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Yay, Rollo didn't get killed or too badly hurt by the Earl (and it was very satisfying, him killing that nasty little man) - and he's being cunning and sneaky and plotting behind Ragnar's back :-( Thing is, for all his nasty ways, I sort of like Rollo - but I want him to be a big, bad, nasty guy with family loyalty. Being the Cain to Ragnar's Abel is too predictable. I want the family loyalty. I want it, my precious.
I liked the old man asking to come along to get a chance to die the proper way. Poor King Aelle. Of course the Northmen fight like demons and aren't afraid to die - they think death in combat is the only way to get a decent afterlife.
Speaking of King Aelle: snake pit. No! Stop! Way, way too early for that. Ragnar hasn't even besieged Paris yet, for gods' sake! (Also, I'm fairly certain some of those snakes weren't exactly local - what's wrong with a pit full of your basic garden variety adders? Yes, the bite of one won't kill you - but a pit full with no way to get away? That's a slow, nasty death...)
And we had the funeral, straight out of Ibn Fadlan. And Athelstan, by turns intrigued and horrified - I wonder why Ragnar felt the need to show him the slave girl. I mean, why would Ragnar want show him that? Is he preparing him for something? Actually what are Ragnar's current plans for Athelstan? Hmmm...
Speaking of the funeral: angel of death. Which is verbatim Ibn Fadlan. But of course, what he wrote down, what he heard - that would all have had to be filtered through his cultural pov as well as translated from a foreign tongue. I mean, he uses the word paradise, and that's clearly Valhalla, and so I wonder if perhaps Valkyrie might not have been closer to the actual word...
Speaking of Athelstan: I like how he looks more and more at home in the North (which really, really cannot be Denmark - it must be Norway, I don't care about the geography and the narrative and whatnot - Denmark does not have reindeer. The end. (maybe it's Greenland - nah)) and less and less like a monk. I liked Ragnar telling him not to worry before the holmgang. (And I find myself having a deep desire for Earl Ragnar to give Athelstan an armring.)
I liked Ragnarok - it was quite dramatic. Though I do wonder why they stopped there. Though maybe - I know the myths as we know them has a healthy dose of Christianity mixed in, and that early on people fusioned Christianity and Norse myth, claiming that Ragnarok had happened and that Christianity was what came after, Balder reigning in the new world. Maybe - maybe the idea is for Athelstan to make the fusion, to add the next bit? I wonder... (though as best as people can tell, the cyclical element is part of the old stuff - ah well, it's not like it's not a tv show).
Bjorn continues to annoy me. He's - kind of a nasty kid, isn't he?
And Lagertha is pregnant, possibly with a boy. I hope they'll name him Sigurd. (What? Come on, we need the guy who'll grow up and be called Snake-in-the-eye. (yes, I know he's supposed to be Kraka's - so what? I'm team Ragnar/Lagertha/Athelstan all the way. No Kraka.) Oh, and apparently Ragnar is a modern-day sensitive Scandinavian guy and not afraid to shed a tear :-)
The preview for next week looks interesting: not nearly enough Athelstan (is there ever?), but the raid seems to have potentiel.
I liked the old man asking to come along to get a chance to die the proper way. Poor King Aelle. Of course the Northmen fight like demons and aren't afraid to die - they think death in combat is the only way to get a decent afterlife.
Speaking of King Aelle: snake pit. No! Stop! Way, way too early for that. Ragnar hasn't even besieged Paris yet, for gods' sake! (Also, I'm fairly certain some of those snakes weren't exactly local - what's wrong with a pit full of your basic garden variety adders? Yes, the bite of one won't kill you - but a pit full with no way to get away? That's a slow, nasty death...)
And we had the funeral, straight out of Ibn Fadlan. And Athelstan, by turns intrigued and horrified - I wonder why Ragnar felt the need to show him the slave girl. I mean, why would Ragnar want show him that? Is he preparing him for something? Actually what are Ragnar's current plans for Athelstan? Hmmm...
Speaking of the funeral: angel of death. Which is verbatim Ibn Fadlan. But of course, what he wrote down, what he heard - that would all have had to be filtered through his cultural pov as well as translated from a foreign tongue. I mean, he uses the word paradise, and that's clearly Valhalla, and so I wonder if perhaps Valkyrie might not have been closer to the actual word...
Speaking of Athelstan: I like how he looks more and more at home in the North (which really, really cannot be Denmark - it must be Norway, I don't care about the geography and the narrative and whatnot - Denmark does not have reindeer. The end. (maybe it's Greenland - nah)) and less and less like a monk. I liked Ragnar telling him not to worry before the holmgang. (And I find myself having a deep desire for Earl Ragnar to give Athelstan an armring.)
I liked Ragnarok - it was quite dramatic. Though I do wonder why they stopped there. Though maybe - I know the myths as we know them has a healthy dose of Christianity mixed in, and that early on people fusioned Christianity and Norse myth, claiming that Ragnarok had happened and that Christianity was what came after, Balder reigning in the new world. Maybe - maybe the idea is for Athelstan to make the fusion, to add the next bit? I wonder... (though as best as people can tell, the cyclical element is part of the old stuff - ah well, it's not like it's not a tv show).
Bjorn continues to annoy me. He's - kind of a nasty kid, isn't he?
And Lagertha is pregnant, possibly with a boy. I hope they'll name him Sigurd. (What? Come on, we need the guy who'll grow up and be called Snake-in-the-eye. (yes, I know he's supposed to be Kraka's - so what? I'm team Ragnar/Lagertha/Athelstan all the way. No Kraka.) Oh, and apparently Ragnar is a modern-day sensitive Scandinavian guy and not afraid to shed a tear :-)
The preview for next week looks interesting: not nearly enough Athelstan (is there ever?), but the raid seems to have potentiel.
From:
no subject
I really hated the angel of death line, because it's wrong wrong wrong, angel is a Greek word and a Christian concept, and of course the vikings wouldn't have an angel of death >:( Valkyrie might fit well with the basic concept, but could humans take on the role of Valkyrie? Isn't there a concept akin to the 'seer' they've already used that might be more likely?
Speaking of reindeer, I read a fic that kept mentioning the river they lived near? And IDK, maybe it's just me, but the body of water near Ragnar's farm is a fjord, right? It's salt water? That's how I understood it, at least. (My urge to comment just to ask was pretty strong.) Not that they won't have rivers and lakes in Magic Viking Land, and I know they just sailed up the Thyne. But. Fjords?
From:
no subject
Speaking of verbatim: angel of death. That's Ibn Fadlan too - but of course, that's not what the Vikings he saw have a funeral actually said. He had a translator along, and later he went home and wrote a book in Arab for an Arab audience, drawing on concepts Arabs of the age would be able to follow. Ibn Fadlan wasn't interested in helping us poor latte-day people figure out what those funny heathens actually said - Valkyrie? Norne? Maybe Vølve? He was interested in telling a story to his audience.
River, fjord - actually, I kind of think Ragnar's farm might have both. I mean, in the first episode, we have the scene with Lagertha and Gyda fishing, and that looks like freshwater. But there also a lovely view of the fjord. Maybe a river flowing into the fjord?
Actually, forget about the overall geographic location of Magic Viking Land, I want a decent overview of Ragnar's farm and Kattegat. I mean, is it a river? A fjord? A lake? How far is it from Kattegat - I noticed Ragnar and Athelstan carried furs when visiting town? Is Ragnar's farm just the house? What about the surrounding houses and the other people - are they his neighbours? His tenants? His slaves? If not a part of his farm, why were they cut down without warning by Haraldon's men? Why did they never get even a passing mention - are they slaves, then, part of the livestock mentioned cut down? But if they are Ragnar's slaves, why don't we see much in the way of interaction - I mean, Ragnar does his own laundry? Why would he do that, if he had slaves? But if not slaves, how can Svein carry off that boy and how can he be sacrificed without anyone apparently even noticing? Except the way the boy was speaking, he sounded like he expected to go raiding as a free man when he was grown...
I suspect I am feeling about Ragnar's farm a bit like how you feel about Sherlock's house...
From:
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Hmm, you may be right. I'd forgotten about the fishing. I'd go back, but I'm lazy. I just do remember that body of water as very wide and still, so I have trouble quite believing that would be a river -- did look more like a lake. It's probably likely they'd settle down near both fresh and salt water, so yeah, a river flowing into the fjord is probably the best bet.
Your questions are very good questions! For a show that is supposed to be 'historical' they sure haven't done ANYTHING to explain what viking culture actually looked like. My own personal head canon is that the people around Ragnar's farm are slaves -- certainly the ones who were killed by the earl's men, and the boy who was sacrificed. But I don't think many viwers would understand that unless they actually explained it.
It's completely frustrating!
I wanted to ask you, by the way, about Ragnarok. I don't undestand how it would be a taboo subject?? If a culture is primarily oral, I'd expect that you'd constantly need to rehearse every single myth in order for the cultural knowledge to remain intact. Or am I completely off base?
From:
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Thing is, I get why they'd play Ragnar's family as a traditional nuclear family - husband and wife, two kids. That's something modern-day Western viewers will immediately recognize and be able to grasp. Besides, we can't have Ragnar bossing around slaves and servants - he's the underdog, remember?
Ragnarok - I've never heard that it was supposed to be especially taboo. Mind you, it felt to me as if they were playing it as a religious mystery akin to the Eleusinian - a religious truth which has to be conveyed in a particular way, which that whole scene certainly seemed like. Which would also explain why everybody hesitated to talk about it with Athelstan until he could be properly initiated - considering the very dark slant on Ragnarok, without the dawn-of-a-new-world cyclical bits, I imagine the time of year of the telling - middle of winter, maybe close to the solstice? - was significant too.
But no, I've never encountered anything about it being taboo. But then, it's a tv show that thinks Kattegat is a village...