fly agaric), a mushroom native to the Northern Hemisphere with an eons-old connection to shamanic spirituality.Īurvandil is known as the Raven King, and ravens follow Amleth throughout his quest to avenge his father’s death.

The likely culprit here is Amanita muscaria (a.k.a. The resulting hallucinatory experience reveals to the young Amleth the nature of the Viking cosmos and his place in it. In The Northman, Amleth and his father, King Aurvandil (Hawke), drink a potion given to them by their tribe’s shaman, Heimir the Fool (Willem Dafoe). This communion is achieved primarily through trances, psychedelic and otherwise, that impart profound spiritual wisdom. Norse paganism had a strong element of shamanism, which - to reduce a complex, ancient global practice to one single sentence - allows a worshiper to directly experience the spirit world rather than passively worship it. What’s up with Ethan Hawke getting on his knees and barking like a dog? Interestingly, in the original story, Amleth is described as a fool, a detail that both Shakespeare and Eggers chose to set aside for their versions. (He also rearranged the letters in the main character’s name.) William Shakespeare took the premise - an exiled prince vows revenge after his uncle kills his father and marries his mother - and used it as the basis for Hamlet. The Northman is partially based on the tale of Amleth, which is told in books three and four of Historia Danica, a legendary history of the Danish people written by the scholar Saxo Grammaticus in the early 13th century. Once we skip forward in time, The Northman shifts to two real-life locations: the Land of the Rus - which encompasses modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus - and Iceland, which was settled by Vikings in 870. We begin in the fictional kingdom of Hrafnsey, which press notes for the film describe as “located somewhere around the Orkney and Shetland Islands” (i.e., off the northern coast of Scotland). In the year 914, Amleth boards a ship bound for Iceland, then a sparsely populated Viking settlement less than 50 years old.Īll over northern Europe.

The Northman opens in 895 before fast-forwarding a couple of decades as our hero, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), matures from a frightened boy into a hardened warrior.

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