ECL 510A

The Vikings:

From the Sagas to the Screen

Course Description

This course explores the world of the Vikings through the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas and through the reception and reimagining of the Vikings in a variety of popular cultures. We will read sagas (in translation) about the settlement of Iceland, Ragnar Loðbrók, the Viking voyages to North America, shapeshifters and the undead, Hamlet, and more. Through these readings in the primary texts of the Vikings we will examine how the sagas blend myth and memory and history and fiction and construct ideas about identity, family, honor, fate, law/lessness, and the connections between the past and the present. We will also investigate the afterlives of the sagas and how the Vikings have been received and reinvented in popular culture (from 19th-century novels to contemporary manga and screen adaptations). Through these course materials students will consider how the Vikings have been remembered, romanticized, reinvented, and commercialized as well as how the Vikings have been used to think about and speak to a variety of cultural concerns.

Draft Schedule

Ragnar Loðbrók

  • Ragnars saga loðbrókar

  • Ragnarssona þáttr (The Tale of Ragnar’s Sons)

  • Heimskringla

  • Saxo Grammaticus

  • The Vikings (1958 film with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas)

  • The Vikings (2013 series)

  • Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020 Video Game)

The Vinland Sagas

  • The Saga of the Greenlanders

  • The Saga of Eirik the Red

  • Vinland Saga (manga), 2005-Present and TV series based on the manga

  • The Viking (1928 silent film)

  • Joseph Bruchac’s The Ice Hearts

  • Excerpts from Pathfinder (2007 film and Dark Horse Comics graphic novel of 2006)

Shapeshifters and the Undead: The Old Norse-Icelandic Revenants, Berserkers, and Wolfskins

  • Excerpts from the Saga of Grettir the Strong and several others

  • The graphic novel Wolfskin (2006-2007; 2010-2011)

  • Draug (2018 film)

  • Berserker: Hell’s Warrior (2004)

  • Här kommer Bärsärkarna (1965 film)

  • The Damned (2024 Icelandic film)

Amlóði/Amleth/Hamlet

  • The Icelandic Ambales saga

  • Saxo Grammaticus

  • The Northman (2022 film)

  • Excerpts from Shakespeare’s play