With writing credits on The Northman and last year’s Lamb, you might be wondering: Who is this single-named Icelander, Sjón?
The Northman director Robert Eggers first met Sjón while visiting Björk’s home in Iceland sometime after the release of his debut feature The Witch in 2015, and before his follow up The Lighthouse in 2019. Upon his return home, Eggers read Sjón’s 2008 novel From the Mouth of the Whale, a 17th century tale of witchcraft and superstition, which convinced Eggers to team up with the Icelandic novelist-poet to create their own original Viking Saga.
Sjón dabbled in film prior to Lamb and The Northman: He wrote the 2007 short film “Anna and the Moods” and served as the librettist (or lyricist) for Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, which starred his longtime friend Björk in the title role. But to truly understand Sjón and his multi-hyphenate roots requires a trip to Iceland in the ’80s.
The Medúsa Group
Growing up in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, in the late ’70s and ’80s, Sjón became a founding member of a surrealist poet collective, Medúsa.
“We were all influenced by the do-it-yourself energy of punk and the new wave,” Sjón says of the collective.
“It was all about not waiting for anyone’s admission to go forward and do whatever you needed to do,” he continues. “If you wanted to write and publish, you did that. If you wanted to start a band and organize a gig with other bands, your friends and poets, you went forward, and you did that. So it was really a time of the feeling of having great freedom and just going forward.
“We had a record business here. We had publishing houses, art galleries, and things like that,” he adds. “But we decided to operate completely outside these systems and create our own systems.”
The Medúsa group’s members self-published their own works, which is how Sjón became a published poet at the age of 15.
Iceland and its capital of Reykjavik at that time were very conservative.
“We felt we were possibly living in the most boring city on Earth,” Sjón says.
But the collective members could count on one another, and they could count on the cinemas.
“We were really omnivores when it came to culture. We watched whatever film we thought might be inspiring in its strangeness,” Sjón says. “We shared books, both books of poetry and novels. We shared art books. We were bringing each other up to become the artists that we became.”
The Marshall Plan after World War II had established a unique system in which six of the seven theaters in the Icelandic capital were divided among the major studios (one for Disney, one for Warner Bros., and so forth). The seventh “had no license and had to somehow survive,” Sjón says. So this outlier theater programmed Hammer horror features and Roger Corman exploitation pictures that were popular partly because they promised a certain amount of nudity.
Ethan Hawke stars as King Aurvandil in The Northman, co-written by Sjón. Photo by Aidan Monaghan
Sjón recalls seeing Robert Altman’s Three Women when he was 14 or 15. “It just blew my mind,” he says. He also pinpoints influences including John Cassavetes’ films, as well as Japanese cinema like Onibaba.
As in any good art scene, the Medúsa group had things members liked, and things they didn’t.
“As I remember it, we were not so keen on what you can call realist, or socially-engaged, cinema, art, literature, or anything. We were always looking for something that was transgressive in one way or another. That was the consensus. It had to have something extraordinary about it,” Sjón says.
Meeting Björk
When Sjón was 19 he was introduced to Björk, then 16, at a concert. She was dating Sjón’s best friend at the time, Þór Eldon, whom Sjón says was a “surrealist poet and guitarist in a band called Fan Houtens Kókó.” (Eldon, Björk and Sjón would go on to perform together later in the Sugarcubes.)
Björk wasn’t an official member of Medúsa, but Sjón says she became “like the seventh unofficial member of this small surrealist collective.”
Also read: With The Northman, Robert Eggers and Sjón Create ‘An Original Saga’
Iceland’s culture may have been stiflingly conservative, but Sjón’s family supported his artistic dreams. He was raised by a single mother, and even though his family members all had working-class professions, they were also all keen readers.
“There were always books in the home,” he says.
The Master and Margarita
Sjón became a fan of Icelandic visual artist Alfreð Flóki’s “very dark, crazy, erotic decadent surrealist drawings” when he was 12 or 13, consuming all of his “crazy interviews in the newspapers that scandalized everyone,” he says.
Sjón was then lucky enough to meet Flóki a few years later when he was 17 or 18, “and he became my mentor,” Sjón says.
“He had an amazing library, both of art books and literature,” he continues, noting that all of Flóki’s books were like his art: “dark, weird, decadent, bizarre.”
The Northman and Lamb co-writer Sjón
“And he just showed me an incredible kindness,” Sjón adds. “Actually, one of the first things he asked me: ‘Have you read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov? Have you read The Golem by Gustav Meyrink? Have you read The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz?’ And I said, ‘No, I haven’t read them.’ So he just took them down from his bookshelves and said, ‘Read them and then we can talk.’”
Through Zoom, Sjón holds up a photo of the Kyiv-born Bulgakov, which he got from the Bulgakov museum in Ukraine. “I hope it’s still there,” he says of the museum, noting that The Master and Margarita is still his “favorite book.”
Bulgakov’s surrealist masterpiece is important for Sjón’s trajectory in another way. It helped him finally connect the surrealism of his Medúsa collective with the Viking Sagas that his punk-inspired group had consciously been avoiding.
“At the time, we bypassed the Icelandic sagas, because the Icelandic sagas very much belonged to the official culture — the Sagas were high culture,” Sjón says. “They belong to the academia, to the scholars and cultural politicians and people like that. So, we didn’t go into the Sagas at the time.”
But Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita — along with a few other surrealist and magical realist works of art — helped open his eyes to the beauty of these homegrown Sagas.
Also read: Lamb Started Out as an Experiment in Filmmaking
“How Bulgakov worked with different layers of reality within the same novel helped me appreciate the Icelandic Sagas,” Sjón says.
For readers who count themselves as fans of Sjón and Eggers’ The Northman, but who were not raised on the Sagas in Iceland, Sjón recommends two good starting places. One is Grettir’s Saga, which follows a warrior-poet who “is so flawed,” Sjón says, while he praises the story for its pacing and character study.
He also suggests Egil’s Saga, which also follows a warrior-poet, whom Sjón describes as “an incredible warrior and slayer of man.”
Like The Northman, these ancient Sagas do not skimp on the violence. But Sjón notes there is plenty of humor to be found throughout Egil’s Saga as well.
The Northman, written by Robert Eggers and Sjón, is now in theaters. Sjón photos courtesy of Focus Features.
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