Of ruthless queens on page and screen
Watched the second sason of Vikings: Valhalla, which since I enjoyed the first season I was glad to continue liking. The first two or three episodes, I was quietly grumbling there wasn't enough Emma (of Normandy), but that changed, and she and Godwin get both this season's darkest and most twisty plot line. This said, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy Team Harald and Leif's adventures (first with the Rus and then en route to Constantinople) enormously, and am very looking foward to get a Byzantine subplot next season. Freydis' plot line was the one I was least invested in, but I still found it well executed, as she first thinks she's found pagan paradise (err, Valhalla) and then realises your fellow worshippers of the Norse gods are just as prone to screw you over and exploit refugees as a handy workforce as Christians are.
Re: the Emma and Godwin subplot, though.The neat thing is that at first when Godwin "saves" Emma's life, it's really obvious he's set this supposed assassination attempt up, and I was prepared to feel insulted on Emma's behalf when I thought the show would let her buy this. But she didn't. However, both Emma and I were in the dark as what the point of this exercise was, since Godwin at the start of the season doesn't need to impress her, and Canute isn't around to imipress and cater good will for. Plus David Oakes really shines in the role, making Godwin's courting of the ill-fated Aelfwyinn pretty convincing... if you ignore last season's events. But the penny didn't drop until Aelfwynn entrusted her romantic keepsake from Godwyn to her friend and her friend was named as Gytha, related to the royal family. Simultanously, the show managed the tightrope balance of how to handle torture. Emma's instincts turn out to be correct, it wasn't a coincidence that the supposed wannabe assassin was Aelfwynn's brother, but her going so far as to torture Aelfwynn wasn't what revealed this, in fact, the torture didn't achieve anything she wanted from it, cost a young innocent woman her life and played directly into Godwin's long term plan, which Emma only then figured out. If a show does use torture, there are two extremes I can't stand: a) Bad guy tortures hero, hero withstands torture by moral fortitude, or b) shady character uses torture on villain, gets all the information they need in time. Wheraes here, Emma didn't get what she wanted via torture, she found out the truth via other means, and her next move is none violent but psychologically achieving a hit, not to mention that she and Godwin do know they're both guilty of the same ruthlessness and are each other's match there.
Another thing that already occured to me last season is what Emma's presence on the show signals. The Vikings vs Saxons conflict that went on through the original show this one is a spin-off/sequel to (though it stands on its own feet) may continue here, but they're both due to be rushed off the historical stage by the Normans, as Emma's nephew will defeat Godwin's son at Hastings.
I also read The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak, a non-fictioin narrative dealing with Merovingian queens Brunhild and Fredegund in the sixth century. On the one hand, it's definitely a biographie romancee, using novelistic narrative techniques like characters pacing impatiently which the author really has no way of knowing, otoh, it's excellently sourced, and provides footnotes to every direct quotation. It also presents the primary sources, such as they are, and who and what their patrons and agendas were. And when the author disagrees witih what seems to be a standard presentation - as in the Brunhild vs Bishop Egidius conflict - , she says why and lays out her argument.
One of her arguments is that her main characters, who started out from very different positions in life - Brunhild a Visigoth princess from Spain, Fredegund a slave - but ended up essentially ruling parts of today's France for many years - did not engineer the lethal conflict between the royal brothers they married, as it had started long before they got into the picture, but that they then turned out to be easily as ruthless and better survivors then most of the men competing for power they were allied to. She also doesn't present them in isolation as the sole interesting women of the era; we also hear about Radegunde, Byzantine Empress Sophia (wife of mad Justin II), and our antiheroines' daughters, among others.The gore quota is really high, mind you. Fredegund - who has the problem that the main chronicler of the era is on Brunhild's side - makes a brutal mafia boss weep with envy as she assassinates her way to the top, with one of the few positive attributes her contemporaries grudgingly allow being the fact she actually leads men into battles which she wins. Brunhild's killing score isn't as high, but she ends up just as vilified by later chroniclers anyway in order to justify the horrible death inflicted on her. Not by Fredegund, btw, who most un-cliché-like for a female supervillain dies peacefully in bed some years earlier. In an era where practically every not-battlefield death among royalty is suspected to have been the work of poison, witchcraft or both, hers mysteriously has not a single chronicler describing it as anything but natural. Both go through ups and downs of fortune and are in and out of power, repeatedly for decades, but even when out of power never without influence, and always managing a comeback. Which is a big reason why, in Pugh's version, the patriarchy in the form of the aristocracy, faced with old Brunhild starting her third regency (this time for her great grandson), decides to topple her by throwing in their lot of Fredegund's surviving son Chlotar, who has Brunhild executed in the earliest version of someone getting quartered/torn apart by horses in France I've come across.
The whole thing reads like a real life Robert Altmann movie in that there aren't any really sympathetic characters around, unless we count, say, the servants a desperate Fredegund who has just lost her third son in a row to dysentry accuses of being responsible via witchcraft (spoiler: this ends badly for the poor servants), but the overall narrative is compelling, and one does have the impression that both Brunhild and Fredegund would have ended up dead decades earlier if they'd been less ruthless. There's the occasional darkly humorous episode, as when the high born and later sainted Radegunde has died (of natural causes) and her successor is shock, horror, not of the nobility, so the two Merovingian princesses who are nuns in the same cloister at the time stage a strike, then an exit, and then a siege, complete with backup of soldiers they hired in order to get another abbess, utterly ignoring any direction from the local bishop. But in general, there's so much gore - more Quentin Tarantino than Altman, in fact - that I, who have a pretty high tolerance level for historical circumstances like these, still don't think I'll reread the book any time soon.
Still, I'm grateful I've read it, and found it truly interesting. I had heard of Brunhild and Fredegund before, but only in brief allusions - they're named as possible inspirations for Brünhild and Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied -, and their story deserves to be told.
Re: the Emma and Godwin subplot, though.The neat thing is that at first when Godwin "saves" Emma's life, it's really obvious he's set this supposed assassination attempt up, and I was prepared to feel insulted on Emma's behalf when I thought the show would let her buy this. But she didn't. However, both Emma and I were in the dark as what the point of this exercise was, since Godwin at the start of the season doesn't need to impress her, and Canute isn't around to imipress and cater good will for. Plus David Oakes really shines in the role, making Godwin's courting of the ill-fated Aelfwyinn pretty convincing... if you ignore last season's events. But the penny didn't drop until Aelfwynn entrusted her romantic keepsake from Godwyn to her friend and her friend was named as Gytha, related to the royal family. Simultanously, the show managed the tightrope balance of how to handle torture. Emma's instincts turn out to be correct, it wasn't a coincidence that the supposed wannabe assassin was Aelfwynn's brother, but her going so far as to torture Aelfwynn wasn't what revealed this, in fact, the torture didn't achieve anything she wanted from it, cost a young innocent woman her life and played directly into Godwin's long term plan, which Emma only then figured out. If a show does use torture, there are two extremes I can't stand: a) Bad guy tortures hero, hero withstands torture by moral fortitude, or b) shady character uses torture on villain, gets all the information they need in time. Wheraes here, Emma didn't get what she wanted via torture, she found out the truth via other means, and her next move is none violent but psychologically achieving a hit, not to mention that she and Godwin do know they're both guilty of the same ruthlessness and are each other's match there.
Another thing that already occured to me last season is what Emma's presence on the show signals. The Vikings vs Saxons conflict that went on through the original show this one is a spin-off/sequel to (though it stands on its own feet) may continue here, but they're both due to be rushed off the historical stage by the Normans, as Emma's nephew will defeat Godwin's son at Hastings.
I also read The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak, a non-fictioin narrative dealing with Merovingian queens Brunhild and Fredegund in the sixth century. On the one hand, it's definitely a biographie romancee, using novelistic narrative techniques like characters pacing impatiently which the author really has no way of knowing, otoh, it's excellently sourced, and provides footnotes to every direct quotation. It also presents the primary sources, such as they are, and who and what their patrons and agendas were. And when the author disagrees witih what seems to be a standard presentation - as in the Brunhild vs Bishop Egidius conflict - , she says why and lays out her argument.
One of her arguments is that her main characters, who started out from very different positions in life - Brunhild a Visigoth princess from Spain, Fredegund a slave - but ended up essentially ruling parts of today's France for many years - did not engineer the lethal conflict between the royal brothers they married, as it had started long before they got into the picture, but that they then turned out to be easily as ruthless and better survivors then most of the men competing for power they were allied to. She also doesn't present them in isolation as the sole interesting women of the era; we also hear about Radegunde, Byzantine Empress Sophia (wife of mad Justin II), and our antiheroines' daughters, among others.The gore quota is really high, mind you. Fredegund - who has the problem that the main chronicler of the era is on Brunhild's side - makes a brutal mafia boss weep with envy as she assassinates her way to the top, with one of the few positive attributes her contemporaries grudgingly allow being the fact she actually leads men into battles which she wins. Brunhild's killing score isn't as high, but she ends up just as vilified by later chroniclers anyway in order to justify the horrible death inflicted on her. Not by Fredegund, btw, who most un-cliché-like for a female supervillain dies peacefully in bed some years earlier. In an era where practically every not-battlefield death among royalty is suspected to have been the work of poison, witchcraft or both, hers mysteriously has not a single chronicler describing it as anything but natural. Both go through ups and downs of fortune and are in and out of power, repeatedly for decades, but even when out of power never without influence, and always managing a comeback. Which is a big reason why, in Pugh's version, the patriarchy in the form of the aristocracy, faced with old Brunhild starting her third regency (this time for her great grandson), decides to topple her by throwing in their lot of Fredegund's surviving son Chlotar, who has Brunhild executed in the earliest version of someone getting quartered/torn apart by horses in France I've come across.
The whole thing reads like a real life Robert Altmann movie in that there aren't any really sympathetic characters around, unless we count, say, the servants a desperate Fredegund who has just lost her third son in a row to dysentry accuses of being responsible via witchcraft (spoiler: this ends badly for the poor servants), but the overall narrative is compelling, and one does have the impression that both Brunhild and Fredegund would have ended up dead decades earlier if they'd been less ruthless. There's the occasional darkly humorous episode, as when the high born and later sainted Radegunde has died (of natural causes) and her successor is shock, horror, not of the nobility, so the two Merovingian princesses who are nuns in the same cloister at the time stage a strike, then an exit, and then a siege, complete with backup of soldiers they hired in order to get another abbess, utterly ignoring any direction from the local bishop. But in general, there's so much gore - more Quentin Tarantino than Altman, in fact - that I, who have a pretty high tolerance level for historical circumstances like these, still don't think I'll reread the book any time soon.
Still, I'm grateful I've read it, and found it truly interesting. I had heard of Brunhild and Fredegund before, but only in brief allusions - they're named as possible inspirations for Brünhild and Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied -, and their story deserves to be told.