The Eagle
I posted this on Ravelry, but since I think I only have one overlapping reader (hi, hobbitbabe! You've already read everything I have to say here, just FYI :), I thought I'd re-post for any interested parties.
So, on Saturday night, Erin and Matthieu and I went to see The Eagle. Basic plot: Roman hottie’s daddy lost a big symbol (the eagle, the standard of the legion) up in the wild north of Britain and never came home. 20 years later, Hottie wants to reclaim his honor and sneaks up with a Briton slave to steal it back from the Celtic tribe who’s using it as a totem.
Now, as all of you know, I am not a historian, and definitely not a historian of Roman Britain; in fact, I know very little about that period. But as a Celticist, I thought it was actually kind of awesome. You see the Romans dealing with southern Britons, then dealing with the northern tribes as well. Language is a barrier. They actually used real Scottish Gaelic for much of the northern tribes’ speech, mixed randomly with Irish and some Gaelic-sounding gibberish (in their defense, it sounded like the actors just couldn’t get the sounds out rather than the words themselves being wrong). Of course, the British tribes would have been speaking something like Old Welsh rather than Irish, which probably wasn't well-established in Scotland until about the 5th c -- and the current scholarly consensus is that Pictish was also probably P-Celtic (Welsh-like), so basically, Gaelic and Irish have no place in this time/place. Still, it was cool that they made the effort, and it made watching the thing much more entertaining for me! In fact, my only linguistic quibble, really, is that the “druid” in the first part of the film was shouting gibberish (or maybe Hungarian? he has a Hungarian name, and appears to have appeared in almost exclusively Hungarian-language films prior to The Eagle) -- anyway, definitely not anything resembling Welsh or Gaelic of any age or provenance. Good that they're making a linguistic differentiation -- but couldn't they have found a Welsh speaker?
Anyway, I thought the exoticizing was convincing (the Celtic tribes were hugely exotic at the time), and the film did not portray the Celts as a unified cultural entity, which is also a big mark in their favor. They basically made up the entire nature of the Celtic tribes (especially the fanciful “Seal People”), but really, we know so little about Roman-era Celtic tribes that they didn’t really have much to work with.
In terms of the music, I was thrilled to note that they got Allan MacDonald to sing and play the bagpipes; he's a native speaker, and one of the leading lights in traditional Gaelic music. He used some wonderfully appropriate pieces of music, too (little Easter eggs for me!): he sang the song I learned as being in the language of the selkies when they were arriving at the Seal People's village, and after one of the sappiest speeches in the whole thing (honoring the fallen before heading homewards), he broke in with an achingly beautiful bagpipe lament whose (unsung) Gaelic words brought tears to my eyes. Thèid mi dhachaigh, hò rò dhachaigh, thèid mi dhachaigh, chrò Chinn t-Saile; thèid mi leam fhìn ann, leam fhìn ann, leam fhìn ann ... ("I will go home, hò rò, home, I will go home to the cattlefold of Kintail; I'll go there alone, alone, alone ...") *shiver*
All in all, it was nowhere near as bad as I was prepared for it to be. OK, the dialogue was frequently bad. OK, some of the acting was less than stellar. OK, the main character who had to spout OtherLanguage was the worst offender for not being able to pronounce it. But for a Hollywood film, I’d give it a solid B, maybe even a B+. And I might even go see it again with Sìm :)
So, on Saturday night, Erin and Matthieu and I went to see The Eagle. Basic plot: Roman hottie’s daddy lost a big symbol (the eagle, the standard of the legion) up in the wild north of Britain and never came home. 20 years later, Hottie wants to reclaim his honor and sneaks up with a Briton slave to steal it back from the Celtic tribe who’s using it as a totem.
Now, as all of you know, I am not a historian, and definitely not a historian of Roman Britain; in fact, I know very little about that period. But as a Celticist, I thought it was actually kind of awesome. You see the Romans dealing with southern Britons, then dealing with the northern tribes as well. Language is a barrier. They actually used real Scottish Gaelic for much of the northern tribes’ speech, mixed randomly with Irish and some Gaelic-sounding gibberish (in their defense, it sounded like the actors just couldn’t get the sounds out rather than the words themselves being wrong). Of course, the British tribes would have been speaking something like Old Welsh rather than Irish, which probably wasn't well-established in Scotland until about the 5th c -- and the current scholarly consensus is that Pictish was also probably P-Celtic (Welsh-like), so basically, Gaelic and Irish have no place in this time/place. Still, it was cool that they made the effort, and it made watching the thing much more entertaining for me! In fact, my only linguistic quibble, really, is that the “druid” in the first part of the film was shouting gibberish (or maybe Hungarian? he has a Hungarian name, and appears to have appeared in almost exclusively Hungarian-language films prior to The Eagle) -- anyway, definitely not anything resembling Welsh or Gaelic of any age or provenance. Good that they're making a linguistic differentiation -- but couldn't they have found a Welsh speaker?
Anyway, I thought the exoticizing was convincing (the Celtic tribes were hugely exotic at the time), and the film did not portray the Celts as a unified cultural entity, which is also a big mark in their favor. They basically made up the entire nature of the Celtic tribes (especially the fanciful “Seal People”), but really, we know so little about Roman-era Celtic tribes that they didn’t really have much to work with.
In terms of the music, I was thrilled to note that they got Allan MacDonald to sing and play the bagpipes; he's a native speaker, and one of the leading lights in traditional Gaelic music. He used some wonderfully appropriate pieces of music, too (little Easter eggs for me!): he sang the song I learned as being in the language of the selkies when they were arriving at the Seal People's village, and after one of the sappiest speeches in the whole thing (honoring the fallen before heading homewards), he broke in with an achingly beautiful bagpipe lament whose (unsung) Gaelic words brought tears to my eyes. Thèid mi dhachaigh, hò rò dhachaigh, thèid mi dhachaigh, chrò Chinn t-Saile; thèid mi leam fhìn ann, leam fhìn ann, leam fhìn ann ... ("I will go home, hò rò, home, I will go home to the cattlefold of Kintail; I'll go there alone, alone, alone ...") *shiver*
All in all, it was nowhere near as bad as I was prepared for it to be. OK, the dialogue was frequently bad. OK, some of the acting was less than stellar. OK, the main character who had to spout OtherLanguage was the worst offender for not being able to pronounce it. But for a Hollywood film, I’d give it a solid B, maybe even a B+. And I might even go see it again with Sìm :)