After a theatrical run in the spring, Robert Eggers’s viking epic The Northman was a much-anticipated summer streaming title, eventually landing on Peacock earlier this month. Like Eggers’s other films (The VVitch and The Lighthouse), The Northman is dark both visually and tonally with a story told in the straightforwardly violent style necessary to convey the brutality of existence in the time of vikings.
The film stars Alexander Skarsgård in the title role, a man otherwise known is Amleth. In 895 A.D., Amleth is a young viking prince who witnesses his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), being murdered by his uncle, the king’s brother Fjölnir. Uncle Fjölnir appears to be on a mission to usurp his brother as king and take Amleth’s mother (Nicole Kidman) for himself as a victory prize.
Fjölnir naturally wants Amleth dead as well to prevent any chance that the young boy could make a claim to his throne, but Amleth narrowly escapes his power-hungry uncle and grows up thinking only of revenge. As an adult, Amleth is hellbent on assassinating his uncle, avenging his father, and rescuing his mother.
Hakuna Ma Hamlet
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. For one, it’s the plot of The Lion King. But Disney didn’t come up with the saga of Simba all on their own. The Disney classic is of course a retelling of the Shakespearian classic that every high school freshman either loves or hates, Hamlet.
Though Shakespeare made the story of Hamlet famous with his 1599 tragedy, the bard borrowed a bit of his plotting himself from a Danish legend from the 12th century about a young prince of Jutland named Amleth. (Rearrange those letters a bit and you get…voila…Hamlet.)
The Legend of Amleth then has undergone quite a few adaptations over the centuries, from Amleth to Hamlet, from Hamlet to Simba, and now Hollywood has found themselves all the way back at the beginning again with Skarsgård’s Amleth of The Northman.
How does this modern retelling of a tale as old as time stack up against the original legend?
The Original Story of Amleth
The first records of the legend of Amleth date back to the 12th century, but the most cited source on the subject is Saxo Grammaticus whose volumes on Amleth were completed at the beginning of the 13th century. In this version from his “History of the Danes,” Horvendill (Amleth’s father) and Feng (Amleth’s uncle) co-rule Jutland under King Rorik of Denmark.
Predictably, Feng murders Horvendill in a bid for power. And to avoid being seen as a threat to his uncle’s power, Amleth pretends to be simple. This is more or less the course of events in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well, though not quite congruent with the narrative of The Northman.
Feng understands it wouldn’t be great optics to assassinate his nephew/stepson who is perceived as a simpleton, so he attempts some subterfuge. He sends Amleth to Briton with some guards and a coded rune that instructs the receivers to murder Amleth on arrival. But Amleth flips the script and changes the coded message such that his guards get the axe, not him.
When Amleth returns to Jutland not dead, it’s a bit of a surprise to a drunken Uncle Feng, and Amleth is able to get the upper hand and send his power-drunk unc packing to Valhalla.
But the legend of Amleth doesn’t end there. Amleth inadvertently enters into a beef with the King of Briton who decides the safest way to address the issue is to send Amleth on an errand to Scotland in hopes the Scots will make his head roll. But instead of a funeral, there’s a wedding as Amleth ends up enticing the Queen of Scotland into matrimony.
After tying the knot, Amleth heads out to set the King of Briton straight. And though he is victorious against the King, he is then ultimately killed in battle by the son of the King of Briton, Viglek.
How Faithful Is The Northman to Its Legendary Source Material?
Speaking strictly in terms of plot points, The Northman does stick pretty close to basic events and is faithful to each character’s motivations and actions, though clearly many details differ. Almeth did in fact seek revenge for the murder of his father by his uncle, but that’s about as close to the source material as the film gets.
Setting aside the Briton beef side plot that is nonexistent in The Northman, where the two differ most drastically is perhaps in tone and approach. The tone of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the legend as told by Saxo Grammaticus is something like a tale of palace intrigue. They both are heavy on courtly manipulations, schemes, and the behind-the-scenes power-plays and alliances familiar to viewers of Game of Thrones and The Borgias.
While those shows contain their fair share of violence and blood shed, it’s nothing in comparison to the spectacle that is The Northman, another key difference between The Northman and its source material.
The film as directed by Eggers and guided by Skarsgård (who brought the idea to Eggers and serves as a producer as well) leaves behind the safe and cozy palaces and all of their courtly intrigue to take viewers into the brutal world that was Scandinavia a thousand years ago. While much of Europe was feudal at the time, their neighbors to the north were more tribal than anything else, and Eggers’s Scandinavia is a viking-eat-viking world.
Choosing to move the action away from the palace and into the deadly forests and seas of the North Atlantic–a brutal environment where if nature and starvation don’t get you, your neighbor will–gives Amleth’s loss an even greater sense of tragedy. It also makes his quest for vengeance feel very intensely like something he is absolutely owed.
The bleak and desolate conditions of day-to-day existence in Amleth’s world give his quest justification and urgency. In a world where nothing feels solid or safe, the only things that offer a respite from uncertainty are home, hearth, and kin. But Amleth is robbed of those things. As The Northman portrays it, destroying the man who robbed him of those things is Amleth’s only possible goal, everything else has to be damned.
And without spoiling too much of the end of the film, Amleth does set aside other concerns to complete his quest for vengeance. It consumes him, but again, the way Eggers has set it up, Amleth’s obsession with vengeance feels deserved.
The Northman Creates Its Own Legend
It’s true that Eggers and Skarsgård have stood on the shoulders of giants to create their version of the Amleth legend, but their iteration of the timeless tale really only uses the legend as loose inspiration for their own distinctive vision. And the end result is that the The Northman is an epic in its own right, independent of its source material.
The film is a stand-alone tale of betrayal and vengeance that’s worthy of the acclaim that’s come its way. (It’s Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 89%.) And at the same time, it’s a compelling and satisfying retelling of a timeless story, making the familiar new again for a modern era.
The Northman is streaming now on Peacock.
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