Warning: this article contains spoilers for The Northman.
Amleth is forced to play a bizarre and brutal sport in The Northman, and there's a real history behind the game. The Northman is a Viking epic from visionary director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) with a stellar cast that includes Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, and Ethan Hawke. Throughout his filmography, Robert Eggers crafts his stories with meticulous historical detail to immerse the audience within the worlds he creates - the game played in The Northman is one such detail.
In the movie, while Amleth poses as a slave on his uncle Fjölnir's farm, he is coerced into competing in a ball game. The game consists of two teams of five players, each player with their own stick. The sticks are used to combat opposing players and to hit a hardball against the opposition's post. It would appear that the objective is to hit the ball against the opposition's post until one team reaches a winning score or time runs out. In The Northman, however, the game Alexander Skarsgård's character plays does not reach a defined conclusion as Fjölnir's youngest son interrupts to get the ball and is hit by Thorfinnr (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson of Game of Thrones.) The game stops and Amleth comes to the rescue of the boy, beating Thorfinnr to a pulp.
Like so many other aspects of Eggers' films, the sport is based on historical evidence and is called knattleikr (which translates to "ball-game"). Originally played by the Vikings of Iceland, the ball game was referenced in numerous Icelandic sagas, such as the Grettis and Eglis sagas. Eggers and his co-writer, the Icelandic poet and novelist, Sjón, did extensive research into the sagas for The Northman movie's characters and worldbuilding; the scene was likely included due to knattleikr's numerous references throughout the ancient sagas. Knattleikr shares similarities with other ancient ball games, like the Roman harpastum and la soule, a game played by the men of Normandy and Brittany, and therefore likely inspired by knattleikr. The recorded rules of the game generally match well with the version that Eggers put on camera, and the game is even practiced to this day.
As a result of the incompleteness of many historical texts from Norse cultures, to this day, nobody knows the exact rules of knattleikr. The fundamentals are that the plays are divided into teams, each with a captain. The ball can either be picked up with hands or hit with a player's stick. The brutality of the knattleikr game in The Northman is historically correct too, as violence and intimidation were keys aspects of the game. In some sagas, the game was played on a lined playing field; however, some say that it was often played on an ice-covered surface, such as frozen ponds, which would add another layer of danger to the sport. Due to Eggers' dedication to realism, having his actors play on such a surface may have been deemed too risky.
Knattleikr is still played today by reenactment groups and various American colleges, such as Yale University. In modern-day, the game is considered a spectator sport, as it was in 10th-century Iceland and in The Northman. In Iceland, the game was often played from dawn till dusk, and some reenactment groups embrace these rules by ending the game either when all the ale has been drunk or there is only one player left standing. In The Northman, after his fight with Thorfinnr, Amleth is the last man on his feet, which aligns with these modern rules. Ultimately, most of the laws of the game have been lost to time, but Eggers made a spectacle of knattleikr nonetheless and the scene was yet another demonstration of his attentiveness to historical accuracy.