[Earlier this
month, I traveled to Iceland for the first time, a nation with recently
discovered historical connections to the Americas. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy the culture at the heart of those ties, leading up to a special
post on a few takeaways from the trip itself!]
On the key difference
between a spate of 1960s films and a 21st century TV show, and what
has endured.
One of the
biggest films of 1958 was
The Vikings, a Technicolor
blockbuster starring real-life couple Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh
as the hero and heroine, alongside such Hollywood icons as Kirk Douglas and Ernest
Borgnine. As usual in the movie business, one successful film led to a group of
strikingly similar follow-ups, including Erik the Conqueror
(1961; more or less an Italian remake of the 1958 film) and The Long Ships (1964,
and perhaps the most noteworthy of the bunch from an AmericanStudies
perspective as it starred
Sidney Poitier as a Moorish king). All these films would have to be
contextualized in the period’s craze for Biblical epics, including the
trend-setting Quo Vadis (1951), Cecil
B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956),
and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959),
among others. Indeed, while The Vikings
did make a point of filming many of its scenes in Norway for authenticity, from
what I’ve seen these Viking epics often shared a great deal, in both style and
storytelling beats (such as a love triangle where the outcast hero contends
with a more powerful brother-like figure for the female lead), with those
contemporary historical dramas.
It would be fair
to wonder, then, whether and how such films could do any specific justice to
Viking histories and cultures, or whether they simply comprised a substitute of
Norse for Mediterranean or Arabic character and place names within relatively
unchanging plotlines. Things seem far different with Vikings, an epic TV series that premiered in March 2013 on the History
channel and is in the midst of airing its fourth season this spring. Although
this Vikings was likewise inspired by
a broader cultural trend (in this case the success of HBO’s Game of Thrones and the spate of
historical/fantasy dramas it has spawned), creator and showrunner
Michael Hirst has consistently emphasized his reliance on historical
sources, both 13th
century Icelandic sagas and other chronicles from the period, to research and
tell the stories of his legendary protagonist Ragnar
Lothbrok (played by Travis Fimmel) and his family and world. As that last
hyperlinked post illustrates, Hirst and company have certainly taken artistic
liberties with those histories, as any dramatic work would; yet nonetheless,
starting and engaging with those historical and cultural sources to my mind already
reflects a significant shift from the storytelling origins and contexts for the
mid-20th century films.
Ragnar Lothbrok
was also the character played by Ernest Borgnine in the 1958 film, however, and
that one link can help us perceive a fundamental similarity across these distinct
periods and their historical dramas. While Hirst’s show might be more consistently
and thoroughly grounded in its sources than were the films, that is, it continues
to tell what we could call legendary stories, epic myths of conquest, family
strife, larger-than-life heroes and villains, and so on. That continuity stands
to reason, since such mythic stories are generally at the heart of the
Icelandic sagas, themselves (as I noted in Wednesday’s post) as much epic poems
and family dramas as they are historical chronicles. The sagas have long been
and remain the best source for Viking history, and as long as that’s the case
it will be difficult for any representation of Viking stories not to tend
toward the legendary (even Hagar the Horrible
focuses on both conquest and family strife, although in a slightly different
tone to be sure). And perhaps those legendary stories do capture the essence of
Viking culture and identity—but on the other hand, it’s difficult for me to imagine
that the everyday life and experiences for most Vikings weren’t as different
from the legends and epics as was (for example) the world of most Britons from
the tales of King Arthur. If so, that’s a Viking story that has yet to find its
way onto the screen.
Special trip
follow-up post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ways you’d analyze the Vikings or Iceland?
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