Midsommar's NorsePlay elements.

We loved Midsommar as a horror film, and that's its function. While NorsePlay's all about media that uses the Norse Lore, as an incidental conveyance for Lore Midsommer requires some explaining. [Spoilers happening now.]

With the subgenre of folk horror, traditions & folklore become subverted & alienized to provoke uncertainty & fear. That's a horror film's job, and Midsommer co-opts four specific things from the Lore to help its story do this:

1. The Runes. Stitched in clothing, painted in folk art inside wall murals, handwritten in a book, and on two rather fake looking runestones, Midsommer uses the Runes as indecipherable roadsigns to sub/consciously make the viewer anxious about where the film's driving them. Aesthetically, the Runes by themselves evoke a mysterious & magical feel. In the Lore, the Hávamál explains that through Odin's self-sacrifice he gains knowledge of the Runes as a writing system, as associative symbols, and as esoteric vehicles for working magic. This trifold usage does make them rather special.

2. The Blood Eagle. Simon is discovered suspended in the hen house with his back cut open and his lungs pulled out to look like wings behind him, possibly still respirating. In the Lore, The Blood Eagle is an especially grisly sacrificial ritual, often with the purpose of vengeance in the victim's selection. While we only see its result in Midsommer, before this in Vikings S2 E7, we're presented with a long active sequence where this is depicted.

3. Ättestupa. Midsommer reaches its first turning point when a pair of elders willingly jump to their deaths from a cliff during the first day of Hårga's festival. In Gautrek's Saga, King Gauti ends up becoming the much begrudged guest of a secluded family who have a specific dynastic cliff, the Ætternisstapi, where one can choose to jump off as a route to Valhalla and at the same time preserve the stingily guarded resources of said secluded family. While the film plays this end-of-life social contract for shock, the old saga played it for laughs as it greatly contradicted the prevailing virtue of hospitality. Given the current standards of legal elective euthanasia, the spirit of this practice isn't quite as alien as one might think.

4. The Procession of Nerthus. When Dani becomes the May Queen, she's crowned with flowers, put on a platform, and transported in a coach to make the rounds, blessing all the fields with the luck of her newfound status, and then later gets to select individuals for sacrifice. In Tacitus' Germania, the first century CE tribes have a ritual procession of a Goddess in a cart, and at the end of her seasonal parade, the slaves who'd laid eyes upon her would be killed.


In terms of horror cinema, the most obvious predecessor of an outsider coming into an isolated Pagan community would be 1973's The Wicker Man. And for using an older religion's sacrificial/magical practices, 1987's The Believers takes Santería and casts its use into an aggressive shadow that caused many major newspapers to run passively concerned sidebar articles about the Yoruba-descended religion and its practitioners in the U.S.

Anyhow, we're explaining these distinctions before you decide to go running off in shock to the first hammer wearing Heathen you spot and embarrass yourself by asking inapplicable questions about a horror film's visceral presentation of the above, as opposed to that Asatruar's totally acceptable contemporary religious practices. Besides, there's all this other bear as a scapegoat animal and personal relationship baggage that Ari Aster wrote into his film that completely discounts Midsommar as a vehicle for the Lore in any formal sense, and unless you were reading an eruditist's blog entry that explained what Aster used you'd probably never even catch those references.

Okay, feel better? Well, we don't! We're obviously still haunted by Midsommar because we're writing about it, you're reading this and still trying to wrap your head around it, so hopefully this helps.

Perhaps more of this NorsePlay context will be present in the additional 30 minutes of the upcoming NC-17 director's cut for home release. If so, we'll let you know.

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.