This post contains spoilers for The Northman
There's a background character in The Northman you probably blinked and missed. But her appearance, however brief, electrified me more than any other thrill in director Robert Eggers' bombastic new Viking epic (and that's saying something).
Amleth (who embodies the traditional hypermasculine Viking warrior ideal that dominates today's modern reimaginings of this ancient history) is partaking in the spoils of a violent raid on an innocent village. Then an armor-clad woman on horseback storms into the shot. Bearing all the visual markers of a military leader, she rallies the conquered villagers, waving a flag and calling upon strong warriors of any background to join her fight — before riding off, never to be seen in the movie again.
But I spent the rest of its runtime longing for the movie that could've been, if only she had been its main character instead.
Don't get me wrong: I love what The Northman does with Alexander Skarsgård as its lead. But let's be honest, by far the most underwhelming part of Egger's enthrallingly refreshing film is its tired old Revenge-For-My-Daddy-King storyline that's been shoved down our throats countless times before, by everything from Hamlet to The Lion King.
Yet I digress. Because as a dork for this era of prehistory, I'm especially a fan of Eggers' entry into the recent pop culture trend putting Vikings in major TV shows, films, and video games. From History Channel's surprisingly great Vikings series to Netflix's more recent Norsemen and Vikings: Valhalla shows, Marvel's box office-breaking Thor movies (particularly Ragnarok), and the excellent 2018 reboot of God of War, I'm living for this ancient Nordic moment in the mainstream.
But I'm also sick of each one making the same exact mistake by sidelining the best part of real-world Viking history: the absolute badassery of their warrior women (AKA shieldmaidens).
The fact, fiction, myth, and misogyny behind shieldmaidens
Now, to his credit, Eggers is a stickler for historical accuracy in his movies.
That's why the nameless female military leader in The Northman is a deliberate acknowledgment of recent archaeological evidence suggesting that Viking warrior women really did exist, which experts previously doubted. According to interviews, the movie character is loosely based on the famous grave of a high-ranking Viking military leader (identified as Bj 581) long-assumed to be male — until DNA evidence published in 2017 definitively proved she was female.
In The Northman, Amleth's prophesied demise (delivered by none other than Björk) along with his "King's tree" vision implies that his downfall is only the first chapter in his daughter's larger story, as she fulfills her destiny of becoming a great Viking Queen. We'll count that as yet another nod to actual archeological evidence that leadership roles in the Viking Age were far more gender-fluid than previously thought.
But for the love of all that is Freya, why is all this Viking warrior woman badassery still kept so squarely in the background of The Northman?
Just about every other pop culture story set in the Viking Age is guilty of the same oversight. God of War and Thor certainly include the strong mythological female characters central to Norse lore, like the Valkyries and goddess Freya. The Vikings TV show brings that representation a step closer to home by depicting real-world Viking women battling alongside men. But only 2020's Assassin's Creed: Valhalla video game gives players the option to play as a Viking female protagonist. Even then, though, getting the option to play as a woman is not the same as getting a story specifically grounded in the perspective of a Viking shieldmaiden.
Why is all this Viking warrior woman badassery still kept so squarely in the background of 'The Northman'?
In all fairness, though, we can't blame the sidelining of warlike Viking women exclusively on The Northman and its ilk. Until quite recently, women's importance in Viking society was sidelined by history itself too.
History, particularly prehistory pieced together through thousand-year-old archeological finds, isn't as hard of a science as we want it to be. Built on a foundation of facts that rely heavily on the subjective interpretation of artifacts, it's colored by the biases of our modern, male-dominated society. The impact those biases can have on our understanding of gender dynamics in the Viking Age became very clear in the reaction to the 2017 DNA analysis study of the so-called Birka female Viking warrior's grave.
After the skeleton was confirmed to be female, some archeologists jumped to the conclusion that the grave must've never belonged to a military leader in the first place, then, despite containing ample qualifying artifacts. But debate over the Birka female Viking warrior grave only deepened an existing divide within the archeological community over Viking women's role in the social hierarchy.
Many experts still negate the mounting evidence of women being present for the hostile Viking invasions, and discoveries of even more female warrior graves, along with the historical accounts of Viking women joining in warfare — insisting that the statues and depictions of battle-ready Viking women are only symbolic rather than indicative of real-world shieldmaidens. Each side of this debate accuses the other of modern biases, implying that either sexism or feminism clouds the other's objectivity.
The women written out of the Viking pop culture trend
We don't yet have conclusive answers on how pervasive shieldmaidens were in the Viking Age. But their absence from The Northman, aside from the few seconds afforded to the one proven incontrovertibly real, tells us a lot about which narratives we're inclined to believe today, even in a film full of magic.
I'm all for Robert Eggers' near obsessive fixation on grounding his films in real-world facts as much as possible. But exactly which version of history is he giving more weight to — and whose perspective do those versions leave out?
Much like movies, history is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. And frankly, I'm just tired of the Viking Age being used exclusively as a setting to justify depictions of unfettered hypermasculinity, to exercise the same old male-centric anxieties about patriarchy, through the same cookie-cutter male hero archetype, in the same story told over and over and over again.
Frankly, I'm just tired of the Viking Age being used exclusively as a setting to justify depictions of unfettered hypermasculinity.
This isn't really a feminist call-out. It's a declaration of utter boredom — a plea for pop culture's Vikings to try on literally anything other than muddy blood-soaked men, if only for the change of pace. Out of anyone, I thought that maybe the director of The Witch would've known how invigorating it can be to immerse modern audiences in the perspective of women who were too often written out of their own histories.
But perhaps Eggers chose to sideline shieldmaidens in The Northman as a franchise play, to hype up The Northwoman, if you will (god, please don't let this become an actual reality). Most likely, though, it's just the same lack of imagination that turned real Viking women into a myth.
