The Girl Who Died is the fifth episode of the ninth series, starring the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), written by Jamie Mathieson with Steven Moffat. Set on an unspecified date during the 9th Century, the Doctor and Clara are captured by a Viking raiding party and taken back to their village. Here the Doctor attempts to help the village survive a war with the alien warrior race: The Mire. His efforts are successful but ultimately cost the life of his new friend Ashildr. Using Mire technology, he is able to bring Ashildr back to life, but only as a never-aging immortal.
The main historical focus of the episode is the Viking village, specifically the fictional individual Ashildr. Ashildr is a young Scandinavian girl, and seemingly one of the only children in the village. When the Doctor discovers she is a ‘storyteller’ creating puppets to act out her own stories, she becomes a vital part of his plan to defeat the Mire. Her involvement causes her death by heart failure though, and she has to be resurrected by Mire technology that makes her functionally immortal and forces her to outlive the rest of the village, and the entire Viking Age. In later episodes she has abandoned the name Ashildr and simply calls herself ‘Me.’
The name Ashildr comes from the words Ás, the singular form of Æsir (gods from Norse mythology) and Hildur, a word that became a name in its own right but most commonly means female warrior, Valkyrie or warfare in broader terms. The Valkyries were mythological female warriors who escorted dead fighters to the afterlife. The only other Viking name used in the story is Einarr which as a name was directly connected to the einherjar, the warriors that died in battle and were escorted to Valhalla by the Valkyries. Both Ashildr and Einarr are genuine Old Norse names. Ashildr’s name effectively translates as War Lord. In present day Icelandic it would be Áshildur.
The villagers refer to themselves as Vikings throughout the episode, one of them dramatically shouting “We Are VIKINGS!” at one point in the episode to hammer home the point. The word Viking did exist at this time, first used in the 790s in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by monks to refer to coastal marauders. The raiding party that captured the Doctor and Clara, and was then taken and killed by the Mire, would have been Vikings but the rest of the village would have just been Scandinavians. Equally, the word Vikings didn’t enter Old Norse until the 11th Century and still only referred to troops and raiders. The village is actually mostly inhabited by “farmers, fishermen, web designers, maybe not that last one.”
The other main historical inaccuracy with the Vikings in the episode is the horns on their helmets. The Vikings never had horned helmets, but it is a common fallacy. They first acquired their horned and winged helmets during the 19th Century, when the Swede Gustav Malmstrom gave horns to Vikings in his illustrations. Some Viking warriors did wear helmets in battle, but they would have been simple conical helmets. The writers were actually aware of this misconception but decided it would be easier to include them than include dialogue explaining that Vikings didn’t have horned helmets.
The costumes beyond that are largely representative of the sorts of things Scandinavians would have worn at the time. Their clothes were made from wool, linen and animal skins. Men wore tunics and trousers, while women wore long dresses, and their clothes were fastened with belts and brooches. Clara’s tunic that she wears like a jacket was likely made by the village for a male. Ashildr dresses in a more male fashion too but this is deliberate, since Ashildr is characterised as a tomboy, claiming ‘the girls all thought I was a boy’ as one reason why she didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere but the village. Some of the Viking warriors on the raiding party also wear face paint; there is evidence to suggest this is accurate, although it actually seems to have been largely a fashion choice rather than war paint.
After being captured by the raiding party, Clara and the Doctor discuss having spent two days on a longboat to get to the village. Used in battle, Viking longships were long, light and slender so they could move quickly. They had a square sail and a mast or could be rowed with somewhere between 24 and 50 oars.
Norse mythology also plays a role in the episode. The Doctor attempts to convince the Viking village that he is the god Odin taken human form, and that his yo-yo is in fact the ‘sign of Odin.’ There is a Greek vase painting from around 440 BC that shows a boy playing with a yo-yo. The yo-yo is actually considered the second oldest toy in history, beaten only by dolls. The yo-yo didn’t move into Europe until 1800, and didn’t become popular until the 1860s. The Doctor references Clarke’s Law that ‘any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic’ as his reasoning but while It is fair to assume that the Vikings were extremely unlikely to have encountered yo-yos before, they probably wouldn’t have been amazed by it.
Odin was a widely revered Old Norse God, associated with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, battle, sorcery, poetry, frenzy, and the runic alphabet. In Old Norse texts, Odin is depicted as one-eyed and long-bearded, frequently wielding a spear named Gungnir, and wearing a cloak. The leader of the Mire takes the form of Odin far more effectively than the Doctor to demand the village’s greatest warriors to come ‘feast’ with him in the Halls of Valhalla, (in fact a deception to kidnap the warriors, extract their testosterone to drink as supplements, and then murder them.) Valhalla was a feasting hall in Asgard (realm of the Gods) for fallen warriors chosen by Odin and the Valkyries to be rewarded in death (the einherjar). The Mire’s ‘Odin’ wears a helmet with one eye covered, giving him the one-eyed appearance of Odin from mythology. In mythology, Odin plucked out one of his own eyes in exchange for a drink from the Well of Knowledge.
The main point of contention for the episode is the electric eels that the Doctor uses as a vital part of his plan to defeat the Mire. Electric eels inhabit fresh waters of the Amazon and Orinoco River basins in South America, so it would seem highly improbably the Viking village would have had them, as they should have been thousands of miles away. Despite the Doctor’s enthusiastic announcement of “Eels!”, electric eels actually aren’t eels; their scientific classification is closer to carp and catfish. The first electric eels transported to Europe we know of were in the early 19th century. Vikings didn’t keep records though so it’s conceivable that a pair of electric eels could have been gifted as part of trade negotiations. To survive, they would have to kept in a warm hut as pets. In the episode, they are shown to be kept in a hut so while highly improbably, the electric eels aspect of the plot does actually work.
The Girl Who Died uses a limited amount of history to support its story, with variable accuracy and attention to detail. The use of history in the episode is largely as a backdrop to the introduction of the recurring character Ashildr and does not serve to notably build or advance the story. The Vikings are used for comparison with the Mire. The episode is ultimately less of a historical episode and more an episode that just happens to be set in the past.
Trivia
· The Doctor has previously met Vikings in First Doctor adventure The Time Meddler. The Vikings’ helmets were horned in that episode too, and the Doctor mockingly compared one of those helmets to a ‘space helmet for a cow.’
· The Doctor looks up the Mire in his 2000 year diary. The Second Doctor was seen to possess a 500 year diary, while the Seventh Doctor owned a 900 year diary.
· In a more long-term history reference, when asked ‘what happened’, the Doctor answers: “The Big Bang, dinosaurs, bipeds, and a mounting sense of futility.”
· Brian Blessed was originally cast the Mire’s false Odin, but dropped out due to illness
· This episode marks the first time Clara strokes the 12th Doctor’s cheek, the way the 11th Doctor used to stroke hers.
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