Erik the Viking

• 1. Introduction

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  Erik the Viking arrived in cinemas in 1989 as a peculiar kind of fantasy comedy: a film about a Norse warrior who simply did not want to be a Norse warrior. Terry Jones wrote and directed it, drawing on his own 1983 children's book The Saga of Erik the Viking for inspiration, even though the plot he put on screen shares almost nothing with that book. What you get instead is a quest that moves from a sinking island to the edge of a flat Earth, then past Valhalla itself, and finally back home in time for a ship to fall out of the sky and crush the villain.

  Behind that absurdist premise are serious questions: whether one man's conscience can change the world, whether faith determines what a person can actually see, and whether gods are worth petitioning at all. The film opened in Sweden on the 1st of September 1989, then reached American audiences on the 22nd of September, and British audiences on the 29th. It earned divided notices on both sides of the Atlantic and a box-office figure of £845,436 in the UK. The story of how it got made, got cut three separate times, and still found a second life on home video and DVD is what this documentary sets out to tell.

• 2. The Man Who Made It

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  Terry Jones is best known as a member of the Monty Python troupe, and Erik the Viking was produced through the Monty Python company Prominent Features. Jones did not just direct the film; he cast himself as King Arnulf, the ruler of Hy-Brasil, a man so committed to denial that he refuses to accept his island is sinking until the waves swallow him whole. That role gave Jones the chance to play the straight face at the centre of the film's sharpest comic idea: a community whose pleasant self-delusion is more deadly than any invading army.

  The financial backing for Prominent Features came from Swedish company Svensk Filmindustri. That partnership helps explain why Sweden received the premiere before any other country. Jones composed the film's visual world with care, hiring Tolkien artist Alan Lee to create the artwork and Monty Python collaborator Neil Innes to write the music score. Principal photography took place at Shepperton Studios in England. Footage of Erik's village was shot on location in Norway, and the Hy-Brasil sequences were filmed in Malta.

  The casting of Erik himself had an early detour. Tom Hulce, who had starred in Amadeus, was originally set to play the lead before deciding to return to his stage career.

• 3. A Quest Through Mythology

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  Erik's journey begins with guilt, not glory. He feels remorse over the death of an innocent woman named Helga during a raid, and that guilt drives him toward a goal no Viking has attempted: ending Ragnarok. The wise woman Freya explains to him that Fenrir the wolf has swallowed the sun, casting the world into darkness. To reverse this, Erik must travel to Asgard and petition the gods directly.

  Freya tells him the path runs through Hy-Brasil, a sunlit land whose people dress like ancient Greeks and are, as the film notes, exceedingly friendly and hospitable, if musically untalented. There, the key instrument for the quest is waiting: the Horn Resounding, which is much larger than Erik had imagined. The Horn works in three notes: the first carries the ship to Asgard, the second wakes the gods, and the third brings the crew home.

  Standing in Erik's way is Halfdan the Black, a local warlord whose power depends on war continuing. Halfdan fears that peace would end his reign, so he sends his crew in pursuit of Erik. His inside man is Loki, an apprentice blacksmith who persuades the smith Keitel to secretly sabotage the mission from within the crew. Loki eventually steals the mouthpiece of the Horn and throws it into the sea, and when he kills one of Erik's men, Snorri, a single drop of blood triggers the earthquake that sinks Hy-Brasil exactly as its princess Aud had warned.

• 4. Faith and Visibility

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  Harald is the crew member who does not belong in a Norse mythology story. He is a Christian missionary who travels with Erik's men while refusing to believe that any of the myths they are enacting are real. The film uses him to carry a quiet philosophical joke that runs from Hy-Brasil to Valhalla and back.

  When the crew enters the Hall of Valhalla, Harald sees none of it. He cannot see the hall, the ghosts, or the gods. His disbelief is so total that he passes intangibly through the walls. The gods, when visible to everyone else, turn out to be petulant children with little interest in answering mortal prayers. Odin does eventually persuade Fenrir to spit out the sun, but he tells Erik directly that ending Ragnarok will not bring peace to the world. Erik and his men are then told they cannot return home, and because they were not slain in battle, they cannot remain in Valhalla either. They are to be cast into the Pit of Hel.

  It is Harald who saves them. He has returned to the ship and blows the Horn's third note himself, flinging the crew clear of the pit. The missionary who denied the existence of every god and monster nonetheless operates the one instrument the gods recognise as valid. That reversal is the closest the film comes to a thesis about the relationship between belief and action.

• 5. Three Cuts, One Film

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  The version of Erik the Viking that played in cinemas ran 107 minutes. Jones was not satisfied with its pacing and, for the VHS release the following year, cut the film down to 89 minutes. That version was faster, but the story did not end there.

  In 2006, Jones was given the chance to re-edit the film for a DVD release. He handed the actual cutting work to his son Bill, who produced what the release called the Director's Son's Cut, clocking in at 75 minutes. Bill Jones reordered scenes, tightened the pacing significantly, and also produced a completely remixed and re-dubbed soundtrack. The three versions span a range of 107 minutes down to 75, with each iteration reflecting a different judgement about where the comedy lived and where it dragged.

  The film also generated adaptations beyond the screen. Graham Thompson adapted it into a comic book in 1989. A video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System was in development by Eurocom and was to be published by Video System and Kemco, but the project was cancelled before it reached release.

• 6. Critics and the Box Office

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  Variety gave the film a positive notice, calling the premise of a Viking who thought there must be more to life than rape and pillage an amusing one, and concluding that it was an enjoyable film. Vincent Canby of The New York Times awarded it 3 out of 5, writing that it did not measure up to the best of the Python films but that it consistently entertained through the occasional gags that did not work and dialogue that was sometimes obscured by sound effects.

  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it 0 out of a possible 4 stars. He described it as an utterly worthless exercise in waste and wretched excess, uninformed by the slightest spark of humor, wit or coherence. Chris Willman of the Los Angeles Times called it a stillborn comedy in which minutes sometimes mysteriously go by between even attempted gags, and in which virtually no comic scene works up to any kind of viable punch line or payoff.

  On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 50 percent based on reviews from 20 critics. In the UK, it earned £845,436 at the box office. The gulf between Ebert's zero-star dismissal and Variety's warm recommendation captures something true about the film: it was genuinely polarising, not merely mediocre, and the three-version editing history suggests that even Jones himself was never entirely sure where the balance point was.