Horns Aplenty:
The Viking Film by John Tucker

John Tucker is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria with a passion for the Middle Ages.

Next term the University of Victoria is offering a course never before heard of-or so I like to think. It bears the official title, "Filming the Middle Ages," but my own name for it is "Medieval Movies."

My irreverent daughter tells me that the concept is "oxy-moronic," since, as everyone knows, there were no medieval movies. I suppose I could respond that the Bayeux Tapestry is a most remarkable proto-movie, but I doubt that she'd be convinced. In any case my concern, the concern of the course, is films set in the Middle Ages, and there are lots of them. Furthermore they matter, because they give shape to our longings for a simpler, better time.

The nostalgic impulse is very much alive today. Victoria, for example, quite apart from the medieval continuities exhibited by its churches, courts, and university, is strewn with turreted and crenelated bungalows. And while it is true that from them no maidens let down their golden hair nor crossbowmen release their bolts, the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism--which, it should be noted, is interested only in medieval anachronism--is full of maidens and bowmen, young people who know that the Middle Ages can be recreated, albeit anachronistically, because they've seen it at the movies. I'm not sure that my own interest in Medieval English and Old Norse springs from any loftier source. Indeed I fear that it might be traceable to a certain comic book that fell into my eight-year-old hands. Because I can still visualize the comic book and remember that it was based on a film, I decided recently to track down the film source. In the end I did discover it--King Richard and the Crusaders-- in a book modestly entitled The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

I like the Hollywood resonances of the phrase "of all time." Its as if movies have been around since Moses, a notion that The Ten Commandments, seen at an impressionable age, renders entirely plausible. Whatever my daughter may think, the 1950s were not the Middle Ages, and I distrust the glow of memory that makes them seem a better time, but they were in some ways simpler; who in these "morph-ing" days could be bothered with a film that uses jello to part the waters of the Red Sea? But how fitting that this gelatinous medium should thus rely on the miracle of gelatine! So I owe my Middle Ages to Rex Harrison camping it up as Salladin in an uninspired adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman. When I mention this to friends and colleagues I discover that many had similar formative experiences. For several it was another Scott film, Ivanhoe, starring the two Taylors, Robert and Elizabeth. For others it was Prince Valiant. I myself remember Prince Valiant very well, or rather I remember how it was promoted in my town. A young couple was hired to dress up in medieval garb and clatter about the streets on a most unchivalriclooking farm horse. In the days before the Society for Creative Anachronism, it was a real show-stopper and I longed to see the film. Fate, in the form of a mother's convictions, was to dictate otherwise. I found it recently jostling for attention in the children's section in our local video outlet and watched it at last for the first time, now shrunken to a TV image.

I am focussing; on this film version of Hal Foster's meticulously drawn, serial epic (in this case the comic came first) because it brings Lis to my present subject, the part of my course that may interest readers of this journal, namely the "Viking Film." And it brings us to this filmic phenomenon with just the right set'of doubts, for Prince Valiant is a film that can't quite decide what it wants to be: a Viking Film with a clash of King Arthur, or ,in Arthurian Film with hints of a viking past. The explanation for this uncertainty may be that it was not yet possible when Prince Valiant was produced to think in terms of the "Viking Film," it hadn't been invented yet. But that is to presuppose that it was invented later, that a sub-category of the Medieval Film properly called the Viking Film mysteriously came into existence in the course of the 1950s.

Hence my first question: Is there such a thing as the "Viking Film"? And my second: If there is, to what impulses in us does it appeal? My optimistic objective here is to sketch the answers to these questions, starting illogically with the second--as if anyone understands why human beings do any of the things they do.

A serious inquiry into why Viking films are made would have to begin by probing the roots of Medievalism, since "Vikingism" is Medievalisin's northern step-child. Historically, Medievalisrn belongs to Romanticism - a reaction against the "Enlightenment Project," as scholars now call it, and the Industrial Revolution that transformed our world beginning in the late seventeen hundreds. By then the period lying between the glories of Greece and Rome and the so-called Renaissance had receded sufficiently in the historical consciousness to permit the invention of the Middle Ages as a unified culture worthy of regret, a culture capable of architectural and literary renovation in the Gothic Revival. The British Houses of Parliament are a conscious statement of continuity with the medieval well-spring of constitutional monarchy; they assume Sir Walter Scott and predict William Morris. Many of the public buildings constructed in the latter half of the last century in Scandinavia show the effects of similar influences. Such public architecture can tell us much about the societies and the parties who commissioned it. It is well to remember that even Medievalism can be turned to evil ends. National Socialism was the creation of a would-be architect, who incidentally understood the mind-shaping power of film; to some extent Nazism imagined itself and sought legitimacy as a return to medieval values. So Medievalism merits our serious attention.

Within Medievalism, Vikingism seems to me even more problematic, at least among Anglo-Saxons schooled in conventional pieties, for whom King Alfred and not his viking opponent, the doughty Guthrum, is known as "the Great." How is it that Vikings have escaped the oblivion that has swallowed the Macromanni or the oprobrium heaped on the Vandals? No cute, if Archie-Bunkeresque, Huns people our funny pages, nor has their name been appropriated by a line of household appliances. I can think of no sports teams in North America known, for example, as the Mongols. So how did the Vikings get rehabilitated?

Part of the answer is that they didn't entirely, which means that they can be constructed as good barbarians or bad barbarians depending on circumstance: are they at war with themselves or with the English? and are the latter presented as noble or effete? In the film called The Vikings, for instance, Ragnar and his chums might be mistaken for Americans, who systematically play them (whereas English actors play the condescending English). These are honest, harddrinking, robustious vikings, whose world unfortunately is doomed to yield to Christianity and English "civilization." A richer source of Vikingism is surely Scandinavian romantic nationalism, which entered Englishspeaking culture (including Hollywood) by cultural osmosis, particularly resulting from Scandinavian immigration to the new world. Ibsen's The Vikings at Helgeland exhibits an original, native strand in this development.

More important to the Viking Film is the Viking Novel, a genre that seems to be
enjoying a mini-boom just now (consider Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders, Sheelagh Kelly's Jorvik, Joan Collins's Eiriksdottir). Like the novels of Sigrid Undset (whose Kristin Lavransdatter has just been made into a film), these stories themselves reread the sagas. In the process they discover the narratives and narrative motifs that filmmakers rely on, and they demonstrate the existence of an audience willing to watch vikings at work and at play, willing also to pay for the pleasure. Which answers our first question with brutal efficiency: the vikings became eligible for filming when their latter-day piratical descendants (Hollywood Moguls) decided that money was to be made from the Viking Film. But if profit provides an explanation -admittedly reductive -for the why of these films, it also goes a long way to explaining their what -by which I mean the generic features that constitute them as a single phenomenon open to the kind of general discussion here proposed. For genre is often regarded as a pernicious effect of Hollywood commercialism, merely a less reprehensible strategy than sequalization to reduce financial risk by capitalizing on past success.

Yet these films are too few to support the argument that accountants account for their making. None seems to have been made because a mothballed fleet of viking ships demanded a return on investment. So the recurrence of the longship in them must be laid to some other imperative than commercialism. Like the word "viking" itself, which reappears with telling frequency in the titles of the films, the ships come loaded with promises of adventure, manfully rowed by crews of doubly horned warriors.

It is of the nature of films that they trade on audience expectations, for they have little time to establish their credentials. So Viking Films rely on those meaningcharged ships and the seamen who guide them into uncharted or hostile waters, armed but compassless. The ships motivate the journeys away (often begun grimly) and the joyful returns home, to the hall which is the anti-type of the ship, the site of license set against the site discipline, for rowing is a technology requiring the kind of comradely cohesion and self-control that must lead to Social Democracy.

The pastoralist stay-at-homes, including the women, are required to respond spontaneously and enthusiastically to horn calls (literally a leit motif in the films) announcing the warriors' return. This innocent pastoralism reassures us as to the family values of the warriors. Meanwhile majestic settings and stirring melodies tolerate the farming but challenge the menfolk to heroic action.

Fortunately the only challenge we face, squinting between heads in a darkened theatre or huddled before our televisions, is to allow ourselves be carried off to another time. When the lights go down we may imagine ourselves transported to a day filled with "those events that alter and illuminate our times." And we are there!

Scandinavian Press, Issue 1, 1996