The Viking Sisters

"The Viking Sisters" began as a simple idea. It was to do a scene about the meeting in the inhospitable wilderness of Scandinavia. They would be fighting over an inheritance, a reflection of how my mother and aunt fought over my grandfather's inheritance.

A question that came up was the difference between the sisters. What made them different? Then the idea came to have them having been forced to make very different choices in life in order to survive. One would have become a member of the upper crust of Iron Age society: a vǫlva - a shaman. The other would have gone against her gender role and become a viking and outlaw.

The viking age has always been very much alive for me, always lying under the surface. If you scrape away the paint from the old buildings in Stockholm, you can find the runestones repurposed to make the house. The mounds of the old kings very visible from the highway when we went to my grandfather. As I continued to think about the story, it grew far beyond the two sisters. It became about society and the women's place in it. We are always told about the men of the viking age, but hardly of the women. It interested me because I had never been told about them. I decided that every female character would represent an archetype of the viking age woman: the shaman, the warrior woman, the queen, the slave, the lady of the house and the godess.

Inspiration came partly from films. Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ", Hrafn's "The Shadow of the Raven", Herzog's "Nosferatu the Vampyre". But it also came from my childhood. From learning to fish and sail with my grandfather along the coast. From the storms of autumn. From my grandmother telling me stories about the forest and all the goblins and imps her grandmother was convinced lived there. From my dad telling me about stories about the viking expeditions to the east.

This film feels like rain and cold winds to me. It smells of tar and smoke and moist. But it's as much about the inner landscape as the outer. Like Odin says in Hávamál: "The mind alone knows what lies near the heart". I've tried to show what might have lied near the heart of the women that lived so long ago.