With another How to Train Your Dragon movie on the horizon, Lillian Crawford explores artistic portrayals of Vikings across the decades, from Wagner’s horned helmets to Bugs Bunny’s queering of gender norms.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, the hero of How to Train Your Dragon, is no Viking. His opening monologue describing the war between the inhabitants of the Isle of Berk and a hive of pesky dragons is viewed at a distance. Stoick the Vast, Hiccup’s father and chief of Berk, fills the frame – his matted locks of auburn hair cascade under a metal helmet flanked with two enormous curling horns. He dwarfs Hiccup, scrawny and awkward, with a peculiarly 21st-century haircut. After Stoick presents his son with a matching helmet, made from his mother’s breastplate, he places it on the ground to signify to the self-immolating Monstrous Nightmare that he is not a Viking like the others.
The image of the Viking has been bastardised across history, from Victorian depictions of barbarians and marauders to Nazi glorification of the Aryan idyll. ‘Viking’ has been an ethnic term for an historic Scandinavian people, and a chronological label for an age between the eighth and 11th centuries. The fluidity of what it means to be Viking is a godsend for Hollywood, unbound from the tiresome constraints of so-called historical accuracy. The Vikings of cinema are just as much a product of human imagination as its fire-breathing dragons.
The association of Vikings with violence in the Western world largely stems from the paradigmatic raid of 793 AD on Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of what is now Northumberland, as well as attacks on the coast of Wessex. ‘Here were dreadful forewarnings come over the land of Northumbria, and woefully terrified the people: these were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky’, as described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, assembled during the reign of Alfred. More romanticised images of Vikings as noble savages, gleaned from the Norse sagas, emerged later, celebrating the literature, shipbuilding and architecture of the Viking Age.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
The Vikings of How to Train Your Dragon are an amalgamation of these traditions – both nobles and savages. They are at once the cartoonish child-like imaginary of the Viking, and a more nuanced rewriting of obscuring Mediaevalisms. The most famous of which is the horned helmet, popularised by stagings of Richard Wagner’s epic opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, adapted from the sagas and Mediaeval Germanic poetry. Wagnerian influence is seen throughout the films, or rather heard in John Powell’s grandiose orchestral score. His own leitmotifs include the fanfare-like flight theme, repeatedly heard in the offing during Hiccup and his dragon Toothless’ early encounters before exploding in the hair-raising ‘Test Drive’ sequence – a reworking of Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’.
Merrie Melodies (1957)
The 1957 Merrie Melodies cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? queers Wagner’s rewriting of Viking legend. Like Stoick, Elmer Fudd dons a horned helmet as the hero Siegfried, singing ‘Kill the wabbit!’ to the Valkyrie theme. Bugs Bunny transforms into the beautiful Brünnhilde, replete with traditional Viking blonde braids as seen on Astrid in How to Train Your Dragon. Like Bugs, Hiccup disrupts what it means to be male in Viking society – gender norms and dynamics are broken down on Berk, with many Viking women fighting alongside the men. It is a romantic, almost utopian vision, in direct contention with the Anglo-Saxon descriptions of Vikings raping and slaughtering women as they plundered their way across Europe.
Horned and winged helmets pop up throughout 20th-century cinematic and television representations of the Viking Age. An early Viking movie was 1928 silent The Viking, the first feature-length Technicolor film to be released with a synchronised score and sound effects. All bells and whistles, and as critic Mordaunt Hall wrote in The New York Times, ‘the figures often look as if they had stepped out of an opéra comique’ (Pauline Starke’s Helga is announced on screen by Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’). The film established the Vikings as a staple of the swords-and-sandals swashbuckler, decorated with fish-scale armour, bushy moustaches and golden conical brassières. The early Technicolor dye process makes the film look like a live-action Astérix comic book.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
This subgenre of Viking movies peaked in the Golden Age of Hollywood, with Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings in 1958. Fleischer was the son of animation pioneer Max Fleischer, whose studios created such popular characters as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor. While based on an American novel by Edison Marshall, the film’s inspiration came from the sagas and was beautifully shot on location in Norway by cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who later directed The Long Ships in 1964. While derided as ‘Norse Opera’ by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, Fleischer did away with much of the Wagnerian Viking stereotyping, not least the hornèd helmets. The rich colour and production design align the film visually with the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, revealing a legacy of the relationship between animation technique and depictions of Vikings.
Attempts to create more ‘authentic’ Viking movies has been a trend of the 21st century. Grittier historical action films such as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising from 2009 and Robert Eggers’ 2022 adaption of the legend of Amleth, The Northman, trample those troublesome horns into the dirt. Gone too are the popping colours of earlier Hollywood Viking epics, replaced with murky CG-smeared furs and battleaxes. This aesthetic vision of Mediaeval Scandinavia is rendered in motion-capture animation in Robert Zemeckis’ take on the pre-Viking Old English poem Beowulf from 2007, a distinctly more adult cartoon creation than Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon animated trilogy released from 2010.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
The 2025 live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, directed by Dean DeBlois, sits between these depictions of Viking Scandinavia. Landscapes for the film were shot in the Faroes and Iceland by cinematographer Bill Pope on IMAX lenses, depicting the fictional Berk through the real sites of Viking heritage. The dragons might only be the stuff of Anglo-Saxon nightmares, but the Viking people are shown to be more complex than their feral reputation suggests, especially through the detailed production design of weapons, buildings and especially long ships. Perhaps we might forgive those fantastical helmets.
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