READING THE RUNES
The helmets. The beards. The longships. The looting, the pillaging, the red mist of battle. The gods. The runes. The bottomless barrels of mead. Viking iconography has long since passed into cinematic cliché. But how did it get there? And does any of this have a basis in historical fact, or is it all just Hollywood myth-making? As director Robert Eggers prepares to unleash his thunderous Dark Age revenge tale The Northman, we part the veil of history to recount the epic saga of Vikings on the silver screen…
The word ‘viking’ is itself a fiction, an 18th-century catch all term for the Norsemen and Danes who raided the coasts of Northern Europe from roughly the 8th to the 11th centuries. Probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon term ‘wicing’, or pirate, the word came into popular parlance when romantic tales of Nordic heroism caught the Georgian imagination
