Jeremy Chamberlain

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this movie is the most accurate representation of Viking Age Scandinavian culture ever presented on film or television. Their worldview, including their theology and conviction that the world is inextricably bound up with the supernatural, is presented without judgement as the Vikings themselves would have understood and experienced it. It’s brutal, magical, primal, and certainly doesn’t bend to modern sensibilities. I think, especially judging by the reaction of other people in the theater, that this movie might make you distinctly uncomfortable and even outright offend you. These were not what we consider modern people adhering to modern morality. There is no Ragnar Lothbrok here as presented in the tv show Vikings, a modern skeptic who basically abhorred his own culture and wanted desperately to just hang out and philosophy with his Christian monk friend Athelstan. This is a movie about beserkrs and ulfhethnars who take on the spirits of wolves before slaughtering their foes, visions of savage Valkyr carrying the dead to Valhol, and of pitiless Norns who weave unbreakable threads of fate. They raided, took slaves, risked their lives in the pursuit of honor, and took lives in bloody vengeance. Do I recommend it? Yes, with one caveat: you should go in understanding you’re going to enter a world that is wholly alien to you and does absolutely nothing to ease you into it or to translate it into anything remotely palatable. I loved every minute of it.