5 Real Parts of History That’d Be Unrealistic in Any Movie

5 Vikings Loved Skiing

Imagine the next Viking historical epic you watch, starring some Sarsgaard or another. The characters go through their very serious talk about war and death, and then someone says, “All right. Now, feel like hitting the slopes?” Then they take skis out of a closet and go skiing.

Skiing, which you associate just fine with modern Scandinavia, really goes back thousands of years, to the Viking Age and also long before that. Often, they’d ski cross-country just as a mode of transport, such as when hunting, but they’d also ski downhill, for fun. They even had multiple ski gods: Ull, who was a stepson to Thor, and the hunting goddess Skaði. 

When she wasn’t skiing, Skaði had other adventures. One time, she went to Asgard and demanded a husband, and the gods allowed her to choose one, but she had to do so only by looking at everyone’s feet and choosing the ones that looked the most attractive. This would never be allowed in a movie today because today’s audience would consider it far too sexual. Another time, she challenged Loki to make her laugh. He succeeded by tying a goat to his testicles and playing tug-of-war.

4 Geishas Were All Men

You know geishas as Japanese women who performed for men, and also probably provided services of a sexual nature. You’d be broadly right about that — if you’re talking about the period after 1750, which makes up only a small portion of Japanese history. 

Before that, for a period of 500 years or more, geishas were all men. The earliest of these were doboshu, attendants to feudal lords. They were very useful to keep around if you wanted someone to recite poetry or pour tea and take your mind off the war you were planning. They became increasingly known as jesters as centuries passed, or for playing the drum.

It wasn’t a sexual role, but as lords became decreasingly interested in geishas, geishas did shift to red light districts, now parlaying their talents into telling dirty jokes for the paying public. Then the lords finally decided, “Hey, how about we try hiring women as geishas? They’re far more interesting to look at, and maybe we can also have sex with them.” 

3 Pirates Had Strict Rules Against Impropriety

Speaking about dubious sex with women, let’s talk about pirates, whom you could always count on to come to port and then drag your town’s women away into the ship with them. 

Or could you count on them to do that? Pirates wrote out formal codes by which sailors had to abide, and the Articles of Bartholomew Roberts specifically banned those sort of shenanigans. “No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them,” said the code. “If any man were to be found seducing any of the latter sex, and carried her to sea, disguised, he was to suffer death.”

As to whether this capital punishment was always enforced, well, we have our doubts, but the presence of this rule at all is remarkable considering pirates’ reputation. Why, consider Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, in which a pirate has ripped the petticoat off a woman, who is now hiding from her pursuer in a barrel. 

Or consider the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, which was inspired by the ride and which brought such renewed attention to the ride that Disney rid it of the barrel woman. In the second movie, there’s a sequence where a bunch of people are chasing each other to steal magical artifacts. A pirate duo bump into Elizabeth Swann, and both groups realize that neither actually has any of the items. The pirates now chase Elizabeth anyway, for some foul non-material purpose — because even in a children’s movie, we know that pirates must be capturing women. And these are a pair of pirates who start out this movie with a subplot of newly worrying about their immortal souls. 

2 Egyptians Corrected Spelling Mistakes With a Red Pen

Egyptians, as you may know, wrote on papyrus, but they also wrote on erasable tablets, which we today call gessoed boards. Though the boards were reusable, text remained if the users didn’t actively remove the old stuff. That means we’ve been able to dig up old writing boards from 4,000 years ago, with their text intact. 

This board shows text that a student copied from another source. That’s the black writing, at least. The red writing is from a teacher, correcting the student’s mistakes. 

In a movie, we can tolerate a lot. The recent Gladiator sequel has a scene where a character drinks wine at what appears to be a café while reading a broadsheet newspaper, and if you aren’t concentrating closely, you might not even notice how absurd this is for Roman times. But if you watched a movie set in Ancient Egypt, and it featured a teacher correcting homework with a red pen, you’d throw up your hands and walk out of the theater.

1 The 1,000-Man American Lacrosse Games

Let’s imagine a story about tribes in America in the 17th century. We’re looking at two tribes of the Haudenosaunee, a group that the Europeans would call the Iroquois Confederacy. The groups are prepared to fight over a piece of land, and the chiefs discuss the next step. “There’s only one way to decide this,” they say. “We play a game of lacrosse. Winner takes all.”

This happened, regularly. Lacrosse was originally an indigenous game, and they really did resolve territorial disputes using it. Games featured hundreds of players, and six miles could separate the two goals. This made it look more like a battle than a sports game, but it was indeed a game — players were tossing balls using sticks and keeping score, without anyone trying to kill each other. For coaches, the tribes used their medicine men. 

The most obvious reason no movie would show all this is that movies never feature hundreds of extras anymore — unless they’re CGI aliens. 

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