Since
the end of the Viking era in the 11th Century, the Norseman carried a
reputation for savagery and brutality. It was not until the 17th
Century that writers began to explore the culture behind the pillaging,
and many original Norse texts were translated into modern tounges for
the first time, revealing the surprisingly advanced culture. This
'revival' reached its peak during the Victorian era in the 19th Century
when a highly romanticised notion of sea-faring explorers lead to an
avid yearning to find links to Viking culture - thus towns in Britain
quickly proclaimed their Viking roots, and even Queen Victoria was
claimed to be a descendant of a Viking King. A wide ranging collection
of fictional tales sprung up around this increased popularity, and new and translated
Viking Sagas were quickly sucessful. The first full scale Viking movie was the experimental The Viking (1928), filmed using a new Technicolor film process (a subtractive two-colour dye transfer print)
and only the second feature length film ever shot to include a recorded
soundtrack, with music and effects although without dialogue. Directed
by future Universal Horror film-maker Roy William Neil (The Scarlet Claw
(1944)) the story tells the epic tale of explorer Leif Ericsson who travels from
Scandinavia, past Greenland, in search of new lands to the West. Despite
the film's sucess, it was to be three decades before another dedicated
Viking movie was filmed.
The
1950s saw a big rise in the Hollywood epics; from Biblical to
historical stories, every period of history and mythology was ripe for
putting on the big screen. The Vikings
(1958) from director Richard Fleischer, starred a rugged Kirk Douglas
and bearded Ernest Borgnine and was based on the real Norse legend of
Ragar Lodbrok, a semi-legendary King of Denmark in the 9th Century.
Preceeded by over a year of painstaking research, the film ranks as one
of the more accurate Viking movies and proved very sucessful and influencial. Low
budget filmmaker Roger Corman was the first to capitalise; before the film had even been released, he shot the incredibly low budget, and suitably daft Viking Women and the Sea Serpent (1957), while British based producer Irving Allen crossbred the Vikings with the popular Arabian themes of the
Sinbad films to create
The Long Ships (1964) starring Richard Widmark and a mis-cast Sidney Poitier. Meanwhile,
The Vikings' editor, Elmo Williams, used stock footage and costumes from the film to create the television series
Tales of the Vikings (1959).
European filmmakers had similarly tapped into the craze for historical
adventure films with a string of mythological 'sword and sandal' films known as
Pepla. After the sucess of the Hollywood film, several of the Italian studios
switched production over to Viking movies, leading to such exploitation
films as
L'Ultimo dei Vikinghi (1961) and
Erik, il Vichingo (1965), and the impressive double bill of
Gli Invasori (1961) and
I Coltelli del Vendicatore (1966) from Italian director
Mario Bava. The latter film, better known as
Knives of Avenger
is of particular interest, being the first Viking film to focus
entirely on internal conflicts rather than exploration, looking and feeling more
like a Western than a typical Viking movie but probably quite authentic.
The into the
1970s, Vikings became the opponents for lost explorers in
The Island at the Top of the World (1974) and for cowboys in the surreal
Spaghetti Western Get Mean (1976) before being subject to the ignominy of
The Norseman (1978), with
Six Million Dollar Man
Lee Majors in the title role as a Viking bound for America to avenge
his father's capture by natives - rather lacking in historical
accuracy, it is ranked as one of the most embarrasingly bad Viking
movies.
In the 1980s a wave of low budget Italian Sword and Sorcery films followed in the wake of Conan the Barbarian (1982), and among the lowest budgeted of them all was the appaling Thor il Conquistatore (1983), very loosely inspired by Viking mythology. Relatively more sucessful was former Monty Python
member Terry Jones' comedy Erik the Viking
(1989) starring Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney and John Cleese, although it
met with limited sucess compared to their other ventures.
It
was in response to these inaccurate and often very bad Viking films,
that Icelanding filmmaker Hrafn Gunnlaugsson began work on Hrafninn Flýgur
(1984), which despite a low budget, was the most gritty and realistic
Viking film made to date, and was eventually followed by the better
budgeted Í Skugga Hrafnsins (1988) and Hvíti Víkingurinn
(1991) - the trilogy, all filmed in native languages, capture a realism
and authenticity of day-to-day life during the period that has never
been bettered, although sadly they have been very poorly distributed
outside of Scandinavia. In 1995, another attempt to create a more
authentic Viking movie came with the American production The Viking Sagas (1995), filmed in Iceland with a largely Scandiavian cast - although unlike Hrafn Gunnlaugsson's films, it was shot in English to allow for better distribution (although it has still remained obscure).
Into
the late 90s and early 2000s, there have been a series films
with rather usual twists on the classic Viking stories. Most well
known is The 13th Warrior
(1999) starring Antonio Banderas as an Arabian courtier, brought back
to Scandiavia by a Viking raiding party who come into conflict with a
seemingly supernatural force that has been destroying their home
villages - based on a book by Michael Crichton it was critically mauled
on release and went through a very mixed up production, but remains entertaining. The Berseker (2001) was a much less effective, low budget, straight-to-video production with a Highlander
inspired story of a Viking warrior who is cursed by Odin to live
through the centuries as an insane warrior. The poorly received Pathfinder
(2007) is the story of a Viking boy left behind by the first Nordic
raiders in North America, and raised by the native tribes, who later
comes into conflict with a returning party of Norse warriors. Yet to be
released is Outlander (2007) starring James
Caviezel as a space traveller who crashes into Viking-era Scandinavia,
bringing with him a deadly alien monster - possibly the most unusual
Viking movie to date.