God of War Interview (Patreon)

Hi folks, I am still drowning in all my May obligations but I was given the go-ahead to share with you this unedited transcript of an interview I did with Alice Bell of videogamer.com about the new God of War game. It's not a perfect transcript, and there are some parts where the recording fell out (marked [--]), but it's more complete than what's going to get posted in her article later this week.

I haven't played the game; she just sent me a lot of clips of the video scenes in the game and asked me for my thoughts on them. Also, since this interview I've found out that it was my colleague Maja Bäckvall at the University of Uppsala who was hired to write the runes in the game. She definitely knows what's she doing, but the developers had their own ideas and distorted the runes as she wrote them (as she's mentioned on Twitter; @skrivafel ). That's too bad, but it's not her fault.

First of all, I guess, what did you think generally from what you saw of the game?

Well I suppose I should preface that by saying I understand things like modern video games, modern TV shows, modern movies would be in a sense the next step of the transmission of a story. I don't necessarily expect perfect fidelity to the source material. 

That being said the story portrayed in the scenes from the game do not appear similar to the source material in a lot of significant respects. I have a video that I put up recently, by pure coincidence, about the death of Baldr.I don't know if you've seen that, but I can tell you in brief what we see in the Eddas.

I did see it! I thought it was a very useful coincidence. 

I filmed that months ago, before I knew this game had anything to do with Baldr. 

I did see a lot of the comments were asking you to comment on the game, so maybe this will be a shortcut for you.

I think this will be a useful thing to link to for my followers...There's no character anywhere near equivalent to Hodr, as far as I could tell -- he blind brother. It's all Loki. It's interesting that you don't have this element about Frigg going around and asking every single thing to promise; she somehow contrives some kind of spell. I never understood what exactly she had done in the game, but it didn't seem to be very similar to what she does in the myth. The element about Baldr not being able to feel anything is unique to the game. I think that's kind of creative: the idea that if you're immortal maybe you take away some of the human-ness of being alive. It's creative, but it's not in the original sources. 

Also, just the portrayal of Baldr as a character is unique to the game. I mean, Baldr is a blank slate basically, in the Eddas. He has no speaking lines. We never hear his own voice. And myth often follows a sort of dream logic, where the things that happen don't necessarily follow anything like what we would consider a logical perspective. I mean, if everything can be made to swear not to harm Baldr, why can't everything be made to swear not to harm everybody? I kind of understand that the first thing the gods are going to do when they find out Baldr can't be hurt by anything is throw things at him. I do sort of understand the childish glee of that. But he's just a completely blank state. He's pure archetype. But so is his brother Hodr -- well I suppose Hodr speaks a little bit, but Baldr in the Eddas is as silent as the god Vidar who's called the silent god. He never gets a single line. And so portraying him as sort of bitter is an interesting direction to go, because basically any personality you give to him is as valid as any other. He has no personality in the Eddas. I think it's an interesting move to make him bitter about his immortality. Angry. Confrontational. I watched all these different scenes; there's one where he's talking to his mother in, I think in Hel, about it, and regretting how he has no sensations whatsoever any more. It's all very bitter and like I said, since he has no personality in the Eddas it seems as valid as any other personality you could give him. 

From what I understand the one thing it does say is just everyone loves him and he's beautiful and that's kind of all we know. 

Yep, pretty much. The specifics of how he is beautiful are not even really stated. Snorri in the prose Edda says there's a flower so white that it resembles his eyelash, so it's called Baldr's eyelash. They associate -- often in the Eddas and Sagas very fair hair is associated with attractiveness, so that's probably part of the image of him in Norse times.

One element of his image in the video game that's unique is all the tattoos, though it seems like everybody is really tatted up. This is -- I think a big part of how we express on one hand individuality, on the other hand allegiance to a group today is with tattoos, but there's only one source from the middle ages that really speaks about the Vikings having tattoos and that's the Arabic writer ibn Fadlan, who claimed that he met a group of them and that they were tattooed from the tips of their toes to their necks. That's the only person who ever says anything like that, they never mention tattoos, as far as I know there's not archaeological evidence for tattooing, but that particular remark has inspired a lot of people, especially lately, to depict the Vikings as tattooed. I think it's on sort of shaky ground. 

How do you feel about how Norse myth is portrayed in current pop culture? I mean I went to see the latest Marvel film today; that's obviously had a huge influence on how people think of characters like Thor and Loki. 

It has one effect on my classroom, which is that typically the first version of a story that you've seen is going to stick with you, to a certain degree. When I'm teaching Norse myth I know that I have to kind of know what the pop culture references are right now, because I have to kind of help people get past them and the misconceptions in them. The one that the marvel movies have made popular is that the giants are these huge blue creatures. In the actual medieval sources the giants look exactly like the gods. The gods are giants by descent, they intermarry frequently, there seems to be no psychical distinction between them by size or by colour or anything. I think that can be a little unexpected for people. But it's amazing how popular this stuff is. I teach a class of 180 in Norse mythology. Every semester. And the only reason it's 180 and not more is because there's a limit to how many students you can fit in the classroom. I mean this stuff has become so popular, and the Marvel series I think is part of it, the Vikings TV show I think is part of it... but a lot of what ends up on the screen is sort of third of fourth hand from the original authentic sources like the Eddas. A lot of it is filtered through 19th century mysticism, because Vikings have been popular before in the 19th century when a lot of mystic theosophic-type thinkers got into them, and a lot of their ideas about the Vikings and about runes and that kind of thing have become accepted by modern people who are interested in this stuff. I think it's influenced by 20th century ideology because a lot of ideological groups, some pretty ugly in the 20th century, embraced Viking and Norse stuff as emblematic. And then I think it also gets filtered through what I call the 21st century action movie filter, which is just what looks cool on the screen, right? How many explosions can we work into this? The Eddas and Sagas are action packed but not necessarily in an explosion-a-minute Michael Bay movie way. But they get filtered through that and gradually these things accrete to the stories. While, like I said, I understand that people retell stories in a way that matters to them and the current generation, it also does sort of distort what's actually there in the originals. So I guess you could call my feelings ambivalent.

It seems such a huge departure the only thing we know about Baldr -- which is that he's a good guy, right? -- and the game just goes completely the opposite way.

There is one other remark about him that I didn't mention in that video. Snorri says in the prose Edda at one point, when he's introducing the different gods, he has a couple just random remarks about them, and he says of Baldr that he has a son named Forseti, who is such a good judge that his judgements, his verdicts, are always good, they're always just, and people never break them because they're so perfect. And that seems to somehow reflect a little bit on the character of his father, I would think. If anything, although like I said his personality is a blank slate, there's nothing to suggest in the Eddas that there was any sort of negative feelings toward him. I mean after all, if everything swore not to harm and everything wept to get him back from Hel, by implication that also includes all the gods' enemies. The only one who doesn't weep at the end is Loki, who's disguised as a giant woman. But all of the other giants, then, must have wept for him. So he must have been someone who could reach across that aisle, right? I think that speaks for a very positively viewed character, whatever his exact personality was. But the Baldr of this game seems to be someone I would not want to sit particularly close to in a bar.

So how do you feel about that interpretation of him as just a really kind of horrible bad guy?

Well like I said, in a sense any personality is almost equally valid, but... I guess that isn't true now that I'm thinking about how the giants must have also sworn not to harm him. He must have been very loved. I mean maybe he got away with being a jerk because he was so beautiful, whatever that means exactly. But I think also probably -- I wonder if maybe part of it is that they want to surprise people who might feel that Loki as the chief bad guy would be sort old same-old same-old for Norse mythology based games; they kind of want to surprise you with someone else being kind of the bad guy. There might be a little bit of that. Because there are a lot of games out there right now based on Norse myth -- you pointed out the Hellblade game -- so people might be, I don't know, a little bit tired of Loki and his children always being the central antagonists. It certainly is unique. I can't think of another modern story where Baldr is portrayed that way. Although in a version of the Baldr story from Saxo Grammaticus' Latin version, which I mention in that video, Baldr is an antagonist. But there he's fighting his brother Holdr -- well he's not his brother in Saxo's reading but he's fighting the equivalent of Holdr, who's his brother in this version. So I guess there's a little bit of medieval precedent for him being portrayed in a negative light. But it just in that Latin euhemerised version. 

It's interesting to me as well that in the game Loki is a good guy. He's a child but he's on the protagonist's side and presented in a really positive light, whereas the gods are the bad guys. 

I'll tell you an odd fact that has made me think. As my videos and books have gotten more exposure I've ended up getting just so much email that it's kind of unmanageable. One of the main email messages I get is I probably get about a hundred messages a day from people who want Norse tattoos. I mean this is a huge subculture I guess. And I don't have time to [--] the brief glances I get at some of these emails, I feel like half or a little bit more than half are somehow sort of glorifying the quote 'dark side' of Norse myth. People are really into Loki, they're into the giants. It's not people, typically, who're [--] maybe a little more about Odin [--] the gods who were actually popular and the sort of quote 'good guys' in our medieval sources. People are interested in that dark side. It's a cultural moment that I've seen where people are really intrigued by that, and I think part of that is the popularity of the Loki character in the Marvel universe, but also it might speak to the fact that this is a sort of an anti-hero moment in our culture, I think in a lot of different media, and the giants and Loki are those anti-heroes in this story. 

The portrayal of Loki as a child is interesting. He is never portrayed as a child in any of our surviving Norse sources, and although he is sometimes a helpful sidekick to Thor, he is never as naive as the child Atreus seems here. 

I was really surprised when you sent me that email with all the different links, where you said, 'Here's a link where we see that the boy Atreus is actually Loki.' When I started that video I thought 'Something's going to happen, he's going to show that he's engineered this whole thing, he's going to come out of his disguise as a child and confront the hero or something.' I was surprised that he was Loki but that he was actually in it as a child. He is still not the Loki that we know from the myths yet. That's a surprising twist.

It'll be interesting to see -- because the game has been really, really successful already, and they're probably already making a sequel, given how long development cycles are -- it'll be interesting to see if the later games do kind of add more to his story.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the rest of it because there's a lot more material to work with. I can tell that it's popular because one of those videos you sent me I think had 86 million views already. 

Yeah it's been huge. It's been huge. I think games are still seen as quite a small nerd thing, but as an entertainment industry they're bigger than films.

Oh yeah, this isn't a little niche where you've got 86 million people. It's clearly one of the major art forms of our day, in the same way that big movie releases are a big cultural event, big video game releases are now. I think people that ignore that are sort of ignoring a big part of the artistic expression of current generations.

Do you play video games yourself?

I don't. I haven't played a video game since 2002. So needless to say I was surprised. It looks like they've changed a lot. I felt like I was watching a movie. When you said you were going to send me some links to video play I thought -- my image was like Age of Empires 2, you know? So I was a little bit surprised.

Oh yeah. We've come on a lot. We're doing pretty well in games... Is there anything in the videos that you saw that struck as being done kind of right, as being done well in relation to the source material? 

I don't know. Not necessarily. There were some things that I wondered about. It seemed like Freyja and Frigg are the same person, given that Frigg is said to be Baldr's mother in the Eddas, but I saw that she's mostly called Freyja here, although it looked like she's also called Frigg. With Freyja and Frigg there's some speculation, and I've speculated myself, that what we're seeing is one figure who was later misinterpreted as two, because there is a gap of a couple hundred years between the viking age and our earliest written sources. But the sort of matter-of-fact presentation of her as one person it's surprising. You could regard that as being sort of in touch with some current thought. The look of the world, as far as I could tell, certainly seems similar to parts of, say, Norway, but that's also I think pretty popular among people setting movies and video games and such in the Northern world; they do want to use that landscape. I think Skyrim, from what I've seen of that, does the same thing -- Frozen certainly did. 

Oh, you did some work for Frozen didn't you?

I actually consulted on that, yeah. That was actually a world that I touched a little bit. 

Wow!

Yeah, it was a unique opportunity...

One thing I was noticing in some of the videos was there are runes here and there. Baldr has some rune tattoos. There's runes on the wall in the temple that Kratos and Atreus are walking through, and the runes are Elder Futhark, which is actually older than Old Norse. A lot of people get interested in Elder Futhark because the name sounds cool. It sounds better than Younger Futhark, which is what Old Norse is actually written in. I was trying to figure out what was written and having a hard time figuring it out. It looked like someone took some Old Norse quotes and was trying to write them in Elder Futhark but didn't know how to because the Elder's not designed for it, so I couldn't quite figure out what they were going for there but I thought that was an interesting design choice -- to have it at all, but also to do it that specific way. Honestly, as someone who does a lot with runes in a scholarly way it always mildly annoys me when people don't match the right alphabet to the right language, but oh well. 

It's part of the game that Kratos can't read, but Loki can understand these different languages.

Yeah I saw that when they encounter the Midgard serpent.

Did you like the serpent, by the way? I quite enjoyed that. There's a part of the game where you go inside the serpent and swim through his stomach 'cos he's so big.

That is cool. They certainly conveyed a sense of scale of that creature, since it is supposed to have circled the entire world. I thought they did a good job of capturing just the immense awe associated with it. Because you can make a big dragon, but you can also make a world-sized dragon, and that is something they captured well, making him look the size of a planet. That was pretty cool. Of course, it'll be interesting to see how they connect that to Loki. As you said, the serpent is said to have been sent back in time so it could still be his kind. It'll be interesting to see if they do that in the sequel -- or if they change it around. Clearly the God of War universe is not going to be exactly like the Eddaic universe.