Historian William Short watches and rates depictions of Viking combat in movies and TV shows.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00The modern idea that Vikings threw their axe is a misconception. If you look at the
00:12physics of an axe, they're very poorly suited for throwing in combat. I'm Dr.
00:17William Short. I'm an independent scholar focusing on a scientific research of
00:23Vikings, particularly Viking combat. Today we're going to look at Viking battles in
00:28movies and T.V. and judge how real they are. What he does is he catches a spear
00:39that was thrown at him, turns it around and throws it right back and that is
00:43mentioned numerous times in the literary sources as being a very effective battle
00:49technique and we've tested it and it works great. It's really not so difficult to
00:55catch the spear in flight and throw it back.
01:03The nature of berserkers are still a little bit mysterious but they are people
01:12who enter a battle frenzy before a battle and the sources say they howl like wolves,
01:19they bite their shields and iron and fire cannot harm them.
01:34So Vikings didn't use stone castles or anything like that. A typical enclosure would be a wood palisade
01:40fence and climbing it with an axe seems very doable using the axe to pull yourself up and we've done a
01:45lot of research on the physics of these weapons doing motion capture, measuring
01:50historic weapons using computer models to study it and what the axe has over some
01:56of the other weapons is just this insane amount of power. In one of our measurements
02:00at the moment the two-handed axe hits the target it just destroys what it touches and
02:06that's how Vikings used it.
02:12So the weapon that Amleth is using in this clip once he enters the village is a sax and before he
02:19enters you can see that it's slung horizontally from his belt. A sax was a short sword. What the
02:25sax is is a chopping weapon and he's holding it upside down in a strange way and uses it for a slice
02:30and that's not what the weapon is meant for at all.
02:40And destroying things with fire was just a way to emphasize the terror of these kinds of raids.
02:48We've done some tests where we actually built Viking houses, instrumented them, burned them down.
02:54It's only a matter of a few minutes before everyone inside is dead.
03:04The game, Knotlaker, a little bit off. We play it almost every year. Our research suggests that it's
03:11something quite different than what you see on the screen. So in the clip we see five versus five but in
03:16Viking times it's pretty clear that it was one-on-one. People were carefully matched to be about the same strength.
03:22You see a lot of running in this clip. The sources suggest running was not a part of the game at all.
03:34The game was really about power. It wasn't about speed. In the sources when people talk about the
03:39games they don't say that this team won or this team won. It's always this particular individual was
03:44stronger than his opponent. This one was stronger than this one. I give the creative team that made
03:50this film a lot of credit for doing deep research and really getting things right about Viking culture
03:56and Viking society. I would rate this as a nine. There are some things a little off but there are so
04:04many things that are just perfect that I can't give it any less.
04:14This kind of sneaking up on the castle? Probably not. Vikings were pretty direct about what they did.
04:20Now they did use ambushes quite a bit. That was a very standard battle technique but it was very different.
04:26What you do is get intelligence about where your enemy was going to be and when and you'd go there and wait for
04:32them with a superior force. It's not like you jump out of the bushes or sneak up on them. You just wait and when they arrive
04:38you start fighting.
04:40The shield wall we see in this clip and numerous others really do not depict the shield wall as it was used in the
04:54Viking Age. The shield wall, the ancient word is skjaldborg, is mainly meant to protect against projectiles
05:00so that the king could observe and issue his orders and then it would be taken down and continue the fight.
05:06The shield wall was meant to be a defensive structure thrown up temporarily then taken down again.
05:20So having archers behind the shield wall? Eh, probably not so likely.
05:24Having archers further back from the front of the lines? Definitely. That was very much a thing.
05:36So what they're using here is some sort of boom chain, something stretched across the river that's underwater
05:46until the last moment and can be pulled up to stop the ship at the appropriate moment.
05:52Now even in Viking lands these kinds of underwater obstacles were used especially around trading towns
05:58and try to minimize the possibility that raiders might attack the trading towns
06:02trading towns were very desirable targets for raiders. A lot of wealth, so chains, underwater obstacles
06:08such as posts and booms that were held below the water's surface, all of these were used.
06:14They're lifting their ships over the mountains and dropping them on the other side so they could sail to Paris.
06:26That's not a Viking approach at all. That's way off. They just sailed up the river.
06:32Viking ships were the technological marvel of their age that Vikings had and other European lands did not have.
06:38And one of the advantages of their ships is they were very shallow draft.
06:42They didn't need much water to float the ship.
06:46And so sailing up the river to Paris was no problem for them.
06:50Now we know that Vikings did portage their ships, especially in the river systems of Eastern Europe,
07:00when they sailed on trading voyages from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea.
07:06It seems likely that the way they would portage a ship over land is with wooden rollers.
07:12Just dragging it, probably mostly by human power, maybe with horses.
07:16I think I would rate this four.
07:18The Vikings TV show uses historical people, names of people, historical places,
07:24but a lot of the details seem to transpire in this what-if fantasy world
07:30where people with Viking names have been dropped into something that's not very Viking.
07:40If we believe the mist, that battle would be over in about a half second.
07:44Loki was scared to death of Thor because he knew Thor would pulverize him.
07:48So in the instances where Thor issued a challenge, Loki quickly backed off.
08:02Yeah, so the Warhammer would not have been a thing in the Viking Age,
08:06except, of course, for Thor's Mühltner, his special hammer.
08:10Numerous mentions of him smashing the skulls of his enemies with it.
08:13Numerous mentions of him throwing it.
08:16But it had additional magical properties.
08:20It could bring the dead back to life.
08:23Now, in the world of humans, these kind of Warhammers don't appear
08:27until way after the end of the Viking Age, late medieval and Renaissance,
08:32in response to warriors starting to use plate armor for their defense.
08:37So they use these long, long Warhammers to try to smash through the armor.
08:41I would give this a three.
08:42The name is right.
08:44A few of the aspects are right.
08:46But most of it is kind of far off based on what we know of Thor, Loki.
08:56The axe had a very specific purpose in battle.
08:59This is a replica.
09:00And what it's intended to do is to split in two whatever it touches.
09:05What the sword has over the axe, the sword has maneuverability.
09:11You can change its trajectory as you're targeting.
09:14So if one target changes or becomes unavailable as the sword is in motion,
09:18you can retarget it and hit something else.
09:21With a two-handed axe, you can't do that.
09:24Once you set it in motion, it's going to hit.
09:27And the analogy we like to use is a sword is like a nuclear-tip guided missile.
09:34You know that it's going to destroy what it hits.
09:36But you can retarget it after it's been launched in flight.
09:40But an axe is like an asteroid plunging through the atmosphere,
09:45hitting the earth, destroying everything and killing the dinosaurs.
09:49The axe is a cutting weapon, quite simple.
09:56And using it in any other way than to cleave in two what's in front of it
10:00is probably an ineffective use of the weapon.
10:03And we see that in the clip, that a lot of hits with the butt,
10:07a lot of strange uses of the axe.
10:10I don't think a Viking would typically do that.
10:13So in a fight, they would want to apply pressure.
10:16You know, pressure, pressure, pressure.
10:18We do see examples of Vikings fighting with different weapons in each hand.
10:27But it's not common.
10:29Much more typical would be a weapon in one hand, shield in the other.
10:34And the shields were the primary defense of Vikings.
10:37You know, someone without a shield was thought to be defenseless.
10:40Viking duels were highly formalized forms of one-on-one combat
10:44with a strict set of laws and a strict set of methods for doing it.
10:49It was one-on-one combat where you could not move.
10:53The two fighters stood stationary during the fight.
10:56And it was trading blows.
10:57So first the challenge man did an attack on the challenger.
11:00Then the challenger did an attack on the challenge man.
11:03And this continued until either somebody died
11:06or the first blood spilled on the ground below them.
11:08And duelers brought three shields with them to the dueling site
11:11because they knew it was likely that a shield would break.
11:14And so if a shield broke, they'd throw it away
11:17and pick up a fresh one during the duel.
11:25So what we see in this clip is a shield being swung around wildly,
11:30like, you know, a knuckle duster.
11:32We don't have evidence that Vikings did that very much.
11:35The shield was a defense.
11:36And any other use was probably sort of last-ditch.
11:39So in the Viking Age, shields were round, made of wood,
11:42with an iron boss in the center.
11:44And you grip the shield from behind the boss.
11:47There's a grip back there.
11:48There's no straps that the arm passes through.
11:50So the shield can rotate pretty freely.
11:53Now the shield in actual use was the defense.
11:56You held it tight to the body.
11:59And that is to allow you to deliver powerful blows with your sword.
12:04Now it's possible to have the shield swinging around,
12:07but in order to deliver a blow with a shield way out here,
12:10you're wide open for a possible counterattack
12:13as you're delivering the strike.
12:14I would call both of those sort of standard Hollywood stereotypical fights.
12:20You could take away the Viking clothing,
12:22take away the Viking weapons,
12:24and substitute clothing and weapons from some other culture,
12:26and the fight on the screen would be exactly the same.
12:29Their attacks were relentless trying to achieve this orstier,
12:32this word glory.
12:33You might kill your enemy with a slice or a jab,
12:36but that wouldn't give you this word glory.
12:38What would give you word glory is by splitting your opponent in two.
12:41So they were looking for these powerful attacks.
12:44And that kind of mindset really seems to be missing in this clip.
12:50So I would rate this clip about four for realism.
12:58When we crack this mountain open, all hell is going to break loose.
13:02Now one thing that this film surprisingly gets absolutely right
13:05is the formations that were used in these battles.
13:08You can see them sketching it in the sand.
13:10Vikings didn't use lines across the battlefield that advanced,
13:14as we often see in these clips, but rather they used columns.
13:17So in the sketch we have three columns that are advancing,
13:20and that would be very typically the Viking way.
13:29There's actually extremely limited evidence that Vikings used catapults.
13:33The projectiles Vikings preferred were, of course, arrows, spears,
13:38and the king of Viking weapons, stones.
13:47The strongest and most capable fighters would be at the very tip,
13:51along with the person holding the battle standard.
13:53So this would be the king's hirth, his bodyguard, his prized fighters.
13:58Also with him would be his berserks.
14:00It's very likely that Viking kings had levy armies.
14:03In other words, farmers who were trained in the use of weapons,
14:06that had weapons available to them,
14:08who were required to come and serve the king in battle when called,
14:13when danger came to their land.
14:15They're wearing very stereotypical Viking helmets with horns,
14:25and there's just absolutely no evidence that Viking helmets had horns.
14:29We really wish they did, because that would be so cool.
14:33Way before the Viking Age, there's pictorial sources
14:36that show ceremonial helmets that did have elaborate horns.
14:40But that wasn't Viking.
14:41The typical Viking helmet was a simple bowl
14:44with some sort of guard over the front of the face.
14:46Where did Hiccup go wrong?
14:48Uh, he showed up.
14:50He didn't get eaten.
14:51He's never where he should be.
14:53Thank you, Astrid.
14:55Viking houses were long and narrow.
14:58They were called long houses for a reason.
15:00So the expansive room that we see in this clip
15:03was probably not typical for Vikings.
15:05Now one thing that's really interesting about this clip
15:08is the young boy is sort of wandering around
15:10looking for a place to sit, and that was not at all the Viking way.
15:14Your seating position was chosen for you by the master
15:17or mistress of the hall, and you did not change.
15:20Young children were at the very bottom,
15:22so the boy would probably be sitting at the far end,
15:25either end of the house, far from the light, far from the heat,
15:28and maybe even sitting on the floor.
15:30I would give this clip a four.
15:32I would give this clip a four.
15:33I would give this clip a four.
15:34I would give this clip a four.
15:35I would give this clip a four.
15:36In the clip, we see someone, a warrior,
15:38wearing male armor.
15:39And the universal defense would have been a shield.
15:41Virtually everyone carried a shield.
15:43And if they had anything more than that,
15:45it was probably much less likely.
15:47So it would be someone at the level of the king
15:49or the king's men.
15:50A male shirt is exceedingly difficult to make in terms of time.
15:57The typical male shirt might easily have 30,000 rings.
16:00Each one has to be riveted shut around its neighboring rings
16:03to form the fabric.
16:11Viking warriors expected that their shields might break.
16:13They were considered expendable.
16:15They were round.
16:16They were made of wood, so wood planks.
16:18And there's an iron boss in the center.
16:20Typical shields were quite a bit bigger than this,
16:22even as much as 36 inches.
16:24So in our test, just one hit with a two-handed axe
16:27to a shield destroyed it.
16:29So in one case, the shields are limp and loose down by the side.
16:33And that would not be typical for a Viking shield.
16:35You'd really want it tight and close to your body
16:38to provide the defense you need
16:40while still allowing you to use your weapon hand
16:42for delivering powerful blows.
16:44And then in the other instance,
16:46he is holding it close to the body.
16:47That's essential for absorbing and deflecting the force of that weapon.
16:51I would rate this clip around three.
16:54It's very much in a fantasy world
16:56with some fantasy weapons and fantastic elements going on.
17:07There's two main categories of Viking ships.
17:09Merchant ships were meant to be primarily powered by sail
17:12and only occasionally by ore coming into land.
17:16Warships, on the other hand, were designed to be rowed fairly routinely.
17:22So they were extremely efficient in their design,
17:26so that the rowers could get high speeds
17:28and they didn't tire themselves on long trips while rowing.
17:31The warships were long and narrow.
17:33This one that we see in the clip,
17:36I'd say the proportions are a little bit off,
17:38but a lot of the details are more or less correct.
17:48Now the thing that was way off was rowing the Viking ship.
17:51What we see in the clip,
17:52these people don't scarcely have their oars in the water.
17:55They're not going to be able to deliver much power in the stroke.
17:58And they're not putting their body into it.
18:00My organization, Hurstwick, has done some experiments
18:02with rowing a Viking ship
18:04and tried several different rowing styles
18:07to see which was the most efficient.
18:09And so based on our measurements,
18:11this long, slow stroke that uses the low muscles of the body
18:16was the one that gave 30% more speed to the ship
18:20than any other stroke we tested.
18:22And also the rowers reported that at the end of each run,
18:25that was the one that was the least fatiguing.
18:29Now comes the true test.
18:31Now!
18:38Surviving archaeological examples of Viking ships
18:41have material equipment outboard of the hull.
18:45And if you come up to a pier or a dock,
18:47that stuff will just get ripped right off.
18:49So it seems unlikely that Viking ships
18:52were routinely brought up to a pier or a dock.
18:55And the typical way of landing a Viking ship
18:57was just simply sail it up onto a Viking,
18:59up onto a sandy beach.
19:01And we even see evidence of that
19:02in the surviving archaeological examples.
19:05The keel is rubbed by sand.
19:07I would give this clip a rating of four.
19:10The costumes are wrong.
19:12The armor that we see is wrong.
19:14The rowing is wrong.
19:16At least the ship is okay.
19:18This hail of arrows was something that Vikings did.
19:30They would have called it driva,
19:31like literally a hail of arrows falling down on the opponents.
19:36And this film clip seems to show that pretty nicely,
19:40this intense hailstorm of arrows.
19:43What's a bit off is how the archers are using their bows.
19:48Now, we don't know a lot about the bows of the Viking Age.
19:53Because they're made of wood, they disintegrate.
19:56Almost every single pictorial source from the Viking Age,
19:59not only from Viking lands but other lands as well,
20:02shows a very different style of drawing the bow.
20:05We think of like modern competitive archers or the Robin Hood style of archers.
20:09You pull the arrow back to your head.
20:12All the pictorial sources show them drawing the arrow down to their hip.
20:16And so I would have hoped to have seen something like that.
20:19The modern idea that Vikings threw their axe is a misconception.
20:31If you look at the physics of an axe,
20:33they're very poorly suited for throwing in combat.
20:36And so in the Viking world, it would have been a last resort.
20:40The axe spins as it flies.
20:42So there's only a very small moment when the axe is in the right position to hit the target.
20:55In terms of cutting a rope with a sword, that's no problem at all.
20:58Just a single stroke will do it.
21:00In order to test them, we want to use a stand-in for human flesh and bone.
21:05And the best stand-in we've been able to find is animal carcasses, typically pig carcasses.
21:10So we'll do test cuts with replica sharp weapons against a pig carcass to see if the weapon cuts the way we expect,
21:17to see if we see the same marks on the skeleton that we see in the skeletal remains from the Viking Age.
21:23These things are highly destructive.
21:26I would give this clip a rating of five.
21:29The details of the archery and the draw were probably off,
21:32but that flight of arrows was realized on the screen beautifully.
21:36It probably looked very much like that.
21:45And that is not how Viking ships were intended to be used, especially the warships.
21:50They would just sail up onto the beach.
21:51The warriors would jump over and be ready to fight literally instantly.
21:56And because the ships were so shallow draft, they knew that if they just jumped overboard,
22:00they would not be in any water any deeper than their knees.
22:03So Vikings did transport their horses by sea, but not in any way like what is shown in this clip.
22:08What we see in the clip is warships, and warships simply had no room for horses.
22:13If horses had to be transported, they'd be transported into merchant ships.
22:17More importantly, Vikings did not carry horses with them for war.
22:21They were sea people.
22:23If they arrived on land and needed a horse to ride to battle, they'd just steal one.
22:27In a battle, they dismounted and fought on foot.
22:31You're not going to achieve this word glory of killing someone on horseback.
22:35You're going to do it by standing in front of them and splitting them in two.
22:38King John, say it right there!
22:40When the warriors raise their weapons over their heads, we can see a variety of weapons
22:49that are far removed from what we would have seen in the Viking Age.
22:52Two-edged axe, that was not used in the Viking Age at all, and not even in later medieval times
22:58when the film apparently was set.
23:01We see some really strange pole weapons, almost halberd-like,
23:06that would have not come into the battlefield until centuries later.
23:10We see some swords that have proportions more like a katana than a Viking sword or a medieval European sword.
23:17It's not like the king had some particularly gigantic axe,
23:29and everyone else had something smaller.
23:32I just think it depended more on what the individual warrior wanted.
23:36All has to do with penetration power.
23:39So a really short head is going to penetrate deeper with the same level of swing,
23:46and a longer head a little bit more.
23:49But it also gives you more flexibility in targeting, too, if the edge is longer.
23:59The other aspect is the shape can also be used defensively for hooking.
24:05Our tests in simulated combat suggest that the hooking shape is indeed a valuable defense.
24:12This clip I think I would rate a three.
24:14The weapons are wrong, the use of the ship is way wrong, just many things are off.
24:22This kind of shield wall is much more like a Roman testudo,
24:35so something that covers over the top, something that people move in,
24:39something that's at the front of the line.
24:41We know of two battle formations they used.
24:43One is the shield wall, skeldburg.
24:46The other formation that I'd like to mention is the boar snout,
24:50and Vikings use that only rarely, and the descriptions of it vary from place to place.
24:55But again, they'd form into a wedge shape,
24:57and it would be used to drive their way through the opponent.
25:01And so I don't see either of those formations in this clip.
25:09If one of the opposing fighters actually was able to approach the shield wall with a sword,
25:16the battle was essentially over.
25:18What we see here where they're hacking much over the top of the shield,
25:21it's something really common in the reenactor world.
25:23One more thing that's completely missing from this clip,
25:26we have good descriptions of mass battles between Vikings and Vikings,
25:31but also between Vikings and other cultures such as the Anglo-Saxons.
25:34And these battles always start with projectiles,
25:37and I didn't see any projectiles being thrown in this clip.
25:40I would rate this clip a four.
25:42Some of the weapons we see are off,
25:43and the clothing is just dull and boring,
25:46and Vikings weren't like that.
25:47They're all dirty and dark clothing,
25:50and Vikings loved bright colors, and they were very clean people.
26:00We know a fair amount about naval battles
26:03because there's quite a bit of detail in the sources on how Vikings fought at sea.
26:07But what was laughably funny about this clip was the people doing the throwing.
26:12So there's two specialized spears that seem to be for naval battle in the Viking Age.
26:18One of them is Snavispeot, a stringed spear.
26:22We can increase the range immensely and put a lot more power into the spear
26:26by throwing it with a string wrapped around the spear.
26:29And so I would have expected to see these throwing strings.
26:33The other spear is just a long, overgrown spear, a spear on steroids.
26:38And rather than throwing, it was more used for jabbing as the ships approached.
26:42The ships approached side to side, and that's not the way Vikings did it.
26:53They approached bow to bow, so front to front.
26:56And once they had touched, they'd grapple, they'd pull themselves in.
27:00That's when the battle really began in earnest.
27:09Their goal was to go the full length of the ship to kill the person in the stern.
27:14So it was like a land battle fought on a floating island, the deck of a ship.
27:19You're forcing your way through, throwing everything off to the sides.
27:23Forcing their way through to get to the king.
27:26Can you imagine the kind of courage it took to do this?
27:29And the word glory you would achieve if you did, in fact, kill the king.
27:33So that part of the battle was pretty far off.
27:36I really expected to see a lot more of that kind of motion in a naval battle.
27:42Because they had no shields, they were using their swords as a defense.
27:55And the way they used their swords is as if they believed that no matter what you do,
28:00they're not going to break.
28:01While Viking swords had a lot of strength, if you do edge-on-edge contact,
28:04very likely you're going to create some sort of chip.
28:07And subsequent hits are going to cause that crack to propagate along the length of the blade.
28:11And the blade is going to break.
28:13And Vikings were very sensitive to that.
28:19So the funeral we see in this clip is every person's preconceived idea of what a Viking funeral was like.
28:27But not in any way supported by any source.
28:30Some Vikings were put into a boat or a ship and the ship was buried.
28:35And the whole thing covered over.
28:37Some Vikings were put into a ship or a boat and burned.
28:40But it was always done on land.
28:42Suppose you did set a ship on fire, send it out.
28:45It's going to burn to the waterline.
28:46The sea is going to put out the fire.
28:48And the remnants are going to drift back to land.
28:51That's not going to be very pretty.
28:52I'm going to have to rate this clip somewhere around the five only for the fight.
28:57The fight had the power and the intensity and the relentlessness that we would expect to see in Vikings.
29:03My favorite Viking movie to date would have to be The Northman.
29:07The creative team that put this together did a lot of research, consulted with a lot of experts.
29:13And they bring Viking life to the screen in a very accurate representation.
29:18Not perfect, but it's quite amazing and head and shoulders above any other Viking film I know.
29:25But in the anoche, it's fine and head and shoulders above and face and above.
29:31The sea is really a great masterpiece.
29:33But it was his own journey of spiritual-like personnages.
29:35And the sea is a great present.
29:37The sea.
29:38The sea is really fun to be whenever.
29:40The sea is really fun to find the sea.
29:42The sea is the sea.
29:43The sea is really good for sure.
29:44The sea is really important to try and pracować.