Viking Wolf the surprise Netflix hit out of Norway, is the latest in a growing list of werewolf IPs to make waves in the horror landscape. But director Stig Svendsen's film
gives us a different style of werewolf than the classic Hollywood type we're used to as it both draws from real Norse legends and invents new ones for the film.
Viking Wolf opens with on-screen text telling us the story of Viking Chieftain Gudbrand the Grim who in 1050 unwittingly unleashed a hellhound into the Norwegian forest. The film then transitions to follow the Berg family who have recently moved from Oslo to the small town of Nybo where the mother Liv (Liv Mjönes) works as a cop. Her teenage daughter Thale (Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne) goes to a party on a bay where a classmate is attacked and dragged into the woods by an unseen creature. Thale herself is bitten on the shoulder and soon begins experiencing strange and disturbing phenomena.
Werewolves in Norse Mythology
Historical Vikings were really into wolves and werewolves so much so that it's a bit surprising that Viking Wolf is Norway's first werewolf movie. Although the story of Gudbrand the Grim was invented for the film wolves with human-like qualities and humans with wolf-like qualities show up again and again in Scandinavian folklore. The most well known and most fearsome is Fenrir also called the Fenris Wolf a giant powerful wolf with the intellect of a man and the son of Loki and the giantess Angrboda. Along with his two siblings, Jormungandr the World Serpent and Hel Fenrir was prophesied to bring down the gods on Ragnarök the Norse doomsday. At that time Fenrir himself would kill Odin.
In the film, Fenrir and his siblings get a shout-out in a school lecture during which Thale begins having unnerving hallucinations. Beyond that, Fenrir's myth isn't directly connected to the lore of the film except perhaps as a reminder of the ubiquity and importance of wolves in Norse legend. The film's resident werewolf expert is a Van Helsing type named Lars Brodin (Ståle Bjørnhaug) who has been tracking the creature that attacked the teenagers at the bay. When he first meets the skeptical Liv he gives her a silver bullet warning her that it is the only weapon that can fell the beast. After he's proven right Liv is finally convinced that the creature is indeed a werewolf and she returns to Lars to learn what she can about it discovering that this werewolf is not the kind we're familiar with.
The Viking Wolf Isn't Like the Werewolves We're Used To
You hear the word werewolf' and you picture a mix of man and wolf running around on two legs howling at the moon says Lars. That's not the case with the Viking wolf. While it was once human and its bite does infect its victims with its curse superficially it simply looks like a large wolf and it can never take human form again. When the curse is completed then the human is lost forever says Lars.
Lars also implies that the origins of the Norwegian werewolf are unclear he doesn't seem to know what we learned in the opening text about Gudbrand the Grim. He theorizes that the Vikings might have brought the curse of the wolf back with them from Europe in the 1100s but he also notes that "humans have always wanted to conquer and command the animal's powers. At first through various sacrificial rites. Experiments. Crossbreeding with other animal species. Lars mention of sacrificial rites might be an allusion to a real group of Viking warriors known as the úlfhéðnar. According to the Norse Viking sagas, these fighters wore wolf hides in battle howled clawed at their enemies bit their shields and appeared not to feel pain and may have taken part in the type of rituals Lars refers to in order to harness the power of the wolf before battle. Their behavior may have contributed to the spread of werewolf mythology in Scandinavia.
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