Written with Icelandic poet Sjón, The Northman is Eggers’s third film. It follows The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019) which, like The Northman, blended psychological intensity, historical verisimilitude and a lavish enthusiasm for supernatural strangeness. The Witch, for instance, which saw a Puritan family in New England terrorised by a ghastly presence in the nearby wood, was told in language cribbed from 16th-century diaries and ledgers. Meanwhile, The Lighthouse was a Poe-esque two-hander featuring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as lighthouse keepers going increasingly loco on a remote island. It ended – lest we forget – with Dafoe transforming into a tentacled sea deity. Eggers doesn’t do things by halves. 

By contrast, The Northman is more conventional. It’s an adaptation of an early 13th-century Danish poem which tells the story of an heir to a kingdom, Amleth, whose uncle usurps the throne, killing Amleth’s father and marrying his mother. Growing up in exile, Amleth swears vengeance, his quest for retribution bloodily pulling the whole family into tragedy. It was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, of course, Disney’s The Lion King. 

Filmed over 87 days on location in Iceland, Orkney and Ireland, The Northman is Eggers’s largest film to date – and by far the most expensive. But unlike the historical settings of his previous films, the Viking world is foggy. The Vikings are a shadow people: we know they existed, but how they lived, thought, fought, and loved is still obscure. Even the word “Viking” is an interpolation. Though it was used in the Scandinavian world to refer to raiding parties, no people thought of themselves as “Vikings”. In fact, the word doesn’t appear in The Northman. 

“We know of the Vikings from three different sources,” Price explains. “The most immediate texts are those written about the Vikings, not by them. So we have a lot of rich sources from people who met the Vikings, but they normally didn’t say very nice things! In fact, that’s where a lot of our stereotypes about them come from. 

“Then we have the Icelandic sagas, written hundreds of years later. And there’s a whole community of scholars dedicated to unpicking whether these were actually representative of Viking life or a kind of mediaeval historical fiction. Then we have the stuff they’ve left behind. The Vikings were incredibly visual – they decorated everything. They lived in a picture world, a world of stories told through pictures.”