NorsePlay Reviews: The Juniper Tree. 🌲
The 1990 CE black-and-white film The Juniper Tree takes The Brothers Grimm folkloric tale of the same name and places it within a medieval Icelandic context, adding the operating mechanism of witchcraft to push the story into the arena of magical realism.
There's an observable throughline here that makes this film even more NorsePlay: The idea of a potentially very early Germanic cautionary tale set "2,000 years ago" (so 188 BCE from its recorded publication if literal), perhaps in an ancient world forest, and setting that story in an isolated Viking Age-style farmstead, and though the time period isn't stated it could be from then up to the Brennuöldin, The Age of Fire when witches (though by contrast mostly male) were persecuted & drowned, between 1625 CE and 1683 CE, so the carry forward from Germanic to Norse happens via modern art cinema. A prominent example of the same story media time shifting happens when Saxo Grammaticus' legendary Amleth becomes Shakespeare's Hamlet set forward by the Bard into the 1400s, pushed farther forward into Michael Almereyda's 2000 CE modern NYC Hamlet, and then later gets temporally reversed into Prince Of Jutland in 1994 CE or The Northman in 2022 CE.
Primarily in my to-be-watched pile for songstress Björk Guðmundsdóttir, she's 20 at the start of the 1986 CE shooting of this, just before The Sugarcubes' 1987 CE international breakout hit Birthday when her unique vocals cry & purr over the radio in her Icelandic accent to grab listeners by the throat and never let go again for three decades for her run of ten solo albums so far. Much like Nicholson or Robbie's typecasting, Björk's made a career based on playing an insane free spirit, here first as a potentially visionary/delusional girl, and after this as a wild child commited to a girls' home in a weird TV film Glerbrot (Broken Glass, 1988). This mad girl association's only mirrored by her in real life attacking a paparazzo, wearing a very bold swan-shaped dress to the 2001 Oscars while "laying" ostrich eggs on the red carpet, and marrying (now divorced) outré filmmaker Matthew Barney to play even more bizarre roles in his strange masonic films, plus all the wonderfully crazypants Spike Jonze music videos that are generated from her lyrics thematically dealing with hyper-emotional shift. Note that NorsePlay mentions all this context with nothing but admiration for Björk's daringly avant-garde choices in both her art and her life (plus she left me a handwritten note with some candy one day [*swoon*], but that's another story for another time), and for pop culturally putting Iceland on the map of modern global consciousness.
More than just younger-punk-grrrl Björk, the small cast of five are all equally tight in their performances, delivering the drama of the story's potentially questionable stepmother Katla moving into lonely widower Jóhann's farmstead, and facing the resistance and increasing mistrust from his son Jónas. Unlike the short story, new stepmother Katla brings with her younger sister Margit, who plays a moderating and guilt displaced teen wracked with empathy for both her new step-nephew and her sister. Beneath all of this, there's the workings of witchcraft, some of which uses a spindle to yarn some wool-based spells so that one can't help but think of Frigg working her distaff, and other magical acts that remind one of the simple but purposeful spells in Icelandic magical tracts like the directions in the Galdrabók.
Ultimately this is a story of emotional resource guardianship and the jealousies that can result in tragedy from this, which is relatable to some of the familial dynamics in the Icelandic sagas. The film feels like the sad moodiness evoked by Ingmar Bergman's Swedish cinema, and one might ask Eggers if maybe he saw The Juniper Tree before scripting The Witch (2015 CE). There's an open ending that begs the viewer's patience, and diverges from the folktale (which has a very symbolic fairy tale ending). The Juniper Tree is not a good time, but it's well wrought, and if you like Iceland, you get your share of Reynisfjara's black beach & hexagonal basalt columns, distinctive (and probably Álfar resident) rocks, and much inside & outside of the cool turf house at Keldur from the 1100s to give you the for real medieval farmlife feels. It was these settings and the outlinings of spooky witchery that gave me reason enough to move in with these characters for a spell. Well, and some time with the incomparable Björk.
If that sounds like enough for you then hit that play button above, and let us know what you thought in the comments below, NorsePlayers!
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.
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