It is the character Professor Ivarsson,
an American-Scandinavian archeologist, who becomes our guide to the Viking
world in the Disney production The Island
at the Top of the World (1974). When Sir Anthony Ross, former British ambassador,
hires him to lead an expedition to the arctic, the troupe is surprised to find
there an island that has remained green amidst the ice and snow. They are even
more surprised to find it populated by Vikings. As an expert in Norse
archaeology Professor Ivarsson is able to blur the margins between the two
cultures, establishing communication between his fin-de-siècle comrades and the
‘lost colony.’ He explains to Sir Anthony Ross the reason that they are being
taken captive is that the Vikings worry they are the first ‘of thousands.’ Sir
Anthony responds with ‘preposterous.’ However, also on this expedition is Oomiak,
an ‘Eskimo’ from Ellesmere Island who was kidnapped by Sir Anthony in order
that he might lead them to this island. His
presence validates the Vikings’ fears and reminds the audience of past
interactions between a group of ‘invaders’ and a group of ‘indigenous peoples.’
To understand The Island at the Top of the World directed by Robert Stevenson it
is necessary to understand postcolonial theory. For instance, Franz Fanon,
describing the uprisings of populations under colonial rule, could explain why
the Vikings have been depicted as having a culture that Viking expert Prof.
Ivarsson recognizes: in the twentieth century, as populations tried to reassert
their identity against a dominant culture traditional arts were renewed. The
resulting perception is that any modernity is derived from the dominant culture
and that the indigenous, subaltern, identity is, unfairly, something static and
rooted in the past. Therefore the Vikings did not change for a thousand years
and presumably Oomiak’s culture was only changed by invaders. In this film the
plot, the word choice (like the loaded word invaders) and even the
nationalities and occupations of the characters evoke the American colonial
experience.
The film uses Vikings as stand-ins for
an un-colonized indigenous population. Yet Vikings are European descendants,
blurring the divisions that are usually made between the subaltern and the
dominant cultures. The choice allows audiences that identify with the dominant
American culture to sympathize with both the Vikings and the explorers. The
film asks us to think about the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and between
‘civilized’ and ‘un-civilized.’ In these concerns The Island at the Top of the World is representative of American
made movies about Vikings.
Colonialism is a main tenet or obvious
theme of ‘Viking’ films from The Viking
(1928) to How to Train your Dragon (2010).
Like The Island at the Top of the World,
these films revolve around the issues of cultural interaction as we understand
them through the lens of our colonial past. While, all of these films engage in
the subject from the point of view of the dominant, invading culture, yet the
films differ in their depictions of both Vikings and the time and place where
two cultures overlap.
The corpus of American-made Viking
films in question is generated out of Kevin Harty’s list of Viking films in The Vikings on Film:
Essays on Depictions of the Nordic Middle Ages. Harty’s list includes
country of production; the United States was deliberately chosen as a limit for
this study because of the preponderance of the productions, the availability of
the material, but also for the interesting relationship the United States and
Hollywood have with the medieval past. As Joseph Sullivan has shown, country of
production is often an arbitrary distinction due to the international nature of
many productions (Sullivan, 2011, 57). Yet the number of productions attributed
to US companies is relevant, and slightly ironic for the discussion of
postcolonialism.
The United States has had an
interesting, possibly unique, experience with colonialism, being both the
colonized and the colonizers, and being both postcolonial and still having several
subaltern cultures. Native American populations would not characterize this as
a postcolonial period, though it has also been postcolonial since 1776. Andrew Bennet
and Nicholas Royle discuss the difficulty with the term postcolonial, since it
is an imprecise term to discuss colonialism as it is still occurring or
neocolonialism which is often categorized by the oppression of cultures not
through traditional forms of power, but through capitalism and corporations. The
specific difficulty here of calling these films postcolonial is that they are often
looking at the moment of cultural interaction, maybe even the first moments of
colonialism, rather than the colonial period or the period afterwards. In fact,
of all the films in question, only Lost
Colony: The Legend of Roanoke (2007) and How to Train your Dragon (2010) deal directly with a colonial
situation. However, as Young states,
if colonial
history, particularly in the nineteenth century, was the history of the
imperial appropriation of the world, the history of the twentieth century has
witnessed the peoples of the world taking power and control back for
themselves. Postcolonial theory is itself a product of that dialectical process
(Young, 2001, 4).
The films represent a dialectic between the
twentieth/twenty-first century and its colonial past. They are using colonially
inspired language and visuals to talk about the moment of cultural interaction,
when the margins between two disparate cultures collapse. And while cultural
interaction is not necessarily colonial, our colonial experience has influenced
the way we talk about that interaction. David Lloyd gives an example in his
discussion of colonialism:
we can refer to
India as a British colony only at the point where British governmental
administration rather than East India Company mercantile practices dominates and
the process of administrative rationalization occurs by ways of metropolitan
decisions and concerns: retrospectively, we can see the work of the East India
Company as a phase of colonialism, though the word itself may not have been
used (Lloyd, 1999, 7).
The colonial experiences of the nineteenth century
characterize the way we view the past.
Viking films contribute to this debate
because they build on the scholarship about the Vikings inherited from the
Victorians and onward. One prevalent interpretation of Vikings is as marauders
and as barbaric invaders. John Aberath traces this interpretation to the
medieval sources outside of Scandinavia, particularly from places which
recorded higher numbers of Viking attacks such as northern England or northern
France (Aberath, 2004, 30-1). The Vikings are thus the ‘other’ against which
local populations were defined.
However
a competing, some would say revisionist, version of Vikings was made popular
around the Victorian Age. The earliest translations of Viking Sagas, such as
the Vínland sagas which describe a
voyage of Viking Age Icelanders to what seems to be North America, occurred in
the eighteenth century, usually in Danish, but were more widely translated by
the second half of the nineteenth century. Writers including William Morris
translated many sagas into English (Hammer, 2002, 139). These presented a wider
picture of Vikings as farmers and merchants, as well as marauders.
Vikings also feature in discussions of
colonialism because of the dramatic expansion, which also gave them a
reputation for barbarity. Early Medieval Scandinavians settled as the Rus and
become Russians, were mercenaries in medieval Byzantium and raided and settled
in the British Isles as well as northern continental Europe. Settlers from
Norway colonized Iceland, then Greenland, and then, according to both
contemporary sources and archaeology, arrived in North America.
Victorians, especially in the United
States, visualized both the explorer and the democratic nature of the Viking
Age Icelanders. Especially in New England, work on nationalism and the
‘science’ of ethnicity that resulted from colonialism lead thinkers to use the
Vikings to define the role of race in the American colonial experience. As an
extreme example, in 1877 Marie Shipley wrote The Icelandic Discoverers of America, or, Honor to Whom Honor is Due.
In it she stated that the founding of America was one of the greatest
achievements in all of world history, and if North America ceased to
acknowledge Columbus, but instead acknowledged the Vikings, all the corruption
of Catholicism and its most devout followers, the Spanish, would disappear from
American culture (Shipley, 1887, 177). Emphasizing
the comparison with Columbus demonstrates how much, the Vikings have been identified
with colonialism, even though they did not leave a direct colonial legacy. It
is against this backdrop that American film depicts Vikings.
The collection of essays edited by
Kevin Harty emphasizes the heterogeneity of representations of Vikings on film.
Alan Lupack notes how different the Vikings are in The Vikings (1954) directed by Richard Fleischer and those in Prince Valiant (1954) directed by Henry
Hathaway (Lupack, 2011, 46). It will be apparent how heterogeneously the films
deal with both the colonial moment and colonialism. Discussing the themes of
colonialism that bring these works together does not take away from the diversity
of the films. Several scholars in that collection have already noted the way Viking
films can be framed in postcolonial theory. Laurie Finke and Martin Schichtman
see Orientalism as defined by Edward Said in the depiction of the Grimault in The Saga of the Viking Women and their
voyage to the waters of the great sea serpent (1957): ‘the Vikings are for
the most part pale blond northerners; the blonder they are, the more leadership
qualities they seem to possess … The Grimault warriors, by contrast, are dark
and swarthy, sporting hats reminiscent of Mongolians that give them a faintly oriental
look (despite the entirely white and American cast)’ (Finke and Schichtman,
2011, 155).David Marshall makes a very clear link between the themes of
colonialism and Outlander (2008).
Elizabeth Sklar has shown how the acceptance of diversity amongst cultures is a
central feature of The 13th Warrior
(1999). Kevin Harty’s contribution to the collection demonstrates that the
films that depict Vikings in North America are deliberately engaging the
colonial narrative that puts Europeans in North America. He shows how the films
engage in the debate about alterity, and about who or what is savage or
civilized, who is the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ of the cultural interaction, and the blurring
of those lines or margins (Harty, 2011c,
118). It is just this idea of savagery, of alterity, which also makes Vikings a
great vehicle through which to explore colonialism
Nickolas
Haydock, building on Benedict Anderson and Jacques Lacan, coins the term the
Imaginary Middle Ages. Aberath, Haydock and Harty have all commented on the way
the medieval film, or to use Harty’s term the ‘reel’ Middle Ages, reflects on
both the ‘otherness’ and the continuity of history. Medieval films often
project characters that have our values and engage in political debates that
are relevant to contemporary audiences. The retrospective view makes such
debates seem essential to the human condition, and broaden the implications of
the conflicts we hold dear. Both Harty and Haydock note that the Middle Ages on
film has been a particularly useful image to talk about national identities (Haydock,
2007, 112). The Middle Ages is our past, but also is removed from us by
cultures and time. They are us and are not us. They represent an ‘other’ we are
meant to see in ourselves. Chinua Achebe notes that we find it difficult to see
the rituals and customs of our own culture, because we are not removed from it
(Achebe, 2010, 1613). Depictions of the Middle Ages allow us to see the rituals
that were once a part of our own culture and to ruminate on how much we are
still like these people on screen. Combine this with the fact that the Vikings
were ostensibly the first Europeans in North America, but didn’t leave a
colonial heritage, means they are both us as the dominant culture, and are not
us as they are not as directly related to our transplantation out of Europe. Vikings
are appropriate for an exploration of cultural interaction and colonialism, not
just because of their traditional scholarship, but because depictions of the
Middle Ages are a great proving ground of contemporary politics or values.
In Viking films not all of the ‘Vikings’
are even meant to be historical Vikings. Historical accuracy is not necessarily
a useful concept in this context since ‘the purpose for making them [medieval
films] in the first place is not to engage sober academic reflection but rather
to lay the framework for the film’s reality effects and to authorize it as a
site of what Lacan calls ‘imaginary identifications’ for a mass audience’
(Haydock, 2007, 7). The mention of Vikings is meant to evoke a past age, and to
remind us of people who both are and are not us in an even more meaningful way
than the depiction of aliens. An idea of historicity is important to the
audience’s reaction. Lupack tells us that the shorthand imagery, like the
horned helmets used in How to Train your
Dragon, allows the audience to enter a state of willing disbelief,
regardless of the actual historicity of the imagery (Lupack, 2011, 51).
For
the researcher, The Viking (1928), is
the most accessible of the silent era films about the Vikings. It is by no
means the only one. Kevin Harty describes the Vikings in The Viking Queen (1914) and The
Oath of a Viking (also 1914) as decidedly Victorian (Harty “Introduction”
4). By this Harty is referring to the more sympathetic Viking that nationalists
created following the pattern of Richard Wagner (Harty, 2011a, 4). The film
invites a postcolonial reading from the first title card which sets the movie
in the context of the arrival of Europeans in North America: ‘[a] thousand
years ago, long before any white man set foot on the American shore, Viking sea
rovers sailed out of the north and down the waterways of the world.’ Leif
Ericsson, the anglicized version of Leifr Eiríksson, is one of the main
characters. In the Vínland sagas
Leifr Eiríksson leads the first expedition that establishes a base in Vinland,
a place that has come to be associated with North America. The film is about
Leif Ericsson’s conversion from his barbaric ways to Christianity, and the
weight Christianity has on his decisions. Before Christianity it is assumed
Vikings are barbaric, as they take the English Christian Alwin captive. But
when Alwin usurps Leif’s place in his beloved Helga’s heart it is Christianity
that stays Leif’s hand. Though Alwin and Helga’s romance, and the evil
Halfdan’s machinations are major focuses for the viewer, the colonial narrative
overlays all other considerations. People’s worth is determined by how much
they are interested in seeking out the new land to the west. That is how Leif
knows that Alwin is good. More than once the voyage to the new land is
characterized as ‘the greatest adventure by sea that man had ever known.’
Leif’s strength, compassion and Christianity form the nobility of his European
soul. When he gets to the new land he shares his nobility with it, planting the
cross on the beach, building a tower and hanging the cross around the neck of
the native inhabitant: ‘let this cross and the tower I have built be the signs
of peace and friendship between us.’ It should be noted that this movie is made
before any archaeological proof was really found. It is hard not to see this as
adding to the national spirit of this movie. The whole effect is to indigenize
northern Europeans to North America, and legitimate their claim to the land by
showing their reasonableness, nobility and even right to the land. At the end
of the film the Star Spangled Banner is played, suggesting this is a
specifically American colonial tradition of nobility, strength and adventure.
No
one would argue that this depicts colonialism from any point of view besides
the dominant one. The film is building a national myth based on an heroic as
well as a paternalistic past, which is seen by the laying of the cross around
the neck of the Native. This is a text of a colonial period, of a pre-World War
II era in which we were still forming our ideas of dominant and subaltern
cultures. This paradigm, however, is taken up as late as 1978 in The Norseman directed by Charles B.
Pierce, which positions noble Vikings against savage Natives, though The Norseman is less intent on the
ideological stance.
If The Viking and The Norseman
are deliberately positing the nobility of the first Europeans to engage in the
American colonial experiment, The 13th
Warrior wishes to remind us that our ideas about who and what is noble or
human are flexible. Our protagonist is Ibn Fadlan, who asserts his civility in
the face of the Vikings, but also his brotherhood with them as fellow humans.
Young sees this as part of the way the dominant culture understands
colonialism: ‘today’s repeated stress on the multicultural identity of the
Commonwealth is in part designed to counteract the legacy of the historical
fact that it was originally intended to be a whites-only affair’ (Young, 2001,
39). The 13th Warrior turns our gaze
away from the Vikings in North America, back to Vikings in Europe.
Nevertheless, cultural interaction, framed through postcolonial eyes, is as
central a tenet of this movie as it is of The
Viking, The Norseman and The Island at the Top of the World. Attempting
to posit an historically viable version of Beowulf
based in turn on Michael Crichton’s Eaters
of the Dead, the ability for cultures to interact with each other, respect
each other, while maintaining their own integrity, is one of the overarching
themes of the film (Sklar, 2011, 122). Ibn Fadlan’s attempts to understand and
fit into the Viking culture are met with some playful derision, but ultimately
with respect. In contrast it is ultimately the culture of the Wendols, the
Neanderthal cannibals that are hunting Hrothgar’s people, who cannot be
respected as a separate people with their own ways. It is significant that the
Fadlan character says that the Wendol are not men. It posits a complex view of
colonialism, but ultimately embraces plurality, while acknowledging that
plurality cannot include those who approach cultural interaction with a
destructive intent. Marshall has noted that ‘post-Colonial encounters framed by
feud are, in fact, a common theme in adaptations of Beowulf … a fact not
surprising, since issues of colonialism are not foreign to the original poem’
(Marshall, 2011, 143). This analysis plays out in Beowulf (1998) directed by Graham Baker, which suggests Grendel as
the result of violence by the incoming masculine Scandinavian colonists on the
feminine indigenous population, and also in Beowulf
(2007) directed by Robert Zemeckis, which suggests that the demons Grendel and
Grendel’s mother have a long standing adversarial relationship with men when
Grendel’s mother says ‘they have slain so many of our kind.’
Outlander is another Beowulf adaptiation, positing the action
in 709 AD Norway. Unlike The 13th Warrior,
which is supposed to be historically plausible, Outlander is not, being also a science-fiction story. However, the
action that takes place in Norway isn’t outside the realm of what may have been
possible, if we accept the premise of the film that Earth was in fact a seed
colony that was abandoned and that aliens exist. Attention is then paid to
details of Viking life. Marshall has already shown how the overarching theme of
the film is rooted in postcolonialism. Kainan is from another planet, and crash
lands on earth with two Moorwen on his ship. Kainan must fight and kill the
monster, however, part of the reason for the monster’s monstrosity is that
Kainan and his people, as Kainan says ‘are no different from yours, hungry for
land.’ He describes the genocide of the Moorwen as atrocious, attributing more
sentience to the Moorwen than we have yet seen: ‘we told ourselves they were
nothing, just animals, beasts, so we killed them all with fire.’ Ultimately it
is a condemnation of the colonial experiment, with no resolution for us,
besides to make the best of the mess that we have made.
Pathfinder (2007), directed by Marcus
Nispel, is another film set at the time of Viking arrival in North America. These
are overrepresented in the corpus, but it is of interest to American audiences.
With no less complicated a textual history than The Thirteenth Warrior, Pathfinder is based on the film Ofelaš, which is based on the Sami
folktale (Davidson, 2011, 96). The People of the Dawn, a supposedly ‘pre-written
history’ Native American nation, are the humans in this. The natives speak
English and we see their social structure. They even have faces, which the
Vikings do not, hidden as they are behind their monstrous masks and make-up.
Colonialism is deliberately invoked not only by the subject matter, the
resetting of this tale in the context of North America, but also by dialogue.
The desired outcome for the Vikings is genocide; they want the land. The
Vikings’ violence includes torturing Natives by pulling them apart with horses
or holding them upside down over fires. The reason this is still seen from the
dominant culture’s perspective is that the audience is tied with the main
character Ghost, the Viking boy left behind on an earlier raid, who has to try
to combat the violence and come to terms with this tendency of his ancestors.
The movie does not give him the symbols of native power in the end, but it does
state that his presence forever changed the people. This is loaded with
meaning. We must make our home in this place that our people ravaged with
violence. The film asks are we, or are we not, extensions of them and that
violence? According to Davidson, Pathfinder finds ethnic identity to be
self-constructed (Davidson, 2011, 100). By making the Vikings, the European invaders,
into the faceless savages the film asks us to reinterpret our colonial past
along more contemporary political lines. Yet it does fall into the trap where
white men are saving brown women, though in this case it is from other white men
(Spivak, 2010, 2122). It tries to pull itself out of these negative racial
implications by making Starfire the leader of The People of the Dawn at the
end. Pathfinder demonizes
colonialism. The Europeans and the Native group are essentialist versions of
good and bad. And yet it does offer us a way to be good descendants of
Europeans, speaking directly to a settler colonial audience.
It
is tempting to see The Viking and Pathfinder on opposite ends of a scale,
the former that valorizes colonialism through Vikings and the latter that very
literally demonizes it. The image is
complicated by the fact that the Vikings at the very beginning of The Viking are engaged in violence
against the English and the fact that Ghost is linked intrinsically with his
Viking past. However, the break from barbarity symbolized by Leif Ericsson’s
Christianity and Ghost’s choice to break with his violent past and to become a part
of the Native culture allow us to
maintain these two as extreme ideological stances to colonialism. They reflect
their culture’s values and political stances on colonialism. But both are
similar in the way they engage the discourse from the point of view of the
dominant culture. Both propose actions that allow us to continue living in a
‘postcolonial’ America; The Viking
proposes we be proud and Pathfinder
proposes that we acknowledge our violent past, try to stop the violence, and
attempt forms of hybrid culture.
How to Train your Dragon, directed by
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, engages explicitly with a colonial narrative in
a very interesting way compared to the other films. Unlike the Vikings in Island at the Top of the World, these
characters are not afraid of becoming subalterns and losing their culture to a
dominant force, they are already a dominant culture dealing with a particularly
aggressive subaltern group. The fact that members of the subaltern group are slightly
sentient animals makes an interesting statement about colonialism for a
postcolonial audience. For a society that sees, at least in our politically
correct media rhetoric, all humans as absolutely human, to make the subalterns
unhuman reminds us that this was not always the case. Unlike the Moorwen in Outlander, the sentience of the dragons
is made apparent to the audience by the particularly expressive eyes of
Toothless, the Night Fury. The relationship between the two groups has been
characterized by violence. Hiccup, our protagonist, explains the history of his
village, showing that they are colonists who have been there for seven generations,
and that since that time they have been at war with dragons. The vocabulary of
war, as opposed to environment management, is also indicative of the dragons as
a competing people. When Hiccup befriends Toothless, and they work out an
arrangement that is mutually beneficial, he exclaims ‘everything we know about
you is wrong.’ This is a narrative about trying to understand other cultures.
At a climactic point in the movie, Hiccup is trying to change his father
Stoic’s mind. Stoic reminds Hiccup about the danger of this indigenous group,
that they have killed hundreds of the Vikings. Hiccup retorts that the Vikings
have killed thousands of the dragons. He advocates not just trying to
understand another culture, but also trying to understand the negative aspects
of that culture. The language used positions this conflict in the history of
colonial conflicts, advocating hybridity and understanding. Just like in The 13th Warrior, those
cultures that can achieve hybridity and a mutual understanding, must team up to
face those forces that cannot or will not choose hybridity, and that devour
(through genocide) the cultures they encounter. In this case, a great monster,
not even called a dragon in the film, is the focus of a joint effort by both
Vikings and dragons. How to Train your
Dragon 2 (2014) targets people who prolong colonial conflict for monetary
gain, playing on the same colonial themes as the first movie. Seeing these
movies as commentary on colonialism is complicated by the fact that the dragons
become pets in the context of the village, reminding us again that we are
dealing with dragons and not another people. Nevertheless, this is the most
cohesive argument espousing understanding as a way of life amongst peoples who
will continue to live in a colonial situation, as is the case in the United
States.
These
are Viking movies where the colonial narrative is central to the film. These
films are deliberately working through the colonial experience, though from
widely different viewpoints and with widely different results. This represents
a good majority of the corpus, though not its entirety. The most famous Viking
film made in the United States is The
Vikings (1958) directed by Richard Fleischer. This also represents cultural
interaction, but it is not necessarily positing one culture as dominant and one
as subaltern; nor do the choices of cultures evoke colonial situations for a
modern audience. The two cultures in The
Vikings are a small English kingdom and the Vikings. While the Vikings did
set up colonies in England, this is not what is being evoked, nor is it assumed
that is common knowledge to 1950s audiences. So colonialism is not being
directly invoked. However one of the primary concerns of the film is the
difference between barbarity and civility. This is particularly seen through
Ragnar, the Viking King played by Ernest Borgnine. He, as a noble Viking,
comments on a description of an English punishment with ‘ah, you see, the
English are civilized.’ We are supposed to be shocked by the violence of the
Viking, but later we are shocked by the violence of the English, who cut off the
main character’s hand and throw Ragnar to the wolves. The English may represent
civilization, but they are no more civilized, despite their Christianity. Kathleen
Kelly argues that for The Vikings ‘the
alterity of the Viking Age furnishes the pretext for representations of
violence and sex’ (Kelly, 2011, 15). To American audiences the Middle Ages is
known to be barbaric, and Viking Age settings can really capitalize on these
assumptions. The concepts of civility and barbarians are both old and very new.
Us versus them, and the value of our ways versus theirs, is a very old concept.
However, the idea that a people is intrinsically barbaric, and that
civilization must be brought to them so they can embrace it, is an idea rooted
in nineteenth century colonialism that, among the films, has perhaps its best
expression in The Vikings.
The concept of human barbarity is
systemic in Viking films. It is also the major theme of The Saga of the Viking Women and their voyage to the lands of the great
sea-serpent. The women are seen casting votes, which is intrinsically
civilized to an American audience, but doing it with spears, to signify the
alterity and barbarity of the past. In Outlander
Kainan decides not to go back to his supposedly more refined society, but to
stay with the seemingly barbaric Vikings at the end of the film. He has
questioned his society’s refinement by reflecting on the role he had in the
Moorwen genocide. In The 13th
Warrior Ibn Fadlan is disgusted with the practices of the Vikings, who use
the same bowl to rinse out their mouths. This is true to the original Ibn
Fadlan text, but an interesting inclusion for American audiences who have
othered parts of the Middle East as backwards, as opposed to progressive. In Pathfinder Ghost is driven to speaking
in Norse like the Vikings to save Starfire’s hand. The Viking comments that he
‘knew you could speak like a human,’ which is ironic to audiences who have been
taking the Vikings to be the monstrous other and the Natives as humans.
The anthropomorphizing of beasts, like
the Moorwen, the dragons or even the Wendol, takes the idea of being intrinsically
barbaric (or animalistic) or civilized to a new level, by really asking to
broaden our understanding of what is human, and to question the humanity of
‘civilization.’ Homi Baba has said that the very concepts of civility and
barbarity as we understand it are born out of colonial thoughts:
For at the same
time as the question of cultural difference emerged in the colonial text,
discourses of civility were defining the doubling moment of the emergence of
Western modernity. Thus the political and theoretical genealogy of modernity
lies not only in the origins of the idea
of civility, but in this history of the colonial moment (Bhaba, 2010, 2367).
The Vikings asks us to question how different these people who are our
ancestors are from us, and work through the suspicion that ‘the Vikings lurk
under the layers of modern civilization, waiting to reemerge – a past identity,
a repressed self, what lies beneath’ (Aronstein, 2011, 73).
In Prince Valiant (1954) the Vikings under
Sligon are a barbaric people who are slowly being civilized as they are brought
into the folds of Christianity. This film is based on Hal Foster’s long running
comic strip. Even though Prince Valiant and his family, influenced by
Christianity and civilization espoused by King Arthur’s court, look nothing
like their Viking brethren, people in Briton continue to treat him differently,
as if the barbarity of being a Viking was somehow inherent in his blood,
recalling Pathfinder and also
Victorian essentialism. But if he is governed first by his nature as a Viking,
he is then a perfect example of what postcolonial theorists like Spivak describe
as the marginal buffer group: ‘even the third group on the list, the buffer
group, as it were, between the people and the great macro-structural dominant
groups, is itself defined as a place of in-betweenness’ (Spivak, 2010, 2118).
Bhaba uses terms like hybridity to describe the fluidity between different
cultures. Most often the protagonist of the Viking films is someone who
understands and can assimilate both cultures. Prince Valiant is one example, as
is Eric, Tony Curtis’s character in The
Vikings. Eric is part English and part Viking, though he knows about
neither side of his heritage until the end of the film. He understands the
violence and values of both cultures, and can participate in both. The films do
not necessarily agree on the role of the go-between, as Prince Valiant does not
seem to value the culture of his native Vikings, wishing instead to bring his
people into the folds of Arthur’s court and Christianity. The Viking is also advocating for the subaltern to come nearer to
the dominant culture. In The Norseman
the Native girl embraces hybridity, recognizing the Vikings are the party in
the right, and shunning her own community. Hiccup is the go-between who stems
the violence through his hybridity. Eric in The
Vikings and Ibn Fadlan in The 13th
Warrior embrace a hybridity that does not seek to change either culture, or
to choose one or the other. Instead, they simply gain the tools to act in both
worlds. The conclusions for those characters who embrace, or are forced to
embrace, hybridity, often reflect the overall attitudes of the individual film
to colonialism. The prevalence of this type of character throughout the corpus
is indicative of how prevalent the concepts of colonialism are in Viking films,
and also reflect the heterogeneity of the way these films, and in turn the
dominant culture, deal with those concepts.
Reflecting
on the role colonialism played in the formation of nineteenth century
nationalism, we could even bring outliers like The Viking Sagas (1995) directed by Michael Chapman into this
discourse. However, this example may be more instructive as an outlier. While
more concerned with the ‘fate of Iceland’ and what it means to be a ‘Viking’ than
the actual sagas that inspire the film, this film is the one example of an
American film, or at least a film produced by an American production company,
about Vikings that is insular, the characters are not interacting with other cultures.
It stands out because of this, drawing attention back to the way cultural
interaction, which is not separated from a colonial narrative, has dominated narrative
in the other films.
The
link between Vikings and colonialism is strong and continues to have an
enduring legacy. Even the recent Marvel movies, although the characters
self-identify as Asgardians instead of Vikings, engage in the post-colonial
discourse. In The Avengers (2012),
directed by Joss Whedon, Nick Fury comments to Thor and the other Avengers that
the Asgardians’ appearance on earth forever changed the way they saw themselves:
“we learned not only are we not alone, but we are hopelessly, hilariously,
outgunned.” The dominant culture is becoming aware, as it tries to do away with
essentialisms that place one ethnicity forever above another, there is a
possibility of a dominant group becoming subaltern. This has particular meaning
for American audiences, whose history has demonstrated the devastation of an
invading colonial force. The concept of colonialism changes with the time
period and with the politics of those making the film, but Viking movies evoke
national myth-building for postcolonial audiences and ask those in the dominant
culture to come to terms with the barbaric practices of colonialism.
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