Features Essays Published 2 August 2011

Ibsen’s The Vikings at Helgeland

In his second Ibsen essay, Simon Thomas explores the playwright's rarely staged mythological play The Vikings at Helgeland. Drawing on the Icelandic Völsungasaga, which also influenced Wagner's Ring Cycle, the play features hints of the psychological insight and dramatic irony that was to come to fruition in Ibsen's later plays, as well as his most unstageable stage direction and the most powerful female character he ever created.
Simon Thomas

Ibsen plays around with what information people hold and what knowledge or ignorance drives them to do. Sometimes, characters who are in the know aren’t aware of what other people know. At the feast in Act 2, in embarrassment at the true facts, Gunnar tries to stop Hjördis boasting about his deeds, without realising that Dagny now knows the truth. Under provocation, Dagny then spills the beans to the whole company much to his and her husband’s horror. Later in the same scene, Gunnar is driven to murder Örnulf’s son Thorold, in the mistaken belief that Örnulf has gone to kill his own child. Örnulf then returns with the boy alive, having actually rescued him. This experimentation with knowledge, ignorance and misperception, and the consequences that can follow, was to bear fruit in Ibsen’s later plays. From A Doll’s House and Ghosts onwards he used this kind of subtlety all the time, planting clues about the character’s inner lives all along the way. He learned to handle it a lot more skillfully and naturally but the rudiments are there in The Vikings at Helgeland.

A Viking maiden ready for battle.

In his preceding historical drama, Lady Inger had been unable to decide or act but in Hjördis we find the most forceful female character Ibsen ever created. She’s single-minded and ruthless, prepared to abandon not just her husband, discredited in her eyes once the secret’s out, but also her young son whom she perceives as a weakling. Despite her flaws, she bears a relation to some of Ibsen’s later heroines:

HJÖRDIS: Don’t you feel an irresistible urge to be fighting alongside the men? Did you never put on armour and snatch up some weapon?

DAGNY: Never! How can you think that? I, a woman?

HJÖRDIS: A woman, a woman”¦.! Ah, nobody knows what a woman is capable of!

Once Sigurd has confessed his feelings, the only to her solution is death for them both, as being together is no longer possible in this life. She has no qualms or hesitancy about making the unilateral decision that they should both die but, despite her overwhelming positive energy, she’s frustrated at the final moment. She shoots Sigurd with an arrow and as he dies he tells her they can’t be together even in death, as he’s now a Christian and so is destined for a different place. This clash of the Christian and pagan was to blossom into the central theme of Emperor and Galilean 16 years later.

The play ends with Ibsen’s most operatic scene, the fallen heroes whisked into Valhalla in a terrifying ride of phantom horses, with Hjördis heading the procession. It’s perhaps Ibsen’s most unperformable stage direction, although James McFarlane in his 1962 translation mollifies it by saying “They hear the sound of Aasgaardsrejden in the air – the last ride of the dead on their way to Valhalla” (cf Archer 1890: “Aasgaardsrejden – the ride of the fallen heroes to Valhal – hurtles through the air”). Nevertheless, during his lifetime The Vikings of Helgeland was staged fairly regularly. In fact, between 1858 and his death in 1906 it was the most often mounted of all his plays. Nowadays, it’s just too melodramatic and, without the benefits of Wagner’s music, the story is simply laughable. This is reflected in the performance history. While the more developed The Pretenders was seen in London (in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company) as recently as 1991, The Vikings at Helgeland hasn’t been performed in the UK since 1930. For all that, it’s a fascinating read, standing in relation to Ibsen’s mature masterpieces as Jackson Pollock’s early figurative drawings do to his great drip paintings.

The most recent translation available of The Vikings at Helgeland is James Walter McFarlane’s of 1962, which does a good job of blowing the extensive cobwebs from the work. Otherwise, one has to rely on William Archer’s 1890 translation, full of “thees” and “thous” and arcane phraseology (quaintly they talk of going “a-viking”), which may be closer to what Ibsen wrote but is hard for us to read now.

Simon Thomas’s essay on Ibsen’s The Pretenders can be found here.


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Simon Thomas

Simon writes theatre and opera features/reviews for Exeunt and Whatsonstage. He took a degree in Theatre Arts at the Rose Bruford College and has worked in the theatre, in various capacities since the 1980s. He has a keen interest in new writing, the early (and late) works of Henrik Ibsen, and the works of Carlo Goldoni, amongst other things. His book The Theatre of Carlo Goldoni is available on Amazon.

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