Kenneth Branagh's Thor movie, starring Chris Hemsworth and Sir Anthony Hopkins, helped arouse interest in Viking folklore. Photo / Supplied
Longboats, funeral pyres, glinting helmets and drinking horns: the discovery of a buried Viking boat in the west highlands of Scotland this month has given extra fillip to a burgeoning cultural fascination with all things Norse.
A succession of Viking literary sagas, films and television series, poetry and 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 tunics for the Hollywood blockbuster The Vikings, a television series of the same name and version of the Nordic gods-inspired best-seller, American Gods, are 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 the 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, Neil Gaiman's mystical cult saga, tells the story of Shadow and his dealings with an incarnation of the Norse god Odin, or Woden. And this month novelist Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, brings out the second book in her Norse series. Called Runelight, it follows the story of Maddy Smith, the heroine first established in her 2007 book, Runemarks, who, together with the 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 the new novel The Bone Thief. Author V.M. 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 the 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 said. Her book, The Sleeping Army, is the result of an abiding love of Norse stories. She is haunted, she says, by the 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 the Scandinavians (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) and one of its main sources is the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, a guide to Old Norse mythology 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 1000-year-old longship, dragged out of Roskilde harbour, near Copenhagen. The 35m-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 entertainment, Norse stories are behind the work of the avant-garde Icelandic artist Gabriela Frieriksdottir, whose exhibition in Frankfurt runs until next year. She has collaborated with Icelandic singer Bjork, and her films draw on Norse mythology.
- OBSERVER
No comments:
Post a Comment