Great OD&D Movie: The Vikings

There are many great OD&D movies. But in my experience, the more explicit you make them--such as the two execrable Dungeons & Dragons films--the worse they are. So, among the best are the historical films.

Okay, I admit that I'm biased. I gave Vikings a prominent place in my own game.

This 1958 movie features Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Though I would take issue with the scary and (in my view) somewhat exaggerated Orson Wells introductory narrative (see one of my early blog posts on things Viking here), the movie is wonderful.

See below for a great scene featuring a longboat and fjords:

There's this cliche that 40's and 50's films were black and white in terms of evil vs. good characters. 60's, 70's and more contemporary films are more nuanced, or whatever. That's actually sort of the opposite of the truth.

In the Vikings most of the characters are morally mixed, to say the least, except perhaps for Janet Leigh and her priest, maybe, and of course, the current English king, who's a jerkopotamus to the core. So, the Vikings (represented most forcefully by Kirk Douglas) are literal rapists and murderers, but they also have a certain sense of honor and honesty, unlike, say, the scheming British. And even Douglas does the right thing by the women he loves at the point of death, perhaps sacrificing himself to his sworn enemy.

That's great drama. It's also (I hope) life.

"Do not Smite!" "Smite!" "Do not Smite!"

The first and third of those phrases were the last words of Snorri Sturluson, the great medieval Icelandic poet, Saga writer, lawyer, historian and political leader.

If you go to Iceland (which I strongly recommend), you will find few surviving buildings from before WW2.  This is because Iceland was an extremely poor country from the 13th-century to the first half of the 20th, exploited by it's Scandinavian brothers--Norway, Sweden and Denmark--on an almost continuous basis for 700 years.  Mud and wood shacks don't last.  But most of the the natural locations described in the great Sagas of Iceland's Golden Age still survive--the great plain of Thingvellir where the refined farmer-vikings of the 12th and 13th centuries used to meet at the Althing once a year to pursue their intricate lawsuits, the lonely and foreboding isle of Drangey where the misunderstood and wronged Grettir made his last stand, abandoned by his friends, and Snorri Sturluson's property where he also made a last stand against the assassins (70 in total) sent to kill him.

They found him in the cellar.  The appropriately named Arni the Bitter raised his weapon . . .

"Do not smite", said Snorri.

"Smite", said one of Arni's companions.

"Do not smite", said Snorri.

That's the pool where he bathed and there's the entrance to that cellar.

Once you hear that sequence of words they are impossible to forget.