It's a new Viking invasion of Britain – but this time it's cultural
After the discovery of a Viking burial site in Scotland, Norse history and myths are the focus of a TV saga, epic novels and a major British Museum exhibition
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 23 October 2011
Longboats, funeral pyres, glinting helmets and drinking horns: the discovery of a buried Viking boat in the west Highlands a few days ago has given an extra fillip to a burgeoning cultural fascination with all things Norse.
A succession of Viking literary sagas, films and television series, pieces of poetry and avant-garde art, not to mention preparations for a major British Museum show, are now all on the slipway.
More than 50 years after actors Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis donned their woollen tunics for Hollywood blockbuster The Vikings, a television series of the same name and a TV version of British writer Neil Gaiman's Nordic gods-inspired bestseller, American Gods, are both in development. The Vikings, which picks up on interest aroused by Kenneth Branagh's recent action film Thor, is being produced and written by the team behind BBC2 series The Tudors, and will tell the story of Ragnar, the great Viking leader and his two wives and four sons, who travelled to Ireland, England and France. The semi-mythological figures of Ragnar and his sons were also at the centre of the Curtis and Douglas epic, but this 10-part drama will chart their conquests while aiming to correct misconceptions about Viking society.
American Gods, Gaiman's mystical cult saga, tells the story of Shadow and his dealings with a modern-day incarnation of the Norse god Odin, or Woden. Gaiman is far from the only popular fiction writer to tap into Viking myth. This month novelist Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, brings out the second book in her Norse series. Published by Random House and called Runelight, it follows the story of Maddy Smith, the heroine first established in her 2007 book, Runemarks, who together with Norse gods Loki, Thor and Odin has to prevent the end of the world.
Also joining the queue to pay tribute to the Vikings is new novel The Bone Thief. Author VM Whitworth, an Anglo-Saxon specialist, said: "The Viking age is fascinating because of its multicultural glamour. It's full of fast-moving heroes and heroines, and the constant clash of religions and cultures. Thanks to the Vikings, we can write a story that can plausibly take in Ireland and Arabia."
Perhaps the highest-profile arrival in Norse terrain is children's novelist Francesca Simon, author of the Horrid Henry books. Her imagination was sparked by looking at the Lewis chessmen, the 12th-century Scandinavian ivory pieces in the British Museum, and wondering what would happen if they came to life. "I decided that the Lewis chessmen were Odin's warriors, asleep and frozen until he summoned them at a time of great peril," she explained. Her book, The Sleeping Army, published by Faber, is the result of an abiding love of Norse stories. She is haunted, she said, by the inevitable final flood, fire and death battle, known as Ragnarok, that wipes out both the Earth and the gods.
Norse mythology is the collective term for the ancient legends of Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) and one of its main sources is the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a guide to Old Norse mythology and prosody written in the 13th century.
Modern British understanding of the Vikings has been skewed by the fact that surviving accounts were written by monks who suffered in their raids and invasions. It is a version of history that is to be counterbalanced in the major Viking exhibition coming to the British Museum in three years' time. The centrepiece of the show will be a 1,000-year-old longship, dragged out of Roskilde harbour, near Copenhagen. The 115ft-long vessel went down in a storm in the early 11th century, during the reign of Canute the Great, who united Denmark, Norway, southern Sweden and England in a Viking empire. It was discovered during a dredging operation in 1997.
As well as inspiring mainstream entertainment, Norse stories are behind the work of avant-garde Icelandic artist Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, whose exhibition in Frankfurt runs until early next year. The artist has frequently collaborated with Icelandic singer Björk, and her films in particular draw on the dream worlds she creates from Norse mythology. One room in the show, Crepusculum, uses a display of medieval manuscripts that had never left Iceland before. On calfskin parchment, they set out legends of knights and saints, as well as factual reports, law codes and almanacs. This summer at the Edinburgh arts festival the Exquisite Corpse Dance Theatre, from Newcastle upon Tyne, performed a work based on Norse myths to fringe audiences in Leith. Called Valhöll – Hall Of The Slain, it looked at Viking beliefs about conquest and warriors' afterlife.
It's a new Viking invasion of Britain ? but this time it's cultural | Television & radio | The Observer
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It's about time something supplanted zombies and twinkly vampires, and I'd be quite happy if it turned out to be vikings.
Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial discovery 'a first'
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