NorseSpotting within The Beastmaster. 🐅🦅🐀🐀

You'd just as likely not look twice nor too deeply at the 1982 CE Sword & Sorcery so-bad-it's-good film, The Beastmaster. Released in the huge shadow of Conan The Barbarian only a few months later to try and capitalize on its wake, The Beastmaster only achieved a fair amount of attention after post-theatrical high-volume cable reruns, and its home video release. Yet as with anything Sword & Sorcery, The Beastmaster's heroic tropes are inescapably Norse Mythology derived, so let's animal control more exactly where this Saturday afternoon TV matinee B-film gets a few of those specific facets from.

The 3 Witches As Norns: Though they work in tandem with the wizard antagonist Maax, the witches still prophecy his downfall at the hands of Dar, the Beastmaster. And in the director's commentary, he says they're based on Macbeth's Weird Sisters, which of course are derived from the three Norns.

Scrying Pool As The Fates' Well:

Maax & the Witches spend much of the film posing & peering into the above scrying cauldron's pool to spy on The Beastmaster and his pals. Urðarbrunnr is Urð's Well, The Well Of Fate. Given the seemingly unchangeable prophecy casting Dar as Maax's doom, it seems perhaps they're just going through the predetermined motions of trying and failing by watching in the well how it unfolds.

Eagle-Vison As Ravens' Eye Intel: When golden eagle Sharak takes flight, the Beastmaster is able to see from the bird's eye perspective in order to scout and plan what he's going to do next. This is analogous to Odin sending his companion ravens Huginn & Muginn throughout the Nine Worlds everyday to gather intelligence and report back to him at day's end.

Thrall Kiri As Royal Shieldmaiden:

[Last of the Charlie's Angels (S5), Tanya Roberts.]

King Zed's niece is demoted into a sacrificial thrall under usurper wizard Maax, but Dar doesn't know her backstory when he meets her by the bathing pool. In the film she coldly & boldly kills the warrior-priests as dead weight by knocking the heavy container they're now slave-chained to off the raft into the water, which drowns them all, but gets the now-lighter raft rapidly out of crossbow range so they can escape. Later in the temple, she secret doors it for a quick change into a battle maiden outfit, and gets pretty super-aggressive with her dagger for much of the rest of the film. The idea of a royal turned thrall could be from Laxdæla Saga where Irish princess Melkorka's carried off on a Viking raid and later sold as a faux-mute slave in a Swedish market to Icelander Hoskuld Dala-Kollsson who makes her his side piece, but only after she bears him a curiously exceptional son does Hoskuld way later suss out that she can speak and learns her story.

The Death Guards As Berserkers:

So while in the pyramid, we get to see how regular people are turned into raging Death Guards who kill everyone around them, be it friend or foe. The actual BDSM costume accents aside, there's a shirtless berserkergangr state being used here to defend the temple, albeit at the collateral cost of Maax's men too.

The Eye Ring: 

A witch imbeds her left eye in a ring so Maax's warrior-priest can show what's going on during an away mission. This sacrifice reflects Odin giving up his eye for knowledge at the well of Mímir. The aforementioned cauldron gives remote views what this eye-ring sees until Seth notices it spying on them and pokes it out with a stick, which makes the witch who gave it bleed from her empty socket.

So while The Beastmaster is hardly the best or most obvious NorsePlay'd film, there's some good cinematic DNA by director Don Coscarelli doing the utmost he can with what he has, which was the creative ethic behind his truly well-wrought cult horror film Phantasm (1979 CE). And sure, The Beastmaster feels more like dry and arid SoCal than the frozen North, but the above tropes have migrated from their cold climes across continents & time to endure far into this fantasy film's screenplay, which says alot about the Norse Lore's transmission & reception.

[super special thanks to Kindll Travers for her gifting us the extra copy of The Beastmaster which inspired this entry!]

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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.