The 13th Warrior (1999) is a big, stupid action movie set in the Middle Ages in one respect. But there are three rather interesting things about it that make it worth watching for the Medieval History buff. One is that it is loosely based on the seventh century poem Beowulf discussed in this week's blog. Two is that the source material (Michael Crichton's 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead) is loosely based on a real chronicle, called the Risala, written by a real person, Arab explorer Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, who traveled from Baghdad up the Volga to collect tribute from the Rus in 921 C.E. Three is that the Grendel figures in the movie and book, the "Wendol", are Neanderthals surviving into medieval times.
Antonio Banderas is pretty as the fictionalized version of Ibn Fadlan, and stagefights well, but he's not terribly convincing as an Arab courtier. There is no evidence that the film's backstory---that Ahmad fell in love with the wrong woman and had to leave Baghdad in a hurry-applied to the historical Ibn Fadlan, either. This was just a business trip intended to collect tribute from a vassal tribe. The filmmakers made no attempt to portray accurate costumes (or indeed, much accurate Rus culture beyond Crichton's reworking of Ibn Fadlan). Also, there is entirely too much mud and barbarian illiteracy in the picture. The Rus are conflated with Vikings who could, in fact, read runes. So, they did have a written language, if not one of the literary complexity of Arabic.
The funeral scene at the end is inspired Ibn Fadlan's description of the funeral of a chief, though the film eschews the human sacrifice of a slave girl that Ibn Fadlan describes in detail. But the figure of Buliwyf is stolen directly from the poem Beowulf, which is set in sixth century Denmark. This is, needless to say, a large leap in time and space, even if the poem was not written down until the 10th century.
The idea that the cannibalistic, bear-eating "wendols" were Neanderthals seems silliest of all, though the recent discovery of the Homo floriensis fossils has revived the old Sasquatch debate. Still, we don't know that Neanderthals (or Paleolithic people in general) were any more "savage" in their behavior than the Rus or the Arabs.
It's best to take all of this in the spirit of bone-crunching epic sagas from The Iliad onward-a good yarn, but not a good history lesson.
