Mound-dweller sighting in The Northman’s new trailer

Ian Whyte as the Mound-Dweller in The Northman

Update: You can read my full review of The Northman here. While I don’t directly address the mound-dweller scene in my review, let me endorse it and say it was one of the film’s highlights.

Yesterday a second official trailer for The Northman appeared on YouTube. As with the original teaser released before Christmas, which I wrote about here, this new trailer doesn’t provide a lot of plot specifics but does offer an abundance of intriguing snippets mostly conveying the same impression as the teaser—murder, revenge, and plenty of bloodletting along the way. It also offered something new, something not seen in the teaser: a mound-dweller.

At the 0:55 mark in the trailer we get three shots in two seconds. First, in a match cut from a deranged-looking Willem Dafoe, the corpse of a helmeted man enthroned in deep shadow. His eyes open. Next, presumably the same figure hunkering down behind a shield and raising a sword, a typical early medieval attack stance. Finally, an over-the-shoulder of the helmeted figure bearing down on the hero, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) as they fight in a tight, gloomy space surrounded by barrels, jars, and at least one shield, all within what looks like the gunwales of a ship.

It’s not much, but oh, how much it suggests. These two seconds show an instantly recognizable encounter with a mound-dweller—the ghost of Old Norse literature.

Caveats and corpses

I use the word ghost advisedly, since ghosts as the Norse conceived of and described them in the sagas are wildly different from the floating, translucent spooks you can simulate with a bedsheet. First, and most importantly, they are corporeal. These ghosts have bodies and can—and sometimes must—be killed a second time. In this respect they are more like zombies, undead revenants that can be killed. Unlike zombies, they are often swollen or grown to enormous size: “big as a bull” is a common description.

Second, it’s not typically hard to locate a mound-dweller. Just look for the mound or barrow where the undead was buried; this will usually be a local landmark. (Old Norse ghost-hunting shows would end after one episode, but probably be much more entertaining.) The mound-dweller, true to its name, could in a sense be said to “live” in its barrow.

Finally, mound-dwellers are almost always hostile. The bedsheet ghost or poltergeist might content itself with moaning at night or trashing a room. Mound-dwellers can be devastatingly destructive, killing cattle and any people it can catch.

Beyond that, there’s some variety in how these ghosts are described and how they behave, something reflected in the terminology. A commonly applied word is draugr, a general term for an undead revenant. I want to avoid implying that there’s a precise taxonomy to these creatures, but two other words for draugar are suggestive of different kinds:

After-walkers

The first, the aptrganga (literally the “after-walker,” i.e. walking around after he’s dead), roams around, usually at night, causing trouble and killing people or damaging property before returning to its barrow. These are the most fearful and destructive ghosts.

A famous is Víga-Hrappr or Killer Hrapp, a man who appears in Laxdæla saga or The Saga of the People of Laxardal. A pushy neighbor and household tyrant, Hrapp actually drives his neighbors to combine against him for mutual support. He finally dies—in bed, weakened but still malicious, and asking to be buried sitting upright so he can watch the house. These are all bad signs. The saga writer goes on:

But if it had been difficult to deal with him when he was alive, he was much worse dead, for he haunted the area relentlessly. It is said that in his haunting he killed most of his servants. To most of the people living in the vicinity he caused no end of difficulty and the farm at Hrappstadir became deserted.

One of the saga’s heroes, Hoskuld, disinters Hrapp and reburies him farther from everyone’s farms. “Hrapp’s haunting,” the saga writer tells us, “decreased considerably after this.” That’s not enough assurance for a lot of people, including Hrapp’s widow, who refuses to move back, so Hoskuld himself moves into the area. It’s Hoskuld’s son, Olaf the Peacock, who finally rids Laxardal of Killer Hrapp.

One evening the farmhand in charge of the non-milking cattle came to Olaf and asked him to assign the task to someone else and ‘give me other duties’.

Olaf answered, ‘I want you to look after your own duties.’

The man replied he would rather leave the farm.

‘Then you must think something is seriously wrong,’ Olaf said. ‘I’ll accompany you tonight when you tie the animals in their stalls, and if you’ve any cause for complaint, I won’t blame you. Otherwise you’ll pay for causing trouble.’

Olaf then took the spear known as the King’s Gift in his hand and went out, the servant following him. Quite a lot of snow had fallen.

They reached the cowshed, which stood open, and Olaf told the servant to go inside, saying. ‘I’ll herd the animals inside for you and you tie them in their places.’

The servant went towards the door of the cowshed but suddenly came running back into Olaf’s arms.

When Olaf asked what had frightened him so, the servant answered, ‘Hrapp is standing there in the doorway, reaching out for me, and I’ve had my fill of wrestling with him.’

Olaf approached the door and prodded with his spear in Hrapp’s direction. Hrapp gripped the spear just above the blade in both hands and gave it a wrench, breaking the shaft. Olaf made a run at him, but Hrapp let himself sink back down to where he had come from, putting an end to their struggle.

Hrapp having cheated by sinking into the ground and ending the fight, Olaf goes to the place where Hoskuld had reburied Hrapp and opens the grave, in which he finds eerie confirmation of the previous night’s struggle: “Hrapp’s body was perfectly preserved and Olaf found his spear blade there.” Olaf has the body burned and the ashes scattered at sea, ending the haunting.

The outlaw Grettir the Strong fights and kills two draugar in the saga named after him. The second, a shepherd named Glam, freezes to death and returns as a ghost to terrify the farm where he died. When Glam enters the farmer’s hall at night, Grettir confronts him, cuts off his head, and stuffs it between the corpse’s legs against the buttocks.

The mound-dweller proper

But the first of the two draugar that Grettir fights in his saga belongs to the other subset: it’s a haugbúi, a mound-dweller devoted to protecting its mound and grave goods. Told of Kar the Old’s haunting and terrorization of the countryside, Grettir resolves to kill the ghost—not by waiting to encounter it in the wild, by accident, but by entering the mound and confronting it:

The night passed; Grettir appeared early the next morning, and the [farmer], who had got all the tools for digging ready, went with Grettir to the howe [barrow or grave mound]. Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; Audun implored him not to go down, but Grettir bade him attend to the rope, saying that he meant to find out what it was that dwelt there. Then he descended into the howe. It was very dark and the odour was not pleasant. He began to explore how it was arranged, and found the bones of a horse. Then he knocked against a sort of throne in which he was aware of a man seated. There was much treasure of gold and silver collected together, and a casket under his feet, full of silver. Grettir took all the treasure and went back towards the rope, but on his way he felt himself seized by a strong hand. He left the treasure to close with his aggressor and the two engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed. The howedweller made a ferocious onslaught. Grettir for some time gave way, but found that no holding back was possible. They did not spare each other. Soon they came to the place where the horse's bones were lying, and here they struggled for long, each in turn being brought to his knees. At last it ended in the howedweller falling backwards with a horrible crash, whereupon Audun above bolted from the rope, thinking that Grettir was killed. Grettir then drew his sword Jokulsnaut, cut off the head of the howedweller and laid it between his thighs.

Most prized of the treasures Grettir recovers from Kar’s mound is a sword, and many of the stories in which heroes break open mounds do so either with the result of or, as with the shieldmaiden Hervor in The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, for the express purpose of getting a sword.

Conclusion

Again, I want to emphasize that Norse literature doesn’t present a Linnaean taxonomy of supernatural creatures, and you should have noticed some overlap and sloppiness in how the passages quoted here describe these creatures. Kar the Old, though explicitly a mound-dweller, apparently also leaves the mound sometimes, driving people out of the area just like Killer Hrapp. And Killer Hrapp, a clear case of the after-walker, is dispatched like any mound-dweller—disinterred and destroyed.

The three terms I’ve unpacked are not apparently completely interchangeable, but there is enough overlap to allow for using them loosely. What mattered more to the saga writers and the generations of Icelanders who handed these stories down was the stories themselves. And those stories have inspired generations of storytellers and writers since, including myself.

The ghosts in The Saga of Grettir the Strong and other sagas directly inspired my first published novel, No Snakes in Iceland. In that story, set on a farm in late 10th-century Iceland, the brother of a prosperous farmer drowns in a frozen river and, following his hurried burial in a mound, returns to terrorize his brother’s farmstead and those of the surrounding valley. He rides the house like a horse, kills cattle and men, and, in his bloodiest attack, breaks into the farmstead’s hall itself. The novel’s narrator, Edgar, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and poet living in self-imposed exile, reluctantly accepts the task of killing the ghost. This proves harder than even Edgar anticipates, and also reveals that there is much more going on among these farmsteads than the attacks of a ghost.

But rather than the roving, cattle-throttling variety, The Northman’s ghost seems pretty clearly to be the mound-dweller proper—and not just any mound-dweller, but one buried enthroned, in fine armor, aboard a ship loaded with goods. What we get in those two seconds of the trailer is strikingly reminiscent of Grettir’s battle with Kar the Old in his mound. Further, the actor playing the mound-dweller, Ian Whyte, a stuntman and former basketball player, stands over seven feet tall, so the filmmakers have clearly also gone for the “big as a bull” characteristic for this mound-dweller. It’s hard to tell from what we get in the trailer, but it should be fantastically intimidating.

I don’t know at what point in the film Amleth’s raid on the mound will take place, or what he will seek there or why (though I’d be surprised if a famous sword doesn’t come out of it), but I’m most looking forward to encountering this ghost.

More if you’re interested

One of the sagas I mentioned here, The Saga of the People of Laxardal, is collected with other goods ones in the excellent Penguin volume The Sagas of Icelanders. It’s Keneva Kunz’s translation in that volume that I quoted from above. It and The Saga of Grettir the Strong are also available in individual volumes from Penguin Classics, as is Eyrbyggja Saga, another saga with a detailed ghost story. And Jackson Crawford’s recent translation of The Saga of Hervor and Heiðrek in Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes includes the strikingly different encounter with a mound-dweller that I allude to above. You can also read most of these for free online at the Icelandic Saga Database, whose translation of Grettir I quote above.

On YouTube, Jackson Crawford offers a concise but detailed breakdown of Old Norse ghosts using the story in Eyrbyggja Saga, with his usual careful attention to the sources, here. If that’s only whetted your appetite for this stuff, he also has an excellent hourlong interview on mound-dwellers, trolls, and other such creatures with University of Iceland Professor Ármann Jakobsson here.

The Northman arrives in theatres next week. Check out the new trailer either embedded above or on YouTube here. And if you can’t get wait or simply want more mound-dweller in your diet, please give my novel No Snakes in Iceland a read.

The Northman trailer reaction

Update: You can read my full review of The Northman here. In my review, I don’t address all the nitty-gritty bullet-point stuff that I note in this trailer reaction, but the film is loaded with good details. It exceeded my expectations and was well worth the wait.

I’ve only gotten seriously excited about two movie trailers this year. The first was one I wasn’t expecting—The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne, the trailer for which genuinely surprised me with its atmosphere and cold-wet-asphalt visuals. It also helped that, putting the stink of the Cullens further and further behind him, Pattinson has impressed me over and over as a fine actor. I’m looking forward to The Batman.

But I’m here to talk about the other trailer I’m excited about, one I’ve been anticipating for a long time—The Northman. The first trailer arrived this afternoon.

The Northman is writer/director Robert Eggers’s third film. His first feature, The Witch, stunned me not only with its genuinely creepy atmosphere and grim plot, but its attention to period detail, not only in costumes, sets, and props but even in the way the characters spoke and thought. His second, The Lighthouse, was somewhat too content with non-answers and fart-sniffy archetypal and Freudian mumbo jumbo to suit me, but was nonetheless a visual masterpiece and Eggers’s care for the look, feel, and sound of a period was again in strong evidence. When I learned that his next project was a Viking-era drama inspired by the sagas, I was excited—and somewhat trepidatious. Anyone with a serious interest in the Vikings or the Early Middle Ages more generally is used to being disappointed.

And now that the first trailer is here, I still feel largely the same. Excited. Trepidatious. But considerably more excited.

The Northman appears to tell the story of the son of a Scandinavian king or warlord. After the king is betrayed and murdered by his evil brother, the son goes on the run with the goal of one day returning for revenge. So far so good—classic saga material. You could probably count the sagas that don’t involve revenge on one hand. The son, who as an adult is played by Alexander Skarsgård, seems to spend a while as a captive or slave before allying with a volva or sorceress played by the ever-spooky Anya Taylor-Joy. Here you’re getting some solid stuff from the legendary sagas. And there’s plenty of material that spans both the more nitty-gritty, realistic sagas and the legendary material, especially a few shots of Skarsgård and company wearing wolfskins as they attack some kind of fortification. Is this the climactic battle? Somewhere in the middle, as our Northman fights his way toward his uncle? It’s unclear. But the wolfskins mark him as an ulfheðinn or wolf-shirt, a form of dangerous rogue warrior conceptually similar to a berserkr.

Beyond that—who knows? The trailer is long on atmosphere and striking images but thankfully leaves much of the plot unexplained. I was left wanting more, so the trailer is definitely doing its job.

Other thoughts/observations:

• First and foremost, I’m not seeing any tattoos or fashy haircuts. Already major points in The Northman’s favor. Instead we’ve got heavily bearded but largely well-kempt men and women, as befits a culture famously concerned with appearance and especially coiffure.

• As for other forms of adornment, there are some sensible necklaces and brooches and plenty of rings, and it’s good to see the hero with arm-rings in a couple of scenes. These were the badges of serious warriors across many early medieval Germanic cultures.

• Weapons and armor (about which more below) look interesting, though I couldn’t examine every shot. The hero seems to be wearing a long seax (imagine a Germanic bowie knife) diagonally across his waist in his scenes as an ulfheðinn. A nice touch, one that doesn’t make it into a lot of medieval movies. I’m mostly thankful that the helmets in the trailer look good based on what we know (which isn’t much) and that other armor seems limited to mail shirts. That’s accurate. No anachronistic plate armor or ridiculous leather getups here, thank heavens. See the still from Alfred the Great here to see how badly this can go wrong.

• “You must choose between kindness for your kin or hate for your enemies.” A Viking Age moral dilemma, one not uncommon in the sagas, and a call to be a drengr. (Which, not coincidentally, seems to be the last word chanted in the trailer.)

• Great scenery, especially the glacier in Iceland and some of the sweeping landscapes. Eggers is always very attentive to the environments in which his stories take place, an undervalued aspect of modern storytelling.

• Here’s an iffy one: While what we get in the trailer largely sticks with the muddy doom-and-gloom aesthetic of most medieval movies, it is welcome to see the characters largely wearing nice fabrics (as opposed to burlap or outright rags) and colors. Not just the Norse but everyone throughout the medieval world enjoyed colorful clothing just as much as we do. The Northman’s palette is pretty muted, presumably for artistic reasons as much as that ineradicable image of the Middle Ages as drab, but the young hero’s red tunic and Taylor-Joy’s blue shift were nice touches. I hope there’s more of that.

• Related: When evil uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang) arrives to kill the hero’s father, he’s wearing a “goggle” helm with attached wraparound mail typical of the Vendel period, which directly preceded the Viking Age. A touch of archaism or ceremony for the uncle, then? Also, the drab color palette could be especially purposeful here, as several sagas refer to characters ritually dressing in black to prepare for a premeditated killing. If this is intentional, it shows Eggers has done a ton of homework. I’m hopeful.

• Further related to the Vendel era stuff: Is that Oðinn we get a glimpse of by the fire near the end? His one visible eye appears cloudy. Further, he’s wearing a helmet typical of scenes depicted on Vendel art, which are often interpreted as mythological scenes. Here’s a really similar one. Notice the rods or staffs. Some kind of staff was apparently important for the practice of seiðr, a form of magic or divination that was typically associated with women (see Taylor-Joy’s “cunning” woman) and shameful for men to perform—though Oðinn, notably, practiced seiðr. Is that what’s going on in the trailer? Is that why no one in the scene is wearing pants? Who’s to say at this point, but again, that it suggests these possibilities shows that Eggers isn’t going for the superficial Hollywood image of Vikings.

• Speaking of Hollywood Vikings, there appear to be no shield-maidens, female warriors, or other Hollywood Warrior Chicks™ in the trailer, which is astounding. Hollywood cannot resist throwing that bit of Norse fantasy in. (And I do mean fantasy: here’s a summary of the most prominent example from the legendary sagas.) The only exception here seems to be a valkyrie, about which more below.

• Also: rather more wire-fu than I prefer, especially that over-the-top axe blow at approximately 2:05. Hoping the movie doesn’t go off the rails when the warriors draw their weapons, but there’s little enough here that I’m not too worried yet.

• Other notes on combat: Lots of sneaking in small numbers, especially under cover of darkness. Definitely rings true if you’ve read the sagas at all.

• A few shots I’m particularly eager to see more of: speaking of stuff straight from the sagas, we get what is clearly a glimpse of the burning of a turf long-house. (See the still at the top of this post.) Several other shots seem to show fighting inside the hall, presumably before the whole thing is torched.

• Creepy but 100% realistic detail: Two shots near the end of the trailer appear to show a valkyrie riding through the sky. In the first shot, as she screams, you can see black streaks across her teeth. Numerous skulls from Viking Age burials have exactly this kind of grooving filed laterally across the teeth. Some kind of badge of honor for a warrior? Medicine or magic? Mere personal decoration, like a rapper’s grill? No one knows for sure, but it was cool to see that make it into the movie.

• Eggers loves his dreams and nightmare visions, and I’m guessing the valkyrie and Oðinn—if that is indeed him—might factor into them.

• Finally, I haven’t said much about the cast, but they look great. I’ve liked Skarsgård in whatever I’ve seen him in but remember him primarily as Sergeant “Iceman” Colbert in the mini-series “Generation Kill.” Here he seems to be channeling some of his version of Tarzan, particularly in the ulfheðinn scenes, which look like they’re calculated to show off his abs. Good for him, I guess. Ethan Hawke looks great as a good, wise king and father; Claes Bang—who has suddenly appeared in a bunch of recent American movies, none of which I’ve seen—as a quietly threatening evil uncle. Scar to Hawke’s Mufasa? Taylor-Joy was exceptional in both The Witch and, in something completely different, Emma, and should be excellent here as well. I’m especially interested in Willem Dafoe, whose role is mostly just teased here but, considering Dafoe’s caliber, should be important and not a little weird.

So—The Northman looks like a Viking revenge story taking place on two levels, the first a potentially quite authentic and realistic historical world and the other a dimension of dreams, visions, or the supernatural. That’s my initial reaction, anyway, with a few thoughts, observations, and wonderings. Considering what we get in the trailer, and considering the talent involved, I’m guardedly optimistic. We’ll see. Like I said, medievalists are used to being disappointed (see Knight, The Green), but based on these two and a half minutes, I’m here for it.

Check out the trailer and see for yourself! The Northman comes to theaters April 22 and I guarantee I’ll be there.

Addendum: If you can’t wait for April, as I imagine I may have a hard time doing, please do check out my novel No Snakes in Iceland, which is set in the same world but deals with ghosts and grief and mystery rather than dynastic betrayal.

The Green Knight

Ralph Ineson in David Lowery’s The Green Knight

When the first trailer for The Green Knight appeared, five or six people immediately sent it to me. That’s speaking my love language. Y’all get me.

But I wasn’t sure what to make of the trailer. I hoped for a relatively faithful adaptation of one of my favorite poems, a truly great work of literature and Arthuriana, but I feared the filmmakers would simply use the skeleton of the story as a frame for weird, arthouse ambiguity, special effects, and sex.

As it turns out, I was kind of right about both.

The story (for those unfamiliar with it)

The Green Knight is an adaptation of the fourteenth century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The story, in brief: One year during King Arthur’s Christmas celebrations at Camelot, a strange knight—entirely green—arrives in the midst of the festivities and offers a challenge: give him one blow of whatever kind or severity on the condition that the man who strikes also receive a blow a year and a day later. Sir Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, steps up and beheads the knight, who then picks up his severed head, makes a speech, and leaves.

A year later Gawain leaves on a quest to find the Green Knight and keep his word. He stops for several days at the castle of Sir Bertilak, who engages Gawain in another game of exchange: Bertilak will trade whatever he kills while hunting for whatever Gawain gets while resting at his house—alone with Bertilak’s wife. Over three days and three hunts, Gawain resists all of Lady Bertilak’s advances except one: an offer of an enchanted belt that will render its wearer invulnerable. This Gawain accepts, a fact he hides from Bertilak during their exchange that evening.

Gawain leaves to meet the Green Knight, they spar verbally, and the Green Knight ultimately gives Gawain only a nick on his neck before revealing that he is, in fact, Sir Bertilak, and the entire scenario is a test engineered by the enchantress Morgan le Fay. Ashamed, Gawain and Bertilak make amends and Gawain returns to Camelot, chastened.

Pretty much everything in the poem is in the film The Green Knight, but often trimmed, rearranged, or expanded upon. Fair enough—an adaptation has to adapt. So, for instance, Morgan le Fay, now Gawain’s mother rather than his aunt, is present from the beginning; Sir Gawain’s quest to find the Green Knight, which in the poem gets a few offhand allusions to giants and wandering in the wild, takes up about half the film; and the time Sir Gawain spends with his host Sir Bertilak are streamlined into about two days. Again, fair enough—that kind of repetition, so thematically rich in the poem, might pose mind-numbing pacing problems in a film.

The positives

So I’m fine with the film not being 100% faithful to the source material, and went in prepared for that. Allowing for restructuring and artistic license, there was a good bit of The Green Knight that I enjoyed, or at least admired. But, on balance, I didn’t like the film, and that has a lot to do with the worries I had about the trailer.

Let me start with several things I liked:

• Despite not looking a thing like the man described in the poem (huge, unarmed and unarmored, entirely bright green, quite loquacious), the Green Knight was mesmerizing every moment he was onscreen, in no small part thanks to Ralph Ineson’s amazing voice. The rejiggering of the events at Arthur’s Christmas feast was calculated to give maximum impact to the Green Knight’s act of picking up his head and then addressing Gawain, and it worked. (In the theatre where I watched the film, I heard someone gasp when the Green Knight, headless, stood up. This is certainly one of those stories I would like to experience for the first time all over again.)

• The film has tons of atmosphere—perhaps too much (about which more below)—but I generally liked the look of things, most especially the wild Irish landscapes where much of the film was shot.

• Relatedly, the film’s music and sound design were quite good. Even though in some closeups you can tell the Green Knight is a man in a rubber mask, the sound of creaking, groaning timber and the bassy thud of his footsteps gave him tremendous gravitas.

• The strength of the source material shines through in the characters of the Green Knight himself, as I mentioned, and in Sir Bertilak, unnamed in the film but played by Joel Edgerton (recently of Netflix’s Henry V film The King, another mixed bag that I reviewed here). Edgerton’s performance is bluff, hearty, warm, and welcoming, exactly right for Sir Gawain’s host, and the trimming of Gawain’s stay with him was a detriment.

• Sean Harris (another veteran of The King) plays an older, more tired King Arthur, a performance that I liked quite a lot. I’d like to see Harris in his own King Arthur movie.

• A single scene with giants was interesting. It was simultaneously eerie—the shot that introduced the giants reminded me of that famous Goya painting—and a little unintentionally comedic. After the initial surprise wore off the scene started to look like a prog rock album cover. So this one doesn’t go down entirely in the win column, but I mostly liked it.

• One change to the source material that was quite clever: Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel for his “appointment” with the Green Knight early. In the poem the Green Knight is waiting for Gawain and sharpening his axe—a nerve-wracking image of patience. In the film the Green Knight is in some kind of hibernation and Gawain, after placing the Knight’s axe at his feet, has to wait for him through a night and a day. This recreates the night-long prayer vigil that a squire was expected to undergo before being knighted, a nice touch and thematically appropriate.

So credit where credit is due: The Green Knight is skillfully made, and I enjoyed some aspects of it. That said, the film’s style and its fast-and-loose thematic relationship with the source material do it no favors.

On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot

I’ll be brief on style. In discussing The Green Knight with several people since I saw it yesterday, the phrase I keep falling back on is artsy-fartsy. This being 2021, that means awkward editing, titles in big funky typefaces, intentionally discomforting ambient sound, an elephantine pace, dark, dingy digital cinematography, and, most especially, all of the above rolled into a whole lot of surrealist imagery. Some of this works—I enjoyed the variety of blackletter fonts used in the titles and some of the fever dream imagery. This could have been fun. But much of the rest is overwrought or simply twee, the markers of a self-aware hipster deconstruction. Another bother is the bleak, often low-contrast cinematography; some scenes are so dark it was difficult to make out what was happening.

Also: The Green Knight is “a fantasy retelling” of the story. Fine—Arthurian literature is all basically fantasy anyway. But keep your Medieval Myths Bingo card handy; the film leans hard on medieval stereotypes. The film opens on a shot of a peasant passed out in a straw-strewn yard full of livestock as seen from the window of a brothel, for crying out loud, and many scenes in mucky fields or foggy woods reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

More serious are the thematic changes. The filmmakers have given Gawain the Prince Hal treatment (it’s him waking up in the brothel in the opening scene) and depict him as an aspiring but wayward knight. The film is therefore a coming-of-age story. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this in reviews of the film, and it is mostly well-done. For instance, an invented scene in which Gawain meets the ghost of St Winifred and, when she asks him for a favor, asks what she plans to give him in exchange, shows succinctly just how much he still has to learn. But this arc is warped and complicated—if not compromised—by events near the film’s climax.

Rereading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight over many years, I’m struck more and more by how thoroughly, deeply Christian it is. There are the obvious things, like the story beginning and ending during the Christmas season, or Gawain’s shield—the shield that launched a thousand sophomore Brit Lit papers. (As a measure of the film’s regard for its source material’s themes, the shield is smashed by bandits early in the proceedings.) But this is rooted deeper than obvious symbols. Few stories are as unified in theme and plot as Sir Gawain, and separating the elements of its plot from its original themes guts it.

This is why deconstructionist versions of Beowulf always fail, and it’s why The Green Knight follows after them. A coming-of-age story is all well and good, but the Christian elements in the story offer hope of redemption for the youth who fails as he comes of age, as Gawain does.

So when The Green Knight’s Gawain is tempted by Lady Bertilak with the belt that will render him invulnerable against the Green Knight, he not only takes it but submits to a sex act (off screen) with her. How will he get out of this one when Sir Bertilak gets home and expects their gift exchange? He doesn’t—he flees, bluntly telling Bertilak that he doesn’t want his hospitality. And when the moment of truth comes and the Green Knight prepares his blow, Gawain first fantasizes about running away, becoming King himself, losing everyone he loves, and dying under siege—living a life of temporary success based on a lie. A powerful montage.

But Gawain snaps out of this fantasy sequence, removes the belt, and tells the Green Knight he is now ready. And, after a “Well done” and a wry joke, the Green Knight kills him.

Hony soyt qui mal pence

Well, it is heavily implied that the Green Knight kills him. The director thinks The Green Knight benefits from this ambiguous non-ending. The friend I watched it with was insulted that the film concluded on a punchline. The climax of the poem is a moment of grace that leads to repentance. The climax of the film gives us bravery in the face of failure but no redemption.

Finally, The Green Knight is missing the joy that runs through the poem from beginning to end. It’s a fun story to read despite the high stakes and lethal danger. The film is dour, consumed with its own grit and grime, its rare humor grim and no relief.

What The Green Knight’s filmmakers have accidentally crafted is exactly the kind of movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail was spoofing—stilted, grotesque, an anachronism stew heavy on medieval clichés, with muddy smoke-swept landscapes sparsely populated by people in rags, and, worst of all, self-important. The film delights in weird images and non-answers, which can be fine, but both there and where it matters most it simply isn’t the story of Sir Gawain.

An adaptation is free to be an adaptation, but in this case, despite the often handsome design, the wonderful atmosphere, and a handful of good performances, I’ll still take the original.

More if you’re interested

The source material is still worth reading. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been a favorite of mine for twenty years, ever since I started it one Sunday afternoon as a college freshman and couldn’t put it down. That was Burton Raffel’s translation, which is still in print and still worth your while. Perhaps my favorite is JRR Tolkien’s, still commonly read thanks to the name attached to it but a good translation first and foremost. Other good ones include those by contemporary poets Simon Armitage, who takes an odd ecological tack on his interpretation, and WS Merwin. Penguin Classics has four (!) editions—two modern English translations by Brian Stone and Bernard O’Donoghue, one edition entirely in the original Middle English, and a massive volume of the complete works of the Gawain Poet. Many others above present the text bilingually, which can be informative.

If you’re familiar with the vast tangle of medieval Arthurian literature (do take a minute to look at that map), you know that Sir Gawain varies wildly in characterization—sometimes courteous and principled, other times proud and boorish or even the instigator, because of a refusal to forgive, of the final war that destroys Arthur’s kingdom. Modern interpreters therefore seesaw on what kind of man he is. My least favorite version is The Once and Future King, in which Gawain and his clan are semi-barbarians dogged by Freudian complexes. Humbug. Inkling Roger Lancelyn Green, on the other hand, offers a convincing arc for Gawain that accounts for both the courteous knight of this poem as well as a later, compromised figure, in his King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

In a bit of serendipity, I ran across this excellent essay by Alexander Larman a few weeks ago: “Why can Hollywood never get the King Arthur story right?” An excellent question. The essay was occasioned by an announcement from Zack Snyder that he is working on an Arthurian project. One shudders to think of the result.

Black Ships Before Troy

Odysseus leads a peacemaking delegation to Achilles in Black SHips Before Troy, illustrated by Alan Lee

One night last week I closed our copy of Black Ships Before Troy and set it aside. It was bedtime, and I had just read to my six-year-old daughter and four-year old son about the long-fated duel of Achilles and Hector, of Hector’s death, his father King Priam’s pitiful trip into the night to beg for his son’s body, of the weeping of Troy’s women as they washed and dressed the body for the pyre, and the funeral rites performed for the dead prince.

We sat quietly for a moment. At last my daughter, who had watched me intently throughout this chapter, said, “I’ve never seen a daddy cry before.” And then, “That was weird.”

I picked up Black Ships Before Troy for three reasons: first, my lifelong love of the story of the Trojan War and my constant search for good ways to introduce my kids to these stories; second, the fact that it was written by Rosemary Sutcliff, author of much classic children’s historical literature, like her novel The Eagle of the Ninth; and third—and decisively—the illustrations by Alan Lee, one of the great illustrators of Tolkien. The book proved excellent on all three counts.

Despite its subtitle, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad tells the story of the whole Trojan War. Sutcliff gives special attention to the events of the Iliad—which takes place across only a few weeks near the end of the ten-year siege—but Sutcliff bookends the story of Achilles’s rage with chapters that explain the backstory and the war’s ultimate outcome, from Eris’s fatal wedding gift and the judgment of Paris to the construction of the Trojan Horse and the final sacking of the city. Along the way she also incorporates incidents like the arrival of Penthesilea’s Amazons, Odysseus and Ajax’s dispute over Achilles’s armor, and the story of Philoctetes. It’s very well done.

I appreciate two things especially about Sutcliffe’s treatment of the war:

First, she doesn’t oversimplify the parts based on the Iliad. Black Ships Before Troy teems with characters and the plot rises and falls with the tidelike motion of the armies in Homer’s poem, in which the heroes on both sides first drive and then are driven by the enemy. She also includes the actions of the gods—Aphrodite saving Paris’s bacon during his duel with Menelaus, Apollo striking the Achaian camp with plague, Thetis rising from the waves to comfort her sulking son—and thereby preserves a lot of the tone and integrity of Homer’s original.

Second, and relatedly, she doesn’t soften the characters or the action. Her descriptions of things like the capture and enslavement of Briseis or the sacrifice of captive Trojans on Patroclus’s funeral pyre are neither gratuitous nor apologetic; she simply presents Homer’s heroes as Homer presented them, warts and all. This gave me with lots of opportunities for conversation with my kids, especially where deceit and cruelty factored into the plot as it does in so many places. Relatedly, Sutcliff does not stint on the violence of the combat. Again, it is neither gratuitous nor euphemized, but it is clear in this story that this terrible war ends lives in terrible ways, including those of characters we love.

Hence the anecdote at the beginning of this post. Although I was ready for it, revisiting Hector’s death and reading about the grief of a father, a wife, and a whole city while flanked by my children was overwhelming. It made the most moving moments in Homer newly fresh and impressed that story that much more upon my kids.

The upshot is that Black Ships Before Troy presents, on a kid-friendly level, the same themes of heroism and excellence and the same sense of tragedy as the Iliad itself. I had some great conversations with my daughter in particular about the relative virtues of Achilles and Hector—who was more of a hero, and why, and what we thought might happen when the two of them finally met. By about the midpoint of the book she had stopped asking which side was the good guys and which the bad guys but had decided opinions about which characters were good and which bad—a sign of Homer at work.

This is a children’s version but it is not a modernization or ideological reinterpretation, thank God. This is as close as I’ve seen it get to pure Homer for kids. We loved it.

Finally, Alan Lee’s illustrations. The book is lavishly illustrated. There are pictures on almost every page, from dramatic action scenes teeming with characters—picking out who was who in the battle scenes became a fun game, a Mycenaean Where’s Waldo? for the kids—to halcyon scenes of the peaceful times before the war. A recurring statue of Aphrodite proves particularly poignant. Lee clearly worked hard to make the figures, landscapes, architecture, and equipment as authentic feeling as possible, striking a balance in style between what we’ve recovered from Trojan War-era archaeological sites and later Greek fashions. It’s beautiful, and it works magnificently. The pictures evoke a feeling both of gritty reality as well as of heightened myth. Of one scene in which Achilles, newly armed by Thetis in a panoply forged by Hephaestus himself, charges across the blood-flowing river Scamander toward the gates of Troy, my daughter said, “He looks glorious!”

The publisher recommends Black Ships Before Troy for ages 7-10 or older. That’s probably about right if the child is doing the reading, as the language is slightly elevated and consciously old-fashioned. I read it aloud to my two older kids, which gave me a chance to stop and explain new words and refresh them on who was who. My six-year-old got a lot out of it and really responded to the story. My four-year old enjoyed the pictures and the fighting and had favorite characters (Hector especially) but didn’t seem to track with the story. But that didn’t seem to bother him. Both enjoyed it, and I savored the chance to share this with them.

Black Ships Before Troy is an excellent children’s retelling of the Trojan War. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a beautifully illustrated way to introduce Homer to and enjoy one of the great legends of Western civilization with your kids.

Addendum: The illustrated edition of Black Ships Before Troy was apparently out of print for a long time before being reissued recently. This can make it difficult to find the correct edition on Amazon, where used copies are currently listed for over $300. I’ve linked to the correct hardback reissue, which is less than $20, in this review.

The Odyssey XXII-XXIV on Core Curriculum

Odysseus killing the suitors in an illustration by John Flaxman (1755-1826)

Our journey is ended! This morning the final episode of Core Curriculum’s slow read through Homer’s Odyssey dropped, concluding the show’s fourth series. It’s been great.

In this episode, host David Grubbs talks to Coyle Neal, Jay Eldred, and me about the three climactic books of the Odyssey. Among the topics we discuss are Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors and the numerous action movies it reminds us of; whether justice was served in the killing of the suitors and, especially, the slave girls who had collaborated with them; the duel of wits and cunning between Odysseus and Penelope upon their reunion; and the final restoration of order, with a little assist from Athena. There’s much, much more, but this is a good précis of a very rich discussion.

I had a great time on this episode and on all the Odyssey episodes I got to participate in. If you haven’t been following along, I hope you’ll go back to the first episode of the series. These are great discussions and have only deepened my appreciation of some of my favorite books.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s detailed shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! And stay tuned for the forthcoming fifth series of the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Core Curriculum!

The Odyssey XIX-XXI on Core Curriculum

Odysseus and Eurycleia in an illustration by john Flaxman

With the arrival of the penultimate episode of this season of Core Curriculum, both we and Odysseus are in the homestretch.

In this episode, covering books 19-21 of the Odyssey, Victoria Reynolds Farmer hosts Christina Bieber Lake and me in a discussion of Odysseus’s scouting trip into his own house, the light shed by Athena, the varying relationships of characters like Odysseus, Penelope, and the slave nurse Eurycleia, whether Odysseus enjoys his disguises too much, and a lot more. This was a really enjoyable episode to record and I hope y’all will enjoy listening.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes. There’s only one more on the Odyssey to go!

Thanks for listening!

The Odyssey XV-XVI on Core Curriculum

The latest episode of Core Curriculum’s journey through the Odyssey has arrived! In this episode my friend Jay Eldred hosts Michial Farmer and me in a talk through books XV and XVI.

In these books of the Odyssey, Telemachus returns to Ithaca from his search for his father; Odysseus, incognito, begins to scope out the members of his household; and father and son reunite. Along the way, Jay, Michial, and I talk about fathers real and substitute; what Helen’s parting gift to Telemachus may or may not mean, the swineherd Eumaeus’s tragic backstory and his reconciliation to his fate, the finely observed details of Homer’s poem, its recurring theme of hospitality, and even country novelty singer Ray Stevens. This was a fun episode, and I hope y’all enjoy listening.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s shownotes, including links to the relevant Ray Stevens songs, on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

The Odyssey I-II on Core Curriculum

Athena, disguised as Mentor, leads Telemachus in one of John Flaxman’s illustrations for The Odyssey (1810)

Series 4 of Core Curriculum has arrived! Previous seasons have tackled the Iliad, Plato’s Republic, and the selected poetry of Sappho. This season we’re talking through Homer’s Odyssey book by book.

In the first episode of this series, Michial Farmer of the Christian Humanist Podcast hosts my friend Coyle Neal, of the City of Man Podcast, and myself in a discussion of Books I and II of the Odyssey. We discuss the Odyssey’s relationship to the Iliad and even touch on the vexed and unanswerable question of authorship as well as talking about the events of these books, which follow the title character’s son Telemachus as he begins a journey in search of his missing father. We discuss the poem’s theme of hospitality and honor and, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, compare Homer’s work to everything from blatant parodies or homages like O Brother, Where Art Thou? or “Duck Tales,” to the perspectives of modern war movies, to other heroic poems like Beowulf, and to less obviously related stories like Home Alone and Back to the Future.

It’s a ton of fun. As much as I adore the Iliad and loved talking through that a year ago, I think I enjoyed our discussions of the Odyssey even more and am excited to listen to all of them as they come out.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. It appears Stitcher will no longer allow me to embed the episode, so if you’re looking for a web player you can listen to it on the episode’s page there. You can look at Michial’s detailed shownotes, including all of our references and allusions to outside material, on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you don’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! Hope y’all enjoy.

The Iliad V-VI on Core Curriculum

Diomedes casting his spear against Ares, illustration by John Flaxman

Episode three of Core Curriculum is here! I was honored to be a guest on this episode with host Victoria Reynolds Farmer and my friend and sometime host on the City of Man Pocast, Coyle Neal. In this episode we continue Core Curriculum’s slow walk through the Iliad by looking in detail at Books V and VI of Homer’s masterwork. We talk about the nature of the war dramatized by Homer, the gods, the heroes, arete and the aristeia, and the unforgivable fecklessness of both Paris and the movie Troy. Coyle and I also sing the praises of a criminally underrated character, the ferocious god-fighting hero Diomedes.

You can read the shownotes at the CHRN website here. You can listen in on the web here or in the embedded Stitcher player in this post. Please also add Core Curriculum to your usual lineup of podcast listening, which you can do via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services. Thanks for listening!

The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes

This is a good time for Norse myth—or at least it should be. Thor is one of the most popular parts of the central cast of the Avengers series, TV is loaded with Viking or Norse-themed programming, and last year geek darling Neil Gaiman released Norse Mythology, his own retelling of some Norse legends. 

Unfortunately a lot of this pop culture is just Norse-flavored. The Thor, Odin, Loki, and Asgard of the Marvel franchise are entertaining but considerably different from their original versions. TV shows like Vikings have serious historical problems. And even Gaiman's Norse Mythology, an entertaining enough read, limits its focus to the gods—and not just to the gods, but to the subgroup of the Æsir—and his depictions of their personalities owe more to the characterizations of Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston than to the dark and often inscrutable gods of the eddas. 

An excellent short introduction

I was really pleased, then, with a new book I read last week by Carolyne Larrington: The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, from Thames & Hudson. I found the book on the recommendation of Dr. Jackson Crawford of UC Boulder, about whom more below.

I was already familiar with Larrington thanks to her excellent recent translation of the Poetic Edda (a.k.a. the Elder Edda) for Oxford World Classics. She's an accomplished expert in the field and clearly loves the material, which is a good combination when approaching something as diffuse, arcane, and incomplete as Norse myth.

What we know is based almost entirely on the Poetic Edda and another work by Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda, and it is apparent from both that we don't have all the stories the Norse told about their gods and heroes. What we do have is episodic, allusive, and varies wildly in tone, sometimes within the same stories. Larrington retells the myths carefully, noting often what we do and do not know about the fuller mythology, and retelling them mostly on their own terms, without a lot of modern reinterpretation. Where she does offer "explanations" of certain tales, she is appropriately undogmatic.

A few things I appreciated about Larrington's book:

• Short, well-told summaries of the major myths, with good explanations of things first-time readers of Norse mythology would need to know.
• Larrington uses the original spellings of the gods' and heroes' names throughout, including the letters eth and thorn: thus Oðinn instead of Odin and Þorr instead of Thor. This seems like a minor detail, but I think it helps distance the reader from comic books or modern interpretations and open them to the originals.
• Sidebars on interesting side stories or other topics.
• Over 100 illustrations, many from Romantic era books with anachronisms like winged helmets, but the pictures are a welcome help in imagining the stories. Many others are photographs of archaeological finds like the Lewis chessmen, rune stones, or the Oseberg ship or reproductions of original medieval or early modern Icelandic drawings.
• Larrington is refreshingly frank about the unappealing nature of the Norse gods. Where Marvel's Thor is a well-intentioned but arrogant young warrior who learns humility and self-sacrifice and Odin is a wise—and, well, godlike—old man, the real Þorr is an unapologetically violent bruiser who kills people for humiliating him and Oðinn is a malevolent trickster who first favors then traduces mere mortals in order to stock his hall with warriors.
• Larrington includes excellent summaries of several major human heroes, including Volsung, Sigurð the dragon-slayer, and Ragnar Loðbrok. 

All in all, an excellent short book, and a great introduction to the topic. I recommend this heartily as a first stop.

More if you're interested

Check out all of the books I mentioned above, but especially the original sources for our understanding of Norse mythology, the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda.

In addition to Larrington's translation of the Poetic Edda, the aforementioned Jackson Crawford has an excellent new translation available from Hackett Publishing. As a bonus, he includes his adaptation of the Hávamál, "The Sayings of the High One," the Cowboy Hávamál, a western-inflected interpretation inspired by his grandfather. You can listen to Crawford read it here.

Another book Crawford recommends in the video linked above is the longest and most complicated of the Icelandic sagas, Njals saga, or The Saga of Burnt Njall. I read the Robert Cook translation he recommends while I was working on the first draft of No Snakes in Iceland after college. It's a wonderful book, one I've been meaning to reread for years.

Fortunately, Crawford has just completed a six-part summary retelling of Njal's Saga for his YouTube channel. You can watch all six parts below. Check it out!

Part I: Hrút and young Hallgerð
Part II: Gunnar's rise
Part III: Gunnar's fall
Part IV: Njal's sons
Part V: The burning
Part VI: Kári