recreation

There is a sequence in sensational viking epic ‘The man of the north where the attackers move in columns, not in lines, as the Vikings actually fought. Any other production would have ignored that detail, but its director Robert Eggers remained faithful to reality. Now you can check it out for free and until June 19 on the platform RTVE Play. Historian William Short analyzed the combat in the film, evaluating how faithful the film’s depiction of battles was, and gave it a 9 out of 10 for historical accuracy, recognizing that the depth of Eggers’ research is reflected in the attention to these types of details. From Viking combat techniques to the credibility of the costumes, weapons and rituals of the time. For comparison, Short was much less generous with the 1958 classic ‘The Vikings’ with Kirk Douglas, to whom he gave just a 5 out of 10 for historical accuracy. Short’s starting point was precisely that battle formation in columns: the Vikings did not advance in long lines along the battlefield, and in the film three very characteristic advancing columns are distinguished. But his successes go further: Short also examined the figure of berserker played by Alexander Skarsgårdand although the nature of the berserkers remains somewhat mysterious, sources document that they went into a battle frenzy, howling like wolves and biting at their shields. As for the language, Eggers did not opt ​​for the usual English in these productions. He worked with Icelandic linguist Haukur Þorgeirsson to reconstruct Old Norse in ritual scenes and chants, taking poems written in medieval Iceland and reinterpreting them into what would have been the pronunciation of his time. In short: a must-see film for devotees of Nordic culture that is worth claiming, especially considering that it was a failure at the box office with just 69.6 million in worldwide receipts. In Xataka | Today on Netflix: the first stop-motion film made in Mexico arrives with the seal of Guillermo del Toro