"The Viking Myths" TV series & the skaldhood of A.I.

Buried deep within the obscure streaming app Xumo, I ran across a French-produced 2024 CE 10-episode voiceover documentary-styled series called The Viking Myths.



While there's a whole list of animators in the credits, as I watched the first episode there was an artifice to its style, a sort of motion-comic storyboard presentation, and an artistic lack of fine details with far more easier choices of solids and simple lines in many instances. When we talk about the uncanny valley of A.I. being unable to replicate the natural/creative aspects of humanity, this show has a possible tell of artificial generation to it. While that simplification attempts to err toward the iconic, much like Jeffery Alan Love's cut-out silhouettes with texturing/spot colour illustrations for the Candlewick Studio's 2017 CE edition of Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths, it feels like a workaround to just get something finished. Maybe that leaves fill-in-the-blanks for the viewer's imagination (is Thor a ginger or a towhead?), but it comes across as lacking.

Another tell is the use & some modification of many of the circa-Victorian Era illustrations when cutting to expository sequences away from the narrative, both having voiceovers anyhow. Those choices feel very much as though a user asked a search engine for pictures of the Norse Gods, so the default's artists like W.G. Collinwood, Emil Doepler, Friedrich Wilhelm Heine, and Lorenz Frølich. While I love that era Nordic Romanticism, it again feels artificially aggregated and a shortcut instead of creating original art for the program.

There's also cross-pollinated stories with portions of one myth being combined with another, and simple errors, like mistakenly adding an unnamed extra generation to the Buri-Borr-Odin line of descent. And this doesn't seem like touches of poetic license, but errant data making its way into the final production.

So normally NorsePlay doesn't feature negative reviews unless I feel it's absolutely necessary, and the above finds some essential faults with how the show presents its information (though I'm delighted that a series is making an attempt at creating an audience for the Eddic & Volsung material). Beyond an aesthetic/factual evaluation, however, the broader & more important question here is: Will A.I be the next skald of the Lore? 

With the above errors, the stiltedness & skewed tone of the show might also be faulted, but we can also see a parallel in variations in the evolution of myth within the oral tradition if we follow it from the Indo-Europeans into other geographies over time. Only this time instead of temporal & locational distances being the factor, it's the Norse Lore being sieved & sorted & audio-visually skalded by a computer. I'm not pointing this out as a caution or judgment on A.I. to exclude that construct & result from storytelling. This is part of a throughline in the storytelling tradition, and any avenue that increases access to the Lore is generally a good thing. Just like any human storyteller, there's potential to mess up, and not get things right, but there's also happy accidents, embellishments, and variants that come from each performance (i.e. the show creates the reason that Loki casts a curse so Sif cannot grow her hair back, which gives us a more practical explanation as to why her hair requires its golden dwarven-wrought replacement).

And going back to the Lore, if we look at Kvasir, here's an artificial being created from the DNA-program-laden saliva of the Gods who knows all the answers when you ask him, or head of Mimir with its whispered hard-drive of knowledge, both of which with the advent of A.I seems really familiar. So maybe the next time we want some Lore and no-one's around to give it, instead of scrolling through endless podcasts or videos, we can opt to ask an A.I. to skald it up for us.

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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.