The Viking

The Viking is an epic of the Newfoundland sealers including a melodramatic love subplot. The love triangle is the story of two sealers, Luke and Jed, who love the same woman. The main theme of the film is the life and work of sealers, including techniques for freeing the ship from the ice. Men are seen on the ice trying to free the ship by dynamiting the ice floes. The men jump from ice block to ice block and use their coats as sails to propel the ice. There are scenes of vast expanses of ice undulating like the sea as men advance toward the seals. Sir Wilfred Grenfell, an authority on Labrador, introduces the film and talks about Varick Frissell, the producer, and his devotion to the people and country. Captain Bob of the Viking is played by Captain Robert Abram Bartlett, survivor of the 1913-1914 Steffansson expedition, and skipper of the Roosevelt during Peary's 1909 dash to the North Pole; actors play many of the roles. The basic story is of the two sealers saving each other in turn, getting lost on ice floes, Jed becoming snow blind, and the two sealers walking across ice floes to St. John's, and collapsing in a church during a service. Frissell returned to Newfoundland to shoot additional footage for a sequence of an iceberg. The Viking blew up killing Bartlett, Frissell, and twenty-five other men. The film, originally titled White Thunder, was renamed The Viking to capitalize on the publicized disaster.