Viking history is packed full of action.
Warriors, battles, rage inducing plants, horrid offerings, battle-lust, and plenty of raiding
and pillaging.
Yet we have to take their history with a grain of salt.
Most of it wasn’t written down until a couple hundred years after the Viking Age, which
lasted from around 800 until 1066 A.D.
Legendary figures like Ragnar Lothbrok may or may not have actually existed and lineages
and events can often be hard to pinpoint.
Netflix’s show, Vikings: Valhalla, tells part of this history in all its grim glory.
What actually happened and what’s just been made up for compelling storytelling?
Welcome back to Nutty History.
Today, we’re taking a look at what Netflix got wrong and right about the Vikings.
Vikings: Valhalla picks up 200 years after Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons tormented England
and France with raid after raid – events portrayed in the History Channel’s hugely
popular show, Vikings, a show that also blends a good amount of fact with fiction despite
airing on the History Channel.
But hey, it is the same channel that features this guy broing out about ancient aliens.
Anyway, the fact that Vikings: Valhalla is on Netflix has maybe allowed the show to stray
a bit farther from the historical record, mixing up timelines and creating characters
out of thin air.
The plot of the first season of the show centers around the Viking invasion of England and
a quest for revenge by the Norwegian prince Harald Sigurdsson after his brother and a
whole host of other Vikings living in England in a region known as the Danelaw [Dan-e-law]
were wiped off the earth by the forces of the English king Ethelred in an event called
the St. Brice’s Day Tragedy.
In the Norwegian city of Kattegat, the same legendary city from the original Vikings show,
Harald teams up with Leif Eriksson and the Danish King Canute and his half-brother and
King of Norway, Olaf Haraldsson, to exact revenge.
Leif had just arrived in Kattegat from Greenland with his sister, Freydis, to get their own
revenge on a man who had hurt her and engraved a cross into her back.
All of these characters did actually exist.
The St. Brice’s Day Tragedy did actually happen, and the Vikings did actually invade
England.
But there are some serious problems with the who, what, when, where, and why of it all.
First of all, the St. Brice’s Day Tragedy of the Vikings in England happened in 1002
AD.
Harald Sigurdsson, played by the almost-too-handsome Leo Suter in the show (despite looking like
this on Norse coins), ugh.
Ahhh so dreamy.
Sorry, where were we?
Right, so Harald Sigurdsson wasn’t even born yet when the St. Brice’s Day Tragedy
happened.
Harald came into the world in 1015 A.D.
His brother was Olaf, King of Norway, and he did have some pretty wild adventures in
his lifetime, but it’s hard to exact revenge if you aren’t alive.
Then, in the show, King Canute of Denmark helps lead the invasion of Viking forces into
England to help Harald (again, not born yet) avenge the deaths of his kinsmen on St. Brice’s
Day.
In reality, though, it was Canute’s father, Sweyn Forkbeard, who was seeking revenge for
St. Brice’s Day and invaded the island.
Forkbeard’s sister had apparently met her demise at the hands of the English, and the
Danish king was less than pleased.
According to Viking history – again, a fairly shaky one at times – Canute most likely
joined his father on multiple invasions of England over the next decade, which culminated
in a Viking victory as the English king Ethelred and his son, Edmund, fled to Normandy in 1013
A.D.
Sweyn thus became the first Viking king of England…sort of.
Sweyn died just a few months after capturing London.
With Ethelred and his son Edmund still alive in Normandy, the English crown was basically
up for grabs.
The Vikings in Danelaw proclaimed Canute the King of England, while most of the other English
lords still recognized Ethelred as king.
Ethelred eventually came back from exile and forced Canute to retreat back to Denmark in
the spring of 1014.
Vikings: Valhalla , depicts Canute as the King of Denmark throughout the first season.
It also has his father Sweyn entering into the picture after Canute becomes King of England.
In reality, Canute wasn’t the king of anything before St. Brice’s Day, and he still wasn’t
the king of anything even after his father’s death.
The Danish crown went to his older brother, Harald [show picture of Leo Suter again].
No, not that Harald.
This is Harald.
Officially known as Harald II of Denmark, he served as king while his brother Canute
built up another fleet and then headed back to England to finish what his father started.
Canute did finish what his father started.
With a large coalition of Viking forces from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, he invaded England
in 1015 A.D, and in 1017 he was crowned the King of England.
Canute then went back up to Denmark, where his brother Harald subsequently died under
mysterious circumstances.
Could’ve just been bad timing, or it could’ve been planned.
Either way, in 1018, Canute became the King of England and Denmark.
What happened next could potentially ruin some of the suspense in the upcoming seasons
of the show, but hey, it is still history, and it did still already happen, so if you
want to check out Nutty History’s full biography of Canute hit the link and save it for later.
The two main characters of “Vikings:Valhalla'' are Leif Eriksson and his sister, Freydis
Eriksdottir.
They’re the offspring of Erik the Red.
Erik was exiled from Iceland for unnecessary deaths he caused and ended up leading the
settlement of Greenland.
In the show, this lineage is all portrayed accurately enough.
Leif and Freydis are constantly called Greenlanders, there’s plenty of dialogue about Leif escaping
the shadow of his father Erik and making a name for himself, and even a reference to
the deceptiveness of the name “Greenland”.
When Leif and Freydis arrive in Kattegat, a Viking asks Leif if Greenland is really
green, to which he replies, “Yes, two days out of the year.”
Jokes aside, there is absolutely no evidence that Leif and Freydis ever journeyed to Norway
or Sweden, and nothing about them ever participating in the Viking invasions of England.
What is written about them, though, is compelling in its own right.
A lot of what we know about Leif and Freydis come from the Vinland Sagas.
To make things more confusing, they were written in Iceland.
Vinland is a mysterious place that many historians think could’ve been North America.
The sagas say that first, Leif ventured west from Greenland to explore the Vinland, but
after staying a winter or two ended up returning.
Then, Leif’s sister, Freydis, made the voyage with a guy named Thorfinn Karlsefni.
When they hit land, they set up camp at the same settlement that Leif had started, possibly
in Canada, and then proceeded to make the natives mad, whom many believe were Native
Americans.
But, depending on which saga you read, Freydis could either be a heroine or a cold-hearted
lady.
In one saga, she bravely fights off the Native Americans while she’s pregnant.
But in another, Freydis is a brutal conspirator who ended up ending many of her own people
after a couple of harsh winters in the strange land.
Either way, in the sagas, Freydis is a powerful warrior that no one wants to mess with, which
the shows portray perfectly.
One of the primary points of conflict in “Vikings: Valhalla'' is the one between the Christians
and Pagans.
The show is set up as a kind of supreme battle between those who worship many gods and those
who just worship one.
The Vikings of Netflix are torn between Christianity and the paganism of Norse religion, and it
leads to a ton of death, both amongst the Vikings and between the Vikings and the English.
It permeates the entire season, adding intrigue and infighting and spiritual reckoning that
makes the show that much more compelling.
The St. Brice’s Day Tragedy is played up in the series as a kind of ethnic cleansing
that pits the Christians against the pagans.
While this may have a bit of truth, the event probably had more to do with the fact that
Ethelred and the English nobility were pretty tired of having to pay all these taxes to
the Vikings in Danelaw in exchange for not having their heads taken by the Norsemen.
The Christian/Pagan conflict wasn’t really as cut and dry as the show portrays it.
To be fair, characters like Leif and Harald display a kind of back and forth wavering
between paganism and Christianity that probably ring truest to historical fact.
The truth is, as the Vikings expanded farther south and east into Europe, many of them converted
to Christianity.
But many of them did it more out of pragmatism than deep spirituality.
It was economically useful to accept the One True God as your lord and savior.
Lots of Viking kings converted to Christianity because it helped trade relations and allowed
them to marry into Christian kingdoms and expand their influence.
The truth was that many Vikings simply added the Christian, capital “G” God to the
pantheon of gods that they already worshiped.
Evidence of this was found in Denmark, where a smith mold was found that had spaces for
both the Christian cross and Thor’s hammer, so the blacksmith could cater to both Christian
and Pagan clientele.
Still though, Christian missionaries were pretty relentless in their pursuit of converting
as many Vikings as possible.
It did lead to some conflicts, but not in the widespread way that it’s portrayed in
the show.
It was, for the most part, a peaceful, slow process.
Every good story needs an antagonist.
Oftentimes it comes in the form of an evil person who wants to destroy instead of create.
In Vikings: Valhalla, that person Is Jarl Kare.
Kore is a radical Christian Viking whose sole purpose seems to be purging Scandinavia of
all pagans.
He takes out plenty of innocents in the sacred village and temple of Uppsala (a real place
where Vikings did go to pray and sacrifice to the gods).
He then teams up with Olaf Haraldsson, himself a devout Christian, to march on Kattegat – a
city that, despite being depicted as a city in both Viking shows, is actually a 12,000
square mile area of sea between Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
Olaf Haraldsson was in fact a devout Christian in the Historical record.
He became known as Saint Olaf after Pope Alexander III canonized him in 1164, a little over 100
years after his death.
Jarl Kore, on the other hand, is an entirely made-up character.
There’s no mention of him in any historical records, and was used to stir up the drama
between the Christian/Pagan dynamic.
One thing that the show does get right, and something that is often overlooked in Viking
lore, is the fact that the Vikings were a pretty diverse group of people.
They traveled all over the place, making it as far east as Constantinople and as far south
as northern Africa.
As a result, there was a mixing of cultures and people in Scandinavia that many people
don’t realize.
Scandinavia around this time has been called a “Global North Atlantic,” and while the
name connotes a kind of utopian pluralism.
It was often far from that, filled with much hate and violence.
But it was diverse.
This idea of the Global North Atlantic was portrayed in the show through the character
Jarl Haakon, the ruler of Kattegat.
She’s a woman of color, who in the first episode explains her African-Scandinavian
descent and how she came to be the Jarl of Kattegat.
Her character is apparently based, loosely, on Haakon Sigurdsson, despite the historical
Haakon being a man and a Jarl in Norway.
He was, however, the last pagan ruler of Norway, and resisted attempts by Christian Vikings
to convert everyone to Christianity in much the same way the fictional, female Haakon
did in the show.
History is often a fuzzy thing.
The history of the Vikings is one that combines legend with fact, and as a result, it makes
more sense that dramatized accounts like the “Vikings'' series play with timelines and
add characters to create a cohesive and entertaining story.
What do you think will happen in season two of Vikings: Valhalla?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more Nutty History.