Tribalize or Die
On the Morality of The Northman
There’s no reason to dwell on what’s been going on in France recently—we all see it. And we know that if it happened in our backyard, we wouldn’t fare much better. Something has happened to European man.
This is why reading old books matters, and the older the better. If you read nothing but epic poetry and took it as seriously as the shitlib takes Steven Universe lore, you’d be one of the most formidable humans alive today. Most people barely read (1), but pretty much everyone watches movies, so this is where our heroes live today. Current-year heroism generally falls into two camps: a) the gritty, morally ambiguous girlboss, or b) the shiny, morally unambiguous super-girlboss. I watch next to no new TV or movies, but every time I’m forced to, these are the paradigms into which protagonists are clumsily shoehorned. Yes, even male characters, who are not masculine but fully interchangeable with women apart from the facial hair (although they’re working on it).
So, when Robert Eggers’ film The Northman hit theatres in 2022, this was a breath of fresh air. Eggers stayed astonishingly faithful to the moral outlook of a pre-Christian Scandinavian warrior noble, more faithful than any of us had a right to hope for. This is what sets The Northman apart, and is why it will be remembered for a long time.
And so, I was a bit disappointed to learn of Morgoth’s take on the film:
Much as I enjoyed The Northman I couldn’t help but feel a degree of repulsion at the moral ambiguity of it all. If you front-load your story with your protagonist being complicit in mass murder and the burning alive of women and children, it can reasonably be expected that he atones or reflects on his actions. No so such thing happens, instead he cares only about himself and his quest for revenge.
However, the revenge narrative is then itself deflated by this aspect of the movie because there's not really any difference between the protagonist and the antagonist so, why should we care who wins?
That said, it is indeed wonderful to see movie in a European setting with an entirely European cast. (2)
My response here is in no way a dig at Morgoth. He’s one of the good guys, one of the genuinely, dare I say, folkish voices in our sphere in that he always celebrates what’s native and autochthonic in our culture. But it’s important to clarify that The Northman is quite morally unambiguous—it’s just a morality we’ve lost, and its loss has led us to where we can let ourselves be colonized, even seeing our colonization as just.
It’s true—the protagonist Amleth is kind of an asshole by modern standards. Everything that Morgoth said happens in the film, does in fact happen. We could say more: Amleth kills his half-brother just to spite his traitorous mother. Later, he kills her too. And at the end of the film, he abandons his wife and unborn children to seek his personal revenge. What kind of hero is that?
The Viking-era Dane would have seen him as an exemplary hero. These people had an honour culture, something alien to us today. In Germanic cultures, morality was not a matter of your personal feelings about yourself, not even about your individual relation to a deity (which cashes out to the same thing in practice). For the Germanics, as for all Indo-Europeans, your moral worth was ineliminably social. Your standing in the community was everything—we call this honour culture (3).
Different communities have different standards, but for the Norse, the standard was loyalty to blood, personal bravery, and oathkeeping. Everything that fell outside of these standards was non-moral. All of these standards (4) were rigorously enforced.
The Germanic oath was so ironclad that one would sooner die than break it. An impossible oath drives the action of many sagas, just as an impossible choice drives the action in most Greek tragedies. To fail in this was to be níðr, essentially what we mean when we call someone a cuck (5). One would sooner die a brutal death than be that. Thus, ancient morality.
Bravery was equally imperative—if you fought without concern for danger, you were a drengr—a man’s man. There’s an old Norse proverb that says that “he will be avenged who falls forward” (6), meaning running into battle and not away. It even figures into their theology. The date of your death is fixed by fate. Going into battle, if you live, it’s because you were fated to live. If you die, it’s because you were fated to die—but in dying in battle, you go to Valhalla. The logic demands that you fight, always.
Above all, Germanic morality demanded blood loyalty. So, doesn’t Amleth fail because he kills his own family? Germanic society was patrilineal, meaning that descent was reckoned through the father alone. Amleth was no more related to his half-brother than to a stranger. And the Germanic view of moral obligation to the stranger is more alien to us than perhaps anything else—so much the worse for us. In the Norse Volsungasaga, Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli transform into wolves and hunt travellers for sport, because anyone outside the tribe is also outside of moral consideration. This may seem extreme to us today, but the morality that we took up after this is what led to us getting curbstomped by blacks in our own countries. It just took us some time to work out the kinks, which were just the vestiges of this older morality.
At the beginning of the film, Amleth swears an oath to his father to avenge his death. In failing to keep his oath, in flinching from mortal danger, and in reckoning the outsider as within his moral horizon, Amleth would have brought dishonour not only on himself, but on his wife and children—they themselves would have become níðingar. Between revenge and abandoning his family to a fate worse than death, Amleth had no other choice. Whites need to revive this morality, and we will, because cuckery is inversely tied to birth rates. It may take generations, but soon all that will be left is white men with a spine—all that will be left is tribal white men. This is what “they” fear above all else.
Which whites are tribal today? There are two broad groups: the radical right, and shitlibs. Yes, shitlibs. The modern bugman is indeed tribal in that he has an ethnic preference; his preference is just inverted—he prefers the out-group to the in-group. This was demonstrated in a recent study in which the liberal was found to prefer not only the out-group, but “all living things in the universe” to his own family (7). Opposite this freak is the radical right. In the middle are the universalist moralists, who are shedding numbers quickly. Some of them have found their way into our ranks, but they’re finding out that their morality doesn’t fit within an illiberal scheme.
Indeed, universalist morality has always served tribal purposes, because tribalism is the paradigm of morality. Religions have always been coterminous with a folkhood, or else they have splintered into sectarianism. Catholicism succeeded because it served the imperial ambitions of Rome. As Christendom broadened out, it began to break up, first with the struggles between Pope and Emperor in the Holy Roman Empire, then with the Reformation, which revived Christianity’s adaptivity by limiting the size of the in-group. Religions flow toward tribalism as the river flows toward the sea.
Of course, Protestantism was only ever a pseudo-tribalism. Real tribalism views the out-group as different not because of its belief, but because of its blood. And this is the issue with seeing Amleth as no different than the antagonists against which he fights—he differs from them not on the basis of belief or action, but on the basis of tribe. You fight for your folk—this is the beginning, middle, and end of morality. To put your folk first—and I mean really, put them before anything else—this carries with it some things that modern man finds hard to swallow. He will have to get over that, or else accept his extinction.
When I see Amleth, I don’t see an amoral sociopath; I see a man who puts duty to family above everything else. I see a good man—a man to emulate. The morality of The Northman is the morality of the future, at least to the extent that white peoples have a future. The archaic Roman practiced a form of ancestor worship cognate to that of the Norse, one that demanded absolute vengeance for blood. The religion had a name: parentare, meaning “to avenge the dead”, thereby making offering to his soul. This is my morality. This is my religion.
Imperium Press
July 11, 2023
(1) Something like a third of people have never read a book after high school. 42% of college grads never read another book. https://humorwriters.org/startling-statistics/ (archive)
(2) https://t.me/MorgothsReview/2792 (archive)
(3) It wasn’t until we abandoned honour culture and every man became judge of himself that we started down the path to the current year.
(4) And a few others, naturally. But these were the main ones.
(5) There’s a better word but it will get you kicked off all social media.
(6) Egil’s saga, ch. xxiv.
(7) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5 (archive)
