1066 The Battle for Middle Earth (BBC) review

(For you who don't know history, this review contains spoilers.)

It's 1066 in the third age. Orcs are about to invade Middle-Earth from the south-east across the channel. But for some reason, they never arrive while the old menace from the North, the Vikingr (Old English form of "vikings", Norwegians under Harald Hardraade) starts to occupy the land in the north.

The background is that Edward the Confessor has just died and he has promised the crown to William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. Harold (not to confuse with Harald!) made sure to be close to Edward when he died so that he could interpret "aurgh!" as "I'll give the crown of England to you, my dear Harold!".

The English, the (Anglo-)Saxons, see themselves as the rightful owners of England as they have killed off all the Celts and Romano-Brits half a millennium earlier (DNA-studies have shown that there is basically nothing left from the old population, but that doesn't prove that they got killed right away). Getting another king couldn't matter less to them, but if he brings an entire new class to England, it will piss people off.

Harald's men, on the other hand, just wanted gold, glory and loads of chicks. This was of course the exact same reason most of William's men had, but they also got that story about the crown belonging to their bastard. Not to mention that the Normans also were vikings a few hundred years earlier, but now spoke French and had central-European fighting skills. France was crowded with pesky French people, so killing a few English and take their land seemed like a good idea.

In this movie, in two episodes, we'll follow some common soldiers of all the armies involved.

The movie starts with that all the poor peasants of England have to spend the entire summer waiting for William, and then have to run up to the North to beat the crap out of the Norwegians, which they did, but it was costly. Up there, they were reached by the news that William has gone ashore even though the season of war was already over.

The English took help of every fighting man they could get their hands on, including the vikings they had beaten, but not killed, and marched down to Sussex again.

As you know, the orcs (Old English for foreigners) won, William gave a lot of the country to his army and to the church. Not only did this totally change England, but also the English language that is very different from the Old English that was spoken before the Normans.

So how was the movie

Generally it's very nicely done with few historical errors. Some fighting scenes are clearly made by people with limited fighting skills, which is totally OK for depicting peasants who have only trained during the summer, but the viking who held a bridge on his own would simply have died in the second wave as it looked. He was good, but not the Bruce Lee class of fighter that historical records tell about.

The historical records are generally shown between the scenes which is very nice. You know where stuff have come from.

They didn't show any throwing spears from the Norman cavalry, but otherwise that battle (or should I say fighting as "battle" wasn't imported yet?) was very well done and explained the situation as we know it today.

What I didn't like about the movie was that it was too long and had too little historical details. They had tactical views of the Hasting Battle, so it was not bad at all, but I always want more...

It's kind of fun that they use so much Tolkien language (which is simple as he stole it from the Old English language), but it's of course a marketing stunt. I kind of wonder where Tolkien put the vikings (vikingr) though... But in the movie there are mentioning of orcs, Middle Earth, elves and shire... And they use the word "berserker" instead of "berserk", which didn't confuse me at all, but apparently not everyone have heard that version of the word. Both forms (but different spelling) are common in Swedish and berserker is the Wikipedia form.

Generally I can say it's a nice thing to watch, but you need some patience because it's long.


Of course the orcs are still in power in England, and not only do they own at least 20% of the land, they also make sure that no other orcs can watch stuff from BBC, so if you want to watch this outside of the island, you have to find a torrent. It's available from www.tvtorrents.com but that has closed invitations now. So try:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4914948/1066_-_The_Battle_For_Middle_Earth__Complete__XviD
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