The Vikings
For decades,Vikingshave been a point of fascination in film and television.
Their lives are portrayed most profoundly through the historical epicTV seriesVikings, which ran from 2013 to 2020.
Vikings have also worked their way into popular culture through fictionalized movies.
Now,an earlier Viking movie has its accuracy reviewed by an expert.
The 1958 film is one of the earliest examples of a majormovie about the Viking era.
In this action-adventure epic, a Viking prince and a slave vie for the love of a princess.
In an interview withInsider, historian William Short provides an accuracy rating forThe Vikings.
Short took issue with several aspects ofThe Vikings, including the types of weapons used in the battle.
But what was laughably funny about this clip was the people doing the throwing.
The Vikings (1958) is an epic historical drama directed by Richard Fleischer. The film stars Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis as rival Viking half-brothers battling for power and the love of a Welsh princess, portrayed by Janet Leigh. Set against a backdrop of Norse mythology and brutal sea battles, the story unfolds with themes of loyalty, betrayal, and familial conflict.
So there’s two specialized spears that seem to be for naval battle in the Viking age.
One of them is snrisspjot, a stringed spear.
So it’s, I would have expected to see these strings.
The other spear is just a long, overgrown spear, a spear on steroids.
And rather than throwing, it was more used for jabbing as the ships approached.
The ships approach side to side.
And that’s not the way Vikings did it.
They approached bow to bow, so front to front.
And once they had touched, they’d grapple, they’d pull themselves in.
That’s when the battle really began in earnest.
Their goal was to go the full length of the ship to kill the person in the stern.
So it was like a land battle fought on a floating island on the deck of a ship.
You’re forcing your way through, throwing everything off to the sides.
Forcing their way through to get to the king.
Can you imagine the kind of courage it took to do this?
And, the word glory you would achieve if you did in fact kill the thing.
So that part of the battle was pretty far off.
I really expected to see a lot more of that kind of motion in a naval battle.
Because they had no shields, they were using their swords as a defense.
And subsequent hits are going to cause that crack to propogate along the length of the blade.
And the blade is going to break.
And Vikings were really sensitive to that.
But not in any way supported by any source.
Some Vikings were put into a ship or a boat and burned.
But it was always done on land.
That’s not going to be very pretty.
I’m going to have to rate this clip somewhere around a 5.
Only for the fight.
The fight had the power and the intensity or the relentless that we would expect to see in Vikings.
