The 2022 movie The Northman is a formidable Viking action film in which young Prince Amleth loses his kingdom when his uncle murders his father the king and then marries his mother the queen, so he vows vengeance. It’s like Hamlet, but with fewer soliloquies and more beheadings.
American director Robert Eggers engages in zero diversity casting: Alexander Skarsgård of the leading Swedish acting dynasty is the hero. And the non-Scandinavians in the cast include Nicole Kidman in the Queen Gertrude role as a kidnapped Breton, Ethan Hawke as Amleth’s dad the Raven King, Willem Dafoe as a jester/he-witch, and wide-eyed blonde Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga of the Birch Forest, a slave from Rus.
I don’t know all that much about the Vikings, but the movie strikes me as something the Vikings would have liked. It takes the Vikings’ extraordinarily bloodthirsty moral code seriously and, so far as I can tell, makes no attempt to adapt it to modern sensibilities, woke or Christian.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, the job of directing films tends to go to those who by nature and training are extremely non-woke. Directors believe in hierarchy, responsibility, authority, skill, and talent, and those attitudes seep through into the movies the best directors make.
I have to say after watching The Northman: Thank God for Christianity. The Northman is set around the year 900 A.D., a century before Christianity reached Iceland, where much of the film is set.
The Vikings and their Christian/semi-French offshoots the Normans, despite being few in number, held territory as widely dispersed as Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Normandy peninsula, England, Sicily, and the Holy Land during the Crusades. Watching The Northman, the thought that, if they’d stayed pagan, they might have conquered the world, seems not implausible.
As a non-Scandinavian, their conversion to Christianity strikes me as a good thing.
