As The Northman raids movie theaters this weekend, it is doing so with brutal accuracy of Viking history, as far as that history is known. As archeologist Neil Price explains it, the complete picture of Viking history is a massive canvas for which only a small percentage of threads have been uncovered and laid out. Price served as one of several advisors for historical accuracy on The Northman, offering insights about Viking rituals, weapons, armor, and more. The film’s director Robert Eggers and star Alexander Skarsgård took pride in this added effort to bring authenticity to the screen.
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“It’s in my blood,” Skarsgård told ComicBook.com. “I grew up in Sweden. I grew up literally surrounded by rune stones. So it’s been a dream since I was a boy. And it’s about 10 years ago when I started thinking about trying to put together a Viking film. I’d never seen a great truthful depiction of the Viking age, of Viking, of Norse mythology, of how they lived, how they related to the gods, to the spiritual world. And I was excited about the possibility of maybe trying to make a big epic movie, but that stayed true to the old sagas.”
While Price is quick to credit Eggers for drumming up a fairly accurate script before his expert input, Egger promises he learned “tons and tons” of new details from the advisors. “Neil’s just a humble person,” Eggers said. “One of the lines in the film, Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke like are initiating the child, Alexander Skarsgård, into what it is to be a man. And one of the things they say is to like, you know, heed the wisdom of women and, you know, and they talk about how women are the keepers of magical things. You know, there’s a lot of witches in this movie. And Johanna Katrin, Fridrik’s daughter, was talking about how, you know, so Odin like lost his eye for knowledge, and Odin, even though he’s like a warrior, tried to learn about sorcery, which is a female thing. And she’s saying, you know, this guy’s hanging himself on a tree, poking his eye out, driving himself crazy trying to learn things that the female gods know implicitly. You know? And that was something that was cool from Johanna that we put into that scene.”
Skarsgård echoes a similar sentiment about Price. “Much thanks to Neil Price and his lectures and his books,” he said. “Children of Ash and Elm was my Viking Bible during pre production and the shoot. It’s an incredible read and it deals with the everyday life of the Vikings, but also their belief system, their connection to the gods, to the spiritual world and it’s a big aspect that I had to understand because in the movie. That is such a big component of the film, the spiritual, the supernatural, and the relationship between Amleth and the supernatural, the fact that to him, it wasn’t supernatural. In order to make that feel real, I had to understand how someone like Amleth a thousand years ago would perceive nature around him, the spirits in nature, the spirits within himself, the gods, their relationship to each other, and all that, how that was connected. His relationship to fate, his belief in faith was crucial to kind of wrap my head around.”
A mental education was not the only way the crew on The Northman had to prepare. Skarsgård is no stranger to putting in extra physical work to get ready for a role but The Northman called for specific parts of his Amleth character’s work to be embedded in Skarsgård’s routines. “We tried to incorporate a lot of the stuff that my character would do in the film into the training,” Skarsgård said. “We started about five months before principle of photography, obviously for the fight scenes, So we try to incorporate some of that stuff, the sword and ax, not that I brought a sword and an ax to the gym, but similar movement. But also, Amleth, when he is on the farm as one of Fjolnir’s slaves, the type of hard labor that he would do on the farm, pulling things, carrying boulders, that kind of stuff. We try to incorporate that into the training.”
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