You Can’t Spoil Fate: In Praise of The Northman Fearlessly Promoting Its Fiery Ending

When I was a freshman in high school, my favorite teacher took my English class through Beowulf, laying out its use of various foundational literary devices as we learned the story of a legendary warrior battling his way through monsters and kinghood. At some point near the end of the story, while talking about foreshadowing and the sense of looming morbidity that hung over the whole epic, she looked up at us and said, simply and without fanfare: “Beowulf is going to die.”
I remember some of my classmates reacting as if she’d just slapped them. There were murmurs of “Why’d you even make us read the story, then?” as she calmly ended the class. I wasn’t upset, but I do remember being a little stunned, walking away from that class thinking that there must have been a reason she preferred to announce Beowulf’s death with such matter-of-factness. Eventually, of course, I got it. She was trying to teach us that endings don’t always matter in the way we expect.
I thought about my favorite teacher, and her valuable Beowulf lesson, quite a bit in the days surrounding the release of another Scandinavian epic saga: Robert Eggers’ The Northman. Granted, no one in that film—a violent, primal howl of vengeance set against a backdrop of prophecy, magic and muscle that I loved a great deal—comes right out and says “Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) is going to die” like my English teacher did all those years ago. But the film also doesn’t hide its fatalistic ambitions, using its very first shot to show us the active volcano where Amleth will meet his end and drenching its screenplay in language that references lakes of fire and the inescapability of fate, all pointing the way to a final showdown in a lava field.
Narratively, The Northman is an impressive exercise in reminding audiences that what happens is often not nearly as important as how it happens. From where I sit, it’s been arguably just as impressive to watch the people who made the film fearlessly play up its climax during the press tour. At the premiere, Eggers talked about the necessity of adding digital genitals for both Skarsgard and Claes Bang (Amleth’s devious uncle Fjolnir), because the actors had to be protected by thongs during their climactic nude fight scene. A day later, Skarsgard went on The Late Show and revealed the blood-stained thong he wore for the scene, explaining both the volcano setting and the “wounded” nature of his character. By the end of the opening weekend, Eggers’ full breakdown of the final sequence had arrived at Entertainment Weekly—the headline touting the “nude volcano brawl” that had by then become such an integral part of hyping The Northman that it was showing up in trailers.
Now, to be fair, these discussions don’t tell would-be moviegoers exactly what happens in the film. They don’t spoil how Amleth dies, or how Fjolnir dies, or what happens to Amleth’s paramour and the mother of his children, Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy). But take it from someone who’s been covering genre films full-time since before the first Avengers: Watching an epic fantasy filmmaker and his cast lay out this much of their story in full public view without fear of spoiling anything has been downright refreshing.