Little White Lies Issue 93: April/May 2022

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…

From a colonial-era New England village of 2015’s The Witch to a gusty coastal island in the 1890s as seen in 2019’s The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers is cinema’s chief excavator of the past. On his new film, The Northman, he goes farther than ever in space and time, travelling back to Iceland at the turn of the 10th century for a Viking fable of vengeance. Working with the highest budget of his career and a full stable of bona fide movie stars, this is his most ambitious undertaking yet — not that levelling up will keep him from indulging in his obsession with obscurity. LWLies: What was the first thing you did to make The Northman? Eggers: Several years ago, as Brooklyn hipsters were wont to do, my wife and…

When Alexander Skarsgård was a child, his family used to spend their summers on the idyllic Baltic island of Öland. Sweden’s second largest island is coincidentally home to their royal family’s summer residence. In a manner, the Skarsgårds form a dynasty of their own, with patriarch Stellan one of the most recognisable Swedish actors of all time, and four of his eight children – Alexander, Gustaf, Bill and Valter – also pursuing careers in film and television. In fact, it was a friend of his father who gave Alexander his first acting role at the tender age of seven, in Åke and His World (he played Kalle Nubb, the eponymous Åke’s best friend). But during his childhood holidays on Öland, he was more interested in the runestones that littered the…

Considering the sheer amount of people who work in motion pictures – the immense breadth of the talent pool – it seems strange that you’d regularly find yourself on set with the same people over and over again. Ralph Ineson, a baritone-voiced powerhouse from the West Riding, who shot to infamy for his ability to throw a copper kettle over a pub in seminal TV sitcom, The Office, has locked into a tidy career niche where he plays knights, marauders, messengers and rustic patriarchs in bucolic period fantasies. Kate Dickie, an intense Scottish character actor flung onto the world stage as the lead in Andrea Arnold’s Ballardian erotic thriller from 2006, Red Road, is now an habitual scene-stealer in stories set in other worlds and other times. They also both…

When interviewing a linguist, transcription is an adventure. I must begin with an expression of enormous gratitude to LWLies’ own Marina Ashioti, for dealing with exchanges such as this: “I took the phonology of modern Icelandic English and extracted some features from it. There’s a process called devoicing: so Zs become Ss, Vs become Fs, Ds become Ts. That gives you a base, and if everyone does that, it’s easier than trying to get the more obvious characteristics which are very different – what’s called a palato-alveolar fricative. They would say ‘eyeshland,’ well, ‘eyeshlant,’ so it’s a T at the end instead of the D. We have consistency words, like ‘ghot,’ which takes you away from ‘gawd.’ Another word which, strangely enough, happens a lot in The Northman is ‘bloht’…

At the beginning of 2022, industry operator and LWLies contributor Josh Slater-Williams made a pithy comment on social media in response to a list of the top 30 box office earners of 2021. He noted that only four films on the list were not based on existing intellectual property – and one of those films was the low-balling Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy, which references a lot of existing IP as part of its story and production design. So that’s 26 of the top 30 films of 2021 – top in the sense that people were going to the cinema in droves to see them – all either sequels, remakes, refits, literary adaptations, musical adaptations, spinoffs, franchise extensions or, in the case of Jungle Cruise, based on the popular theme…