The real Vikings: the early medieval world behind the hit drama

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The real Vikings: the early medieval world behind the hit drama

From 2013 to the second part of the sixth and final series, airing on Amazon Prime from 30 December, History Channel’s Vikings has brought a hit multi-season historical drama about the early Viking world to international audiences.

Following the adventures of the legendary figure Ragnar Lothbrok (or Loðbrók) and his sons including Bjorn Ironside, Ubba and Ivar the Boneless, writer Michael Hirst portrays a 9th-century world of seaborne conflict, far-flung connections and family feuding on an unprecedented scale. Despite numerous films over the years, occasional documentaries and an ongoing rival drama series The Last Kingdom, nothing can compare in scale and duration to Vikings in bringing the early medieval world to global television viewers.

Vikings offers up more than 65 hours, of exposure to a fictional 9th-century world of battles and intrigues. Simply put: never before has the Early Middle Ages been afforded so much screen time. Moreover, while The Last Kingdom mainly centres on the Vikings in Britain, the ambitious geographical and temporal sweep of Hirst’s narrative is remarkable.

The show is able to explore many interleaving stories featuring different settlements and spaces, stories and characters in Scandinavia and beyond, encapsulating multiple generations of raiding and exploration in the Baltic, England, Frankia, Byzantine Sicily, Islamic Spain and North Africa, Russia and Iceland. In the show’s culmination, series six is even set to take one of the sons of Ragnar to Vinland – North America.

Vikings Season 6: what’s happened so far?

History vs entertainment, and the historical accuracy of Vikings

Is this popular show a good or bad thing from an academic perspective? Is the show a litany of pseudo-histories, or does it serve as successful edutainment? I suggest it does both.

As a specialist of the Early Middle Ages, including the archaeology of the Viking period in Britain and Scandinavia, I argue that we can celebrate the immersive, diverse and rapidly changing material environment Vikings delivers. We can take it seriously as a form of public engagement – not because it ‘gets everything right’, but because it inspires so many insights and tackles many key issues which historians, archaeologists and other specialists are investigating about the Viking world.

Viking long boats in series three of the drama

'Vikings' doesn't get everything right, but it tackles key issues which historians and archaeologists are investigating about the Viking world, says Professor Howard Williams. (Image by Alamy)

Let’s be clear: there’s no point in picking holes in the accuracy of this show in terms of precise plot content or chronology, any more than precise details of the costumes or sets. This is a 21st-century take on 19th- and 20th-century literary portrayals of 13th-century sagas, themselves drawing orally transmitted remembrances of the 9th–11th century.

Despite the rhetoric of some of the actors when interviewed, the show isn’t a window onto the past. Vikings doesn’t show us the adventures of well-known historically attested individuals, nor does it always show well-substantiated historical events as scholars understand them. Instead, it is engaging fiction: a dramatisation of legends in which the 9th-century Viking world is simplified and sketched, with events and processes, from the earliest raids to the invasion of the Great Heathen Army, conflated and sometimes confused.

‘Vikings’ creator Michael Hirst on the real history behind the hit drama

Having said that, there are some pretty prominent features of the show that test the patience of even the most liberal critic. For example, there is no evidence beyond legend that captured heathen Norsemen or apostates would be crucified by bishops in 9th-century Wessex, any more than the idea that ‘blood-eagling’ is a confirmed pagan sacrificial execution rite (as shown in series two and four).

Likewise, Ragnar Lothbrok unquestionably didn’t lead the famous Viking raid against the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 and stay alive to lead huge armies against Paris in both 845 and 885–86 (series three and four). King Alfred’s court didn’t entertain the sons of Ragnar on his side (series five), and the Rus Vikings of Kiev didn’t launch an invasion of Norway (series six)!

A key problematic historical issue is the emergence of ‘Vikings’ as a self-defined identity. No one would have gone around saying “we are Vikings” in the 9th century: this owes far more to our 19th-century inheritance and popular imaginings than it does to how early medieval people might have talked about and perceived themselves.