In just a decade, Robert Eggers has gone from being an unknown name to one of the most promising directors in the industry. Eggers made his feature film debut with the historical horror movie The Witch in 2015. Receiving strong reviews and a solid box office (making over $40 million on an estimated $4 million budget), the horror film was a star-making vehicle for actor Anya Taylor-Joy, who was only 19 years old at the time the film was released. The movie was also Eggers’ first collaboration with A24, with whom he would work again on The Lighthouse.

Last year, Eggers made his most successful work with Nosferatu. A remake of the old vampire movie of the same name, the movie made over $181 million at the worldwide box office. This not only made the movie the director’s biggest hit to date, but it also ranked among the highest-grossing horror movies of 2025. Nosferatu even ended up nominated for four Oscars, including Best Cinematography and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Now, the accuracy of another one of Eggers’ movies gets reviewed by an expert.

The Northman’s Accuracy Has Been Reviewed

And It Gets A Good Score

The Northman‘s historical accuracy is analyzed by a historian. The adventure epic tells the story of a Viking prince who sets off on a journey to avenge his father’s murder. The film features a star-studded leading cast including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Taylor-Joy, and Willem Dafoe. Despite strong reviews, The Northman faltered at the box office. The film made $75.8 million worldwide, but was made on an estimated budget of $90 million, ultimately losing money.

Speaking with Insider, historian William Short reviews The Northman‘s accuracy. While not everything was perfect, Short is impressed with Eggers’ film overall, praising the portrayal of Viking battle techniques and dwellings. The historian mentions there being evidence to show that Vikings used a “wood palisade fence” as their enclosure rather than “stone castles or anything like that,” which is accurately portrayed in The Northman. Overall, he gave the film a 9 out of 10 for accuracy. At the end of the video, he referred to The Northman as his favorite Viking movie. Check out the full quote from Short below:

What he does is he catches a spear that was thrown at him, turns it around, and throws it right back. And that is mentioned numerous times in the literary sources as being a very effective battle technique. And we’ve tested it and it works great. It’s really not so difficult to catch the spear in flight and throw it back.

The nature of beserkers are still a little bit mysterious. But they are people who enter a battle frenzy before a battle, and the sources say they howl like wolves. They bit their shields. And iron and fire cannot harm them.

So Vikings didn’t use stone castles or anything like that. A typical enclosure would be a wood palisade fence. And climbing it with an ax seems very doable, using the ax to pull yourself up. And we’ve done a lot of research on the phsyics of these weapons. Doing motion capture and measuring historic weapons. Using computer models to study it and what the ax has over some of the other weapons is just an insane amount of power. In one of our measurements, at the moment the two-handed ax hits the target, it just destroys what it touches. And that how Vikings used it.

So the weapon that Amleth is using in this clip once he enters the village is a seax. And before he enters, you can see that it’s slung horizontally from his belt. A seax was a short sword. What the seax is is a chopping weapon, and he holds in upside down in a strange way and uses it for slicing, and that’s not what the weapon is meant for at all.

And destroying things with fire was just a way to emphasize the terror of these kinds of raids. We’ve done some tests where we actually built Viking houses, instrumented them, burned them down. It’s only a matter of a few minutes before everyone inside is ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.

The game, knattleikr, a little bit off. We play it almost every year. Our research suggests its something quite different than what you see on the screen. So in the clip you see 5 versus 5, but in Viking times, it is pretty clear that it’s one on one. People were carefully matched to be about the same strength. You see a lot of running in this clip. The sources suggests running was not a part of the game at all. The game was really about power. It wasn’t about speed. In the sources, when people talk about the games, they don’t say that this team won or this team won. It is always this particular individual is stronger than his opponent. This one was stronger than than this one.

I give the creative team that made this film a lot of credit for doing deep research and really getting things right about Viking culture and Viking society. I would rate this as a 9. There are some things a little off, but there are so many things that are just perfect that I can’t give it any less.

What This Means For The Northman

Eggers Did His Research

Short did not go easy on some of the films in the video, so this praise means a lot. He was much less impressed by the 1958 Kirk Douglas movie The Vikings, which he ended up giving a 5 out of 10 for accuracy. Even though The Northman did not end up being profitable, Short’s analysis reveals how much care was put into the movie. Eggers and his team did hard work to make sure the film was as accurate as possible, and it seems like the end product was fairly spot-on, historically speaking.

Source: Insider