed Rep, 16 January-5 February 2022, at New York City’s 59E59 Theaters.