NorsePlay.

The cybervikingsphere is rife with excitement & premature criticism over the upcoming April release of The Northman . In the above trailer it looks like there's much to anticipate from this NorsePlay'd major motion picture, so let's extrapolate some points of interest about what & why that is: ⸶ Nicole Kidman & Anya Taylor-Joy. Holy Freyja's cats , we'd sail a longship across the Atlantic for those two. ⸶ Björk as the Seeress. It's so spot on to see the avant-garde songstress cast as a mystical Völva witch. In real life Björk's a destiny maker, a musical subgenre game-changer, a talented actress, and winner of Iceland's Order Of The Falcon. Love her. (And she left me candy with a note at my work once. True story.) ⸶ Sjón's co-screenplay. Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, known by his mononymic, is an accomplished writer whose work contains elements of magical realism , a literary convention which has a striking resemblance to the matter-o...

Four-hundred years before Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum: The History of the Danes gave us the legend of Amleth, which is precisely where the bard sourced his story. In 1994 CE the interesting NorsePlay film of Prince Of Jutland also titled Royal Deceit, and later home release re-packaged as Prince Of Denmark and  Thrones & Empires , was made to place the story within its original context, being shot in a reconstructed Viking site in Denmark by Danish director/co-screenwriter Axel Gabriel Erik Mørch.   [so very Game of Thrones mis-marketed, right?] Starring a young Christian Bale, queenly Helen Mirren, fratricidal Gary Oldman, and a dollfaced Kate Beckinsale, the cast is quality, and Freddie Jones of Krull fame has a nice supporting role as the landed apple farmer Bjorn. The tension betwixt nephew Bale and usurper uncle Oldman as the former feigns madness to avoid being assassinated, while the l...