In early 2012, Capital One released yet another commercial in its famous and highly successful “marauding Vikings” series. This one, opening with a barbarian war band on the brink of combat and conspicuously patterned after Braveheart’s William Wallace at Stirling, features a tuxedo-clad, espresso-sipping Alec Baldwin swooping in to interrupt the impending fight, stating, “Battle speech, right?” The hopelessly out-of-place Baldwin then takes sword in hand and rallies the troops with promises of double-miles travel rewards for each dollar charged. His points are punctuated with sword thrusts into the air, each met by rousing acclaims from the armed masses, and supported by dramatic music. The segment ends with the obligatory “What’s in your wallet?” tagline, and Baldwin poking fun at himself for a recent air-passenger-rage incident.

What is interesting about the commercial for the purposes of this study is that the segment works only because the battle harangue has become a stock motif in medieval film. Baldwin’s anachronistic dress, accessories, and message of credit card rewards are easily juxtaposed with a recurring feature of combat depictions set in the premodern era that audiences have seen numerous times. It is therefore not a stretch, even for twenty-first-century Americans with only the most rudimentary understanding of the Middle Ages, to see the irony and get the joke of Baldwin’s moving address to the warriors.

The goals of this study are four-fold. Drawing on expertise in medieval history, film studies, communication theory, and musicology, the authors first bring attention to the historicity of battle orations and the purposes they served, and how those purposes have changed to appeal to modern-day theatergoers. Second, showing how film harangues are made and taken up in recurrent ways allows one to see speech in action as not merely constative, but as performative and persuasive utterances. In other words, the delivery of these harangues on screen accentuates their content and rhetorical power, while fostering a shared experience among viewers. Third, the issue of accuracy vs. authenticity of battlefield speech depictions allows one to observe the complicated interplay between real and reel history, and suggests that there is value in the latter for understanding a component of medieval warfare.