The Vikings: Winning is Easy When the Show Cheats

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Aelle, Breaking Bad, Ivan Kaye, Michael Hirst, Military Stuff, Ragnar Lothbrok, Skyler White, The Sopranos, The Vikings, Travis Fimmel

Today I want to look at the way The Vikings series depicts combat, particularly the raids on Northumbria in the fourth and seventh episodes, because it fundamentally misrepresents how Viking raiding and Viking combat worked.

The Early Viking Raids

The earliest phase of Viking raiding began sometime in the late 780s or early 790s and lasted down into the second quarter of the 9^th century. Since the show opens in the 790s, it ought to be depicting this period of raiding. During this period, the standard form of Viking raid, at least as far as the primary sources allow us to see it, was hit-and-run raids.

A group of Vikings sailed into a vulnerable region in a longship, which was perfectly designed for these tactics. Because a longship could be either sailed or rowed, and because it had a very shallow keel, it could operate effectively on both the open seas and in coastal waters, and even on moderately shallow rivers. This enabled the Vikings to scout around for a vulnerable community to attack, one with weak defenses or which could be taken by surprise, and ideally one that was some distance from the next closest community, so that response would take a while. Once they had identified such a location, they came in, beached their ship, and made a fast surprise attack, grabbing whatever wealth they could, and then returned to the longship and sailed away before a military response could be mounted.

A tombstone at Lindisfarne depicting Vikings

That’s why Vikings liked attacking monasteries. Monasteries were typically isolated geographically, often being located on islands cut off from the mainland. The monks were not fighters, and in fact were generally pacifists, so they were unlikely to effectively defend themselves. And monasteries possessed lots of gold and silver in the form of liturgical plate like chalices, crosses, and patens. So they were easy, vulnerable targets that had a fair amount of wealth. (People often assume that Vikings attacked monasteries out of a hostility to Christianity. Far from it.)

This system of plundering made use of the particular capabilities of the longship, but it also was necessitated by the fact that the Vikings were nearly always going to be outnumbered on their raids. A longship might hold perhaps 60 men, although the more men that were brought along, the less space was left for plunder like livestock or slaves. Most targets they raided were likely to have many more people than that, as well as defensive structures like walls or towers that served to multiply the strength of the defenders; as a result, the Vikings had to find ways to counteract the fact that they were outnumbered, and attacking weak targets by surprise was the best way to do that.

As a result, in this first period of Viking raids, the Vikings generally stayed very close to their ships. If they left their ships to go significantly inland, they ran the risk of getting cut off from their ship. Once that happened, they had lost the element of surprise and the element of maneuverability, and the fact that they were likely to be outnumbered meant that they would probably to lose any ensuing fight. Again, the early Viking raids are hit-and-run raids, not land battles.

Contrary to the popular image, the Vikings were not particularly inclined to take risks. Like playground bullies, they generally took the path of least resistance that got them to their goals. They fought when they had to, but they preferred to attack defenseless, outnumbered targets. They preferred to attack from surprise, and retreated when a serious fight was likely to develop unless they were cornered. They preferred to ransom the captives and plundered holy books when they could, because ransom got them money without fighting.

It was only much later, in the middle of the 9^th century, that the Vikings seem to have gotten more ambitious. They began to make more aggressive attacks on towns and travelled further inland, using horses to maintain their mobility. In some cases they even launched full-scale sieges of towns. Most famously, a Viking sometimes identified as Ragnar Lothbrok laid siege to Paris in 845 (remember, the series has probably put Ragnar half a century too early); Rollo sieged Paris in 885 (and remember, Rollo and Ragnar were not brothers because Rollo was a half-century later than the people Ragnar was based on).

A Viking Era Stele

The reasons for this shift in raiding tactics are not entirely clear, but it was definitely related to the break-down of political institutions under the pressure of these hit-and-run raids. Kings justified their rule by their ability to protect their people, and the Viking raids were undermining that claim in ways that made maintaining law and order much harder; political weakness made raids easier. Additionally, it’s clear that the numbers of Vikings were increasing, perhaps because of the successes of the early raids inspired imitation. More Vikings meant they could challenge increasingly large and better-defended forces. Eventually, in the second quarter of the 9^th century, the Vikings begin ‘overwintering’, camping out on a defensible position like an island and spending the winter there so they could continue raiding the next year without having to sail home in-between.

The Viking Raids in the Series

The first raid, episode 2’s attack on Lindesfarne, is probably a fair depiction of what that event looked like. Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) and his men find a vulnerable, isolated monastery, force their way in, and kill many of the monks, taking a lot of valuable objects and several slaves.

But in episode 4, Ragnar’s crew does something entirely different. They come ashore from their boat (again, that’s probably wrong; they would probably have beached the boat), fight a battle against King Aelle’s reeve and his men in which they slaughter all but one man, who gets away, and then walk inland for a day, camping out near a small walled town. They wait until everyone is at church the next morning, then they go in, capturing everyone in the church, and loot the town. Then they walk back to their ship, where they find that they have been cut off from their ship by a group of Aelle’s men. They fight a full-out battle that they win, and sail off with their plunder.

Vikings looking for a fight on the beach

There’s a lot wrong with this. The second time they go raiding, Ragnar completely abandons the successful tactics of the first raid to do something far more risky. After the fight with Aelle’s reeve when they landed, Ragnar ought to have gotten back in his ship and gone looking for another remote monastery to attack, because he’s lost the element of surprise. The second fight on the beach is entirely predictable, because the survivor from the battle was obviously going to go and alert King Aelle (Ivan Kaye) or the local thane, who would have time to raise a force that would outnumber the raiding party. And that’s exactly what happens. The episode wants to emphasize Ragnar’s cunning, by marching inland and waiting until everyone is at church on Sunday morning. But in fact it demonstrates Ragnar’s stupidity in not leaving after he’s been discovered.

Instead of leaving, Ragnar leads his band at least half a day’s walk from the ship. As I said, this is supposed to be an example of his cleverness, but it overlooks the fact that local residents are likely to spot the longship anchored out at sea (another reason to beach the ship instead, since it would be less visible) and tell the local thane exactly where the ship is.That means he’s almost guaranteed to get cut off from his ship.

Sure, waiting until everyone goes to church is clever, if the Anglo-Saxons are too stupid to leave guards watching the walls during church. This only way this raid on the town succeeds is if the Anglo-Saxons are terminally stupid. Remember, they know there is a party of raiders in the area; the survivor from the fight on the beach has alerted the authorities. And even if Ragnar has somehow managed to outpace messengers on horseback, the town wouldn’t leave itself that defenseless. So Ragnar is being clever only because the script is giving him terminally stupid opponents.

Also, note how inconsistent the episode is about the importance of church attendance to the Anglo-Saxons. It’s so important that all the town guards attend the service, but it’s not important enough that several other people stay behind. Sure, one of them is a bed-ridden old man (they couldn’t have carried him?), but one of the Vikings finds a woman to rape. Why isn’t she in church? Because the script needs her to be standing around waiting to be raped so that Lagertha can intervene and kill the rapist because that will drive the plot forward.

The Second Fight on the Beach

When Ragnar and his crew get back to the beach, they discover what was entirely predictable, that there is a modest force of Anglo-Saxon soldiers waiting for them, and yet they’re surprised. Again, while trying to demonstrate Ragnar’s cleverness, they’ve actually revealed him to be dumb as a post.

Take a look at the scene:

When confronted by the Anglo-Saxons, Ragnar and his crew respond by drawing up into a modified form of a shield wall. A shield wall was a basic tactic in early medieval warfare. A group of men form a tight line with their shields up against one another. The formation is reinforced with additional rows of men behind them, to help keep them in formation and so that if a man on the front line goes down, the man behind him can step in and replace him quickly. That was entirely conventional, and if that’s what Ragnar’s men had done, it would be entirely plausible. (Incidentally, this tactic has been revived by modern-day riot police.)

But instead they form a testudo, a shield wall in which the men in the back ranks put their shields up over their heads to protect the unit from missile fire. But this formation has serious weaknesses. It can only move very slowly and it’s vulnerable to being surrounded. Attacks against it can slowly pick off the men in the front ranks (who are particularly vulnerable to attacks on their unprotected legs). Actually fighting in a testudo is extremely difficult. So it was a formation that was used to protect soldiers from missile fire while they were closing in on an enemy line, not a formation to actually engage in combat in.

This formation has become popular in recent films; off the top of my head, I can think of examples in Troy and 300, and I’m sure they’re not the only ones. But this is an entirely false detail. The testudo was unique to Roman and early Byzantine forces; I know of no evidence that it was employed by the Vikings. There are a couple of reasons for this. First the testudo isn’t very effective with round shields like the ones the Vikings used; there are too many gaps. The Romans used oblong shields that worked much more effectively in this formation. Second, and more important, using a testudo requires an enormous amount of training as a unit, something that was unknown among the Vikings. While a shield-wall is a fairly basic tactic (form a line and stand so close to your neighbors that your shields touch or overlap), the testudo is much more complex (the men have to know which men put their shields forward, which put their shields up and where, and how to maneuver in that formation.) The Romans can achieve it because their soldiers are full-time, highly trained fighters, whereas the Vikings are only part-time amateur fighters with haphazard training. The idea that a random band of Vikings with no special training could pull off a testudo using round shields simply strains plausibility.

Technically I suppose it’s a half-testudo

And Ragnar’s unit uses the testudo in a way it can’t really be used. They fight in that formation. When one of the Anglo-Saxons sticks his spear over Ragnar’s shield, Ragnar grabs it, orders his men to open a gap in the wall, pulls the man through, and then kills him. That’s pretty much impossible. Opening a gap in the ranks gives the enemy a chance to shove a spear through and risks allowing the enemies to force the gap wider.

Additionally, the scene requires the commander of the Anglo-Saxons to be an idiot. First, instead of leading his men from the front, which was expected among the Anglo-Saxons as much as among the Norse, he stands back and just directs the fight. That might explain why his men lose; he’s not inspiring them with his own example of bravery. Worse, he orders his men to charge the testudo. What an actual Anglo-Saxon leader would have done is form up his men into his own shield wall and wait for the Vikings to force the battle by charging, because the side that charges a shield wall typically loses unless they get lucky. So Anglo-Saxon warfare often took the form of two opposing shield walls, each taunting the other to try to get the enemy to break formation and charge. In this specific scenario, the Anglo-Saxons have the upper hand; the Vikings are in hostile territory and have to get back to their ship before further Anglo-Saxon troops arrive. So a smart commander would have formed up his own shield wall and waited for the Vikings to charge out of desperation; if they retreat, he just uses his archers to pick them off.

Furthermore, he has more troops than Ragnar does, and his troops are more mobile because they’re not in a testudo. He has archers, so he doesn’t even need to get close to hurt the Vikings. Instead of ordering his men to charge, he should either have continued the missile fire, slowly picking off the Vikings, or ordered his men to flank the testudo, killing the men behind the shields with arrow fire. And even if he orders his men to charge, they ought to be able to flank the testudo because they outnumber the raiders. So the only way Ragnar wins this fight is if he has the advantage of being the hero and therefore gets to wear a whole lot of plot armor. Ragnar wins purely because his opponents are written as total idiots and he’s allowed to pull off pretty much impossible battle tactics.

The Next Two Fights

In a later episode, Ragnar and company return to Northumbria. Aelle sends out his brother Aethelwulf and a unit of men. They find the Vikings making camp, and the men want to attack, but Aethelwulf inexplicably insists on waiting and watching. That night, the Vikings attack, catching the Anglo-Saxons off-guard because they have apparently not left any guards or watchmen, because, as is becoming clear by now, the Northumbrians are a kingdom straight out of Idiocracy, too stupid to put guards up when they know their enemy is camped nearby. Aethelwulf is so pious that instead of rushing out to fight, he spends the whole battle praying. And this man is apparently the skilled military leader of the kingdom.

Much of the rest of the conflict revolves around the ransom negotiations for Aethelwulf. That’s plausible. The Vikings, as I said, preferred ransoming because it was safer than fighting. There’s some interesting stuff with the Vikings dining at Aelle’s hall, but way too much is made of the linguistic barrier between the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons. The show again wants to highlight Ragnar’s cleverness in learning Old English, but what the show doesn’t understand is that Old English and Old Norse were so closely related linguistically (remember, the Angles came from southern Denmark) that the two languages were mutually comprehensible; they sounded like very heavily accented versions of the other language. For example, the Old English word ‘shirt’ and the Old Norse word ‘skirt’ both refer to the same thing, a long tunic that hangs below the waist. Similarly, what the Anglo-Saxons called a ‘ship’, the Norse called a ‘skip’ or a ‘skiff’. So the Vikings and Aelle’s court would have been able to understand each other more or less without an interpreter.

Ragnar builds a fortified camp, which is something the earliest raiders didn’t do, because the moment you set up a fortified camp, you’ve lost all benefit of surprise and mobility and are vulnerable to being overwhelmed by manpower. Eventually, Aelle’s men attack, charging in on horseback and being tricked by the fact that Ragnar has cleverly concealed a spiked drawbridge.

Here’s the scene (skip over the unrelated scene of Ragnar’s duel with Haraldson; the scene in Northumbria starts about 0:45)

Once again, there are big problems here. First, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t employ cavalry. They used horses for transport, but not to fight from. Exactly why they made this choice isn’t entirely clear; we know that in the early 11^th century, they actively resisted cavalry training, but what the issue was in the 8^th century is less obvious. Presumably they felt that fighting from horseback was too difficult or that horses were too expensive to risk in combat, but perhaps they felt it was unmanly.

But even if they had used cavalry, it would still be silly, because Aelle doesn’t have to attack at all. All he has to do is set up a guard to keep the Vikings from getting food and then slowly starve them into surrender. Alternately, since he has archers, he can encircle the camp with archers and pick off the Vikings until they come out to attack. Sure, Ragnar is holding Aethelwulf hostage, but if Aelle has decided to attack, he is clearly willing to sacrifice his brother to kill Ragnar.

Nothing I’m saying here is particularly cunning tactically. These are basic ideas that any even remotely competent military leader would have known. But Aelle apparently has all the tactical awareness of Homer Simpson. So again, what the show presents as Ragnar’s cunning is actually just Ragnar’s stupidity being outmatched by the stupidity of his opponents. But it’s easy to win when you have so much plot armor you can’t possibly lose.

The Deeper Issue

One reason I’m harping on this so much is that it demonstrates an underlying trend in action films, one I’ve mentioned before. The historical reason the Vikings were so effective is that they had superior technology (by which I mean the longship; their weapons and armor were no better than anyone else’s) and they employed that technology to its maximum effect. They made extremely good use of hit-and-run tactics in ways that their opponents found hard to respond to, and as much as possible they avoided actually fighting equal opponents, because a pitched battle meant they ran a serious risk of losing, and Vikings were generally risk-averse.

But Michael Hirst, the series creator and main scriptwriter, doesn’t want to show that because it would make Ragnar seem a lot less heroic by contemporary standards. Instead of being a daring warrior, Ragnar would basically be leading a gang of opportunistic, semi-cowardly muggers who run away from a fair fight. It’s hard to look heroic to modern Americans when you spend your time avoiding battle. But that’s because what the Norse found heroic isn’t what modern Americans find heroic. The Norse valued cleverness over brute strength, and modern America, or at least modern Western cinema, values brute strength over cleverness. Modern audiences are trained to want heroes who are extremely strong physically, very aggressive, and above all convinced of their moral rectitude. They win their fights because they know they are right; their enemies have wronged them, and that means that in the fight between good versus evil, good wins because good just wants the victory more and fights harder.

As a result, having been stripped of all the reasons that the Vikings were actually successful, Ragnar wins his fights because he has more heart and determination than his opponents do. But that means the fights don’t actually make any sense, because he’s winning even though he’s outnumbered, pinned down, and facing opponents who have better equipment (the Anglo-Saxons are typically wearing better armor and carrying longbows half a millennium too early). So the show has to resort to rampant idiocy to explain his victories.

This becomes even more problematic when you stop and notice that Ragnar isn’t actually the good guy in these fights; he’s merely the protagonist. Ragnar and his men are viciously attacking peaceful, innocent men and women, killing them, stealing their property, and in some cases enslaving them. They’re ravening wolves attacking bumbling toddlers and being celebrated for it.

The show is clearly following the lead of anti-hero shows like The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, and Breaking Bad in which the series follows the exploits of criminals operating within American society and examines the moral complexities of their characters. On the surface, The Vikings is the same kind of show. But these other shows are explicitly set within a context of crime, in which it is clear to the viewers that the protagonists are violating the law and making choices within a range of evils. Walter White has to die for what he’s done, and Tony Soprano either gets whacked at the end or lives a life in which he is forever looking over his shoulder for the people who will eventually kill him. In other words, these anti-hero shows make it clear that on some level the protagonist is a bad guy who will eventually get his just punishment. The shows establish a moral standard even while they watch their anti-heroes deviate from it.

The Vikings, in contrast, is about a bunch of violent men and women who live in a society that actively glorifies stealing from, killing, and enslaving those too weak or too stupid to resist. Ragnar is doing exactly what his society thinks he should be doing. In fact, given Aelle’s viciousness and the monk Aethelstan’s eventual conversion to the Norse way, the show actually asserts that the pagan Norse way is morally superior to the Christian Anglo-Saxon culture the main characters are preying upon. It is actively championing the predatory ethos upon which being a Viking was based, and then occasionally showing how these Vikings are a little less bad, because they occasionally kill rapists, spare old men, and love their sons.

I find this incredibly problematic. On some level I believe it’s immoral to offer literal rapine and murder and present it as morally superior. A show like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad can explore the moral ambiguities of the mafia lifestyle or meth-dealing precisely because it’s clear that on some level the show acknowledges the immorality of the characters’ actions, and that acknowledgement of the immorality creates the nuance on which the show plays. Skyler White comes to function as the voice of morality, forcing her husband to eventually acknowledge the growing evil of his actions, just as Dr Melfi pushes back against Tony Soprano and ultimately terminates her work with him.

(As an aside, I suspect that’s part of the reason that so many fans decided Skyler was a horrible bitch. After all Carmela Soprano was in some ways far more shrewish but never became the object of such intense vituperation and vicious internet memes (although she received a lesser degree of hatred). Carmela is ultimately a venal figure, accepting Tony’s crimes as the price of her life of luxury. But rather than giving in to her baser instincts, Skyler ultimately forces Walter to admit that he is doing evil things purely because he enjoys them. Her character’s moral stance explicitly criticizes the criminal behavior that so many of the show’s fans wanted to revel in, reminding them that they were taking pleasure in something clearly immoral. As a blocking character, she essentially confronts the viewer as well as her husband.)

But The Vikings has no analogous character. Far from pushing back against Ragnar’s actions, Lagertha directly participates in the murder and theft. After his capture, Brother Aethelstan never tries to articulate a Christian critique of his master, and by the end of the season has abandoned Christianity entirely. The blocking characters for Ragnar are Earl Haraldson and King Aelle, both of whom are presented as being more evil than Ragnar is. Haraldson is a villain from start to finish, while Aelle is ruthless; he kills one of his commanders for being defeated, is willing to sacrifice his brother Aethelwulf, and negotiates in bad faith, whereas Ragnar is presented as caring about his men and his brother and negotiating in good faith.

Without any sort of moral standard, the series cannot generate very much ambiguity. Murder, theft, and enslavement are good as long as you’re the hero of the story, because that’s basically the only perspective we’re given to empathize with. About the only ambiguity in the series is the question of Ragnar’s treatment of Rollo and, in the final episode, Ragnar’s disloyalty to Lagertha. And from a moral perspective, I think it’s a serious problem with the show.

I like films and tv series that are willing to explore moral complexity and ambiguity; not all problems have obvious moral solutions, and few people are all good or all bad, so I appreciate main characters who are not entirely moral or immoral. When done well, as with The Wire, or Breaking Bad, or The Sorpanos, moral ambiguity can challenge viewers to reassess their own moral positions and beliefs. But The Vikings is an example of a show that does moral ambiguity poorly, and the result is a series that teeters on the brink of being flat out immoral in my opinion. I’m not suggesting that we need to return to the moral absolutism of the Hays Code, or even 1980s television. But I do think Michael Hirst needs to seriously reassess the way he’s approaching the series. He may be aiming for moral ambiguity, but he’s wound up somewhere much uglier.

Want to Know More?

Vikings Season 1 is available on Amazon.

There’s a dearth of good works on Norse weapons and tactics that both based in sound scholarship and accessible to the general reader. William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques is probably the best option available. There’s also Paddy Griffith’s The Viking Art of War (Greenhill Military Paperbacks), but I don’t recommend it, unless you really want to dig into what little has been written on the subject regardless of quality.

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The Vikings: Was Ragnar Lothbrok the First Viking?

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Medieval Europe, Medieval Scandinavia, Ragnar Lothbrok, The Vikings, Travis Fimmel

The first season of The Vikings deals with the fall-out from Ragnar Lothbrok’s (Travis Fimmel) raid on Lindisfarne in 793 AD. As the show structures it, this was the first Viking raid on the British Isles. It’s followed up in a later episode with a second raid, which seems to be happening the following year, in which the would-be raiders are met at the beach by a royal official. Ragnar tries unsuccessfully to convince the man that they are merchants who wish to trade, but eventually his men prove impatient for violence and so they kill the official and most of his men. So as the series frames it, Ragnar is the first man to go Viking to the west.

Ragnar and crew on the English beach

What is a Viking Anyway?

As a side note, many people mistaken use ‘Viking’ as a synonym for ‘Norse’. ‘Norse’ is an ethnic and cultural term, much like ‘French’ or ‘Latino’ today. ‘Viking’ on the other hand, refers not an ethnicity but to an activity or occupation. Vikings are those who leave home and look to acquire resources to bring back home. These resources could be food, treasure, slaves, or anything else that might be valuable. But they were not inevitably acquired by plunder. Many sources make clear that Vikings traded as much as they raided, and in some cases probably decided which activity to engage in based on how powerful the other side was. In some cases they raided one day and then a few days later traded away the goods they had taken for things that were more useful. This means two things: 1) Not all Norse were Vikings, any more than all New Yorkers are stock brokers. 2) Since there is a little evidence of Norse women directly participating in raiding parties, it is a mistake to speak of ‘Viking women’, Lagertha notwithstanding, or even ‘Viking culture’.

Ok, Now That We’ve Gotten That Out of the Way

The show’s sequence of raids is in fact backward historically. While the raid on Lindisfarne is often talked of as the first Viking raid on Britain, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of the most important English sources for this period, tells us that four years earlier, a group of Norsemen landed at Portsmouth in Southern England. The king’s official rode out to greet them, assuming they were merchants coming to trade with the king. Instead they killed him. This incident is the earliest recorded incident of its kind. The Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin, living at Charlemagne’s court, claimed that the raid on Lindisfarne was unprecedented, so even if it was not the absolute first such attack, clearly it was one of the earliest of any importance. The Norse had certainly launched earlier raids down into Frisia and Francia, but it seems clear that the raids in 789 and 793 marked a turning point, because after them we have records of raids occurring every few years somewhere in the British Isles.

Lindisfarne

One of the major questions that scholars have wrestled with is why the Norse begin to raid more aggressively in this period. What changed in Scandinavia around this period? The Vikings’ answer is that Ragnar Lothbrok acted like a Norse Columbus, discovering that there were lands to the southwest that could be raided. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a ludicrous claim. But the question is an important one.

And, unfortunately, there’s no clear consensus on the answer. Some scholars have connected the beginning of the Viking raids to a shift in climate that made Scandinavia colder, thus creating pressure on the food supply and forcing some Norsemen to resort to aggressive raiding to acquire food and other resources. Others have suggested it might be related to political shifts in Scandinavia, as the slow emergence of small kingdoms may have driven dissenters out of Scandinavia; conversely, ambitious men might have started raiding seeking the resources that would allow them to expand their political power. One of the most interesting theories emphasizes the development of naval technology. Germanic boats dating to the pre-Raid period do not show unambiguous evidence of sails, but the surviving ships of the Raid period all have sails. As a result, it has been suggested that the Norse developed sails in the generation before 793, so that it was the development of sailing technology that enabled the Viking raids to occur. Unfortunately, that theory, as tempting as it is, depends on archaeological reconstructions of pre-Raid boats, and the evidence is unfortunately unclear.

So while the Vikings’ explanation for why the Viking raids started is wrong, it’s at least addressing a serious scholarly debate, either intentionally or unwittingly.

How to Crew Your Longship

Another hypothetical issue the show has addressed has to do with the way longship crews were organized. At the start of the series, Earl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne) apparently exercises tyrannical control over the Viking raiders. He owns the ships, sends the men out to raid without accompanying him, and then claims the majority of the plunder when they return home. I’ve already talked about what’s wrong with that model. When Ragnar seeks to raise a crew, he offers a very different model, in which all the men on the ship are equal. It’s not exactly clear what this means in practice, because Ragnar actually makes all the leadership decisions, but the suggestion is that the men are sharing the plunder or at least keeping what they take for themselves.

Historically, Ragnar’s model has a lot in common with the actual model used by Viking raiders, at least so far as we can tell from the sources. The ship was apparently owned by an individual, who acted as the captain and leader of the warband. He recruited men into a felag, a joint partnership, sort of like a temporary business partnership. The members were called felagi (cognate to the modern English ‘fellow’) and were expected to share both the risks and the benefits of the partnership on a roughly equal basis. The details are sketchy; the owner seems to have made the major decisions, but he might have consulted his felag for advice or to see how much risk they were willing to take. He was expected to share the risks his men took, particularly by leading them in fighting; his bravery set a standard for theirs. He also probably got a larger share of the plunder, since he owned the ship that made the whole thing possible.

What this means for the show is that the series is suggesting that Ragnar Lothbrok was the innovator who created the felag system and that his model caught on because it was more appealing to the Norse than Haraldson’s old system. It’s highly unlikely that the felag system had a formal inventor. Norse society, with its higher degree of egalitarianism probably simply evolved the system naturally. But it’s not inconceivable that one leader invented the system using practices that already existed (the use of the felag was not restricted Viking raids; it was a basic economic arrangement in many situations). Nor is it entirely inconceivable that the emergence of raiding felags might have contributed to the start of the Viking raids. So it’s not impossible that Ragnar Lothbrok might have invented a system that enabled the start of the Viking raids. That is, if Ragnar Lothbrok had been a real person, which he probably wasn’t.

It’s also worth pointing out that when Ragnar emphasizes equality on his ship, the series is engaging in the same sort of handwaving that 300 and Braveheart employ. They start a wonderful-sounding modern virtue, like ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’, but never actually define what that virtue actually means. The purpose of this is to align the modern viewer with the hero, because they both share a common value. Having established viewer identification, these shows and movies can then completely ignore the value whenever it’s not narratively important, which allows the show or movie to contradict its own stated values without addressing the problem. So Leonidas proclaims Spartan freedom despite the fact that he is the only Spartan who ever actually uses his freedom in any meaningful way. Wallace proclaims freedom and then is outraged when the Scottish nobles use their freedom to decide that they prefer Edward I. And in The Vikings, Ragnar declares that everyone on the ship will be equal and then proceeds to make all the important decisions himself. At the end of the season, despite his much-vaunted equality, he declares his ‘fealty’ to King Horic (even though fealty is an 11th century French concept involved in an explicitly hierarchical lord/vassal relationship).

This is a rather cynical exploitation of modern values, typically aimed at American males who presumably will just sit back and enjoy the violence and sex while not thinking about the way their values are being used to manipulate them. The Vikings, to its credit, does briefly wrestle with its own contradictions, when Rollo asks Ragnar about the leadership arrangements. Ragnar replies that they will always be equal, but then proceeds to make all the leadership decisions himself. The unfortunate effect of this is to emphasize that Ragnar is actually out for himself and doesn’t mean what he says about his brother. But maybe that’s why his brother isn’t sure he can trust Ragnar in the first place.

Want to Know More?

Vikings Season 1 is available on Amazon.

The best primary source for the Viking raids on England is the The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is actually 9 different records with a common source. It’s a very bald narrative, and there are lots of challenges to understanding it, but it’s a good source to read.

The Vikings: Hey, Gang! Let’s Go Discover Britain!

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Medieval Europe, Medieval Scandinavia, Ragnar Lothbrok, The Vikings, Travis Fimmel

One of the more prominent elements of the History Channel’s The Vikings series is the early plotline about Ragnar’s determination to sail west to Britain. Like many other parts of the series, this is a mixture of fact and nonsense.

But before I can get into that issue, there’s another question that needs addressing.

Where do the main characters live?

The pilot sets the series in “Scandinavia”, which is pretty vague, allowing for anywhere in Norway, Denmark, or Sweden. The series makes regular use of footage (shot in Norway) of high, cloud-covered mountains with deep fjords. Since Denmark is relatively flat and low-lying, that would seem to put the series in Norway or Sweden somewhere.

Earl Haraldson’s village appears to be called ‘Kattegat’; in one episode characters talk about going to Kattegat from Ragnar’s farm. However, Kattegat isn’t actually a village; it’s the narrow body of water between Jutland and southern Sweden. (The series creators have acknowledged this fact and admitted that they took a liberty here.) Since Jutland is probably too low-lying for the scenery we’re shown, Kattegat is probably on the Swedish side, with the Vastra Gotaland district probably working best. That would fit into a few other clues the series gives, such as the marriage alliance Haraldson makes with the Svear earl Bjarni, since the Svear were the people living in central Sweden who ultimately unified Sweden. Also, the men of Kattegat travel to the eastern Baltic to raid, which was broadly the destination of Vikings from Sweden much more than Denmark or Norway. (This means, incidentally, that Ragnar’s community belongs to the same people as Beowulf’s Geats.)

Denmark, to the best of my knowledge, has no fjords like this

The Situation at the Start of the Series

In the pilot, it is established that Haraldson always raids into the Baltic, specifically into Russia. No one has ever gone to the west, because they don’t know that there is anything west of Denmark and Norway. They are convinced that there is just endless open sea to the west.

But Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) knows better. He has met a traveler who has told him there are lands to the west, and who has, for reasons unexplained, given Ragnar two exotic items that will help him navigate. The first is what the show calls a sun-board, a wooden disk with notches around the edge and a gnomon that sticks up. When floated in water to keep it level, it allows the user a crude way to determine latitude by the length of the shadow from the gnomon. The second is a sun-stone, a piece of light-polarizing crystal that allows the user to locate the sun through clouds or fog.

Whoever this stranger was, he was apparently very persuasive, because Ragnar is absolutely convinced that he can sail west. The show does nothing whatsoever to establish any basis for Ragnar’s certainty. As a result, he’s another example of the modern cinematic convention that faith/confidence is superior to scientific knowledge; he doesn’t need evidence because he’s got certainty, and certainty is always right, even when it’s nothing more than a hunch. So really, he’s just a spiritual ancestor of the cinematic Christopher Columbus.

Regardless, the series proves him right (because certainty is always reward in these stories). He sails west in the second episode and, after a mandatory moment of doubt when the ship is lost in the fog, he finds Lindisfarne monastery, raids it, and everything is set for his growing clash with the earl.

But Does Any of This Make Sense Historically?

Not really.

The idea that the 8^th century Norse thought there was nothing west of Norway and Denmark is simply preposterous. The primary Norse navigational method was to sail along the coastline, and if you think about a map of Europe for about two seconds, you’ll remember that the west coast of Denmark extends in a south-westerly direction to Frisia (the Low Countries) and France. The Norse had been raiding and trading down into that region for centuries. That region had also had contact with the British Isles for centuries; the Angles and the Jutes, two of the three peoples who conquered low-land Britain, came from the region around Denmark and invaded by boat (just like everyone else who invades England). So the idea that the characters have no idea that the British Isles exist is about as silly as doing a film in which the English have no idea that Ireland exists.

Norse Navigational Techniques

The Norse were skilled navigators, far more skilled than this series lets on. Their basic navigational technique, as I mentioned, was simply following the coastlines. Experience was particularly important, because it allowed a sailor to know how many days north or south to go, where there were submerged reefs to watch out for, and so on.

They relied on the sun and the stars for navigation, as virtually all ancient and early medieval sailors did. They also understood how to follow currents; from Norway, prevailing currents take one straight toward the western side of Britain, for example, making getting from Norway to Britain relatively easy. They also watched birds (since the presence of birds gives clues about how close land is). In the second episode, Ragnar releases a raven to see if it will return; if it doesn’t that means land is near. That’s a trick mentioned in a source about the discovery of Iceland, so it’s genuine.

If you go online and do a Google search on Norse navigation, you’ll find a lot of discussion about sun-boards and sun-stones and how they were used. Some of these pages are even maintained by scientific institutions like the University of Chicago or teaching sites like the Mariner’s Museum. But it’s important to realize that these are science sites, not history sites, and an academic astronomer is not likely to be an expert on Norse history and archaeology. When you actually look at what we can genuinely prove about Norse navigational tools, you discover that it’s a lot iffier than all those web pages suggest.

First, let’s deal with the sun-board. All notions of a Norse sun-board go back to this:

A Norse bearing dial?

It was discovered in Greenland in the late 1940s by a Danish archaeologist. It’s half of a flat wooden disk (the image on the left is the back side of the image on the right) about 7 cm across (so the complete item would apparently have been about the size of a hockey puck), with triangular notches carved into the outer edge and space for a hole at the center. It was dated to c. 1200 AD. Almost immediately, a man named Captain C. V. Sølver (who presumably was a naval officer or ship’s captain with an interest in archaeology) suggested that it was a bearing dial, a navigational aid mentioned in late medieval Norse records but only in passing. He suggested that it was used with a gnomon to determine latitudes. And that was the starting gun for a race to prove that the Norse had a complex series of tools with which they navigated the North Atlantic. As far as I can determine, all subsequent claims about Vikings having either hand-held bearing dials or water-floated sun-boards are based on Sølver’s theory.

A hypothetical reconstruction of Sølver’s bearing dial

What gets overlooked in this was the response to Sølver’s theories by scholars of the day. They identified numerous flaws in his theory. His gnomon was a reconstruction, not something found with the disk, and the hole is too large for a proper gnomon (assuming that the gnomon didn’t taper, which it could have). More seriously, the disk has 17 notches on it, suggesting that the whole disk would have had 36 notches. Since a compass is based on four quarters, it has to have 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 markings, not 36, and as far as we know, the Norse only recognized 8 directions anyway (the four cardinal directions and those halfway between them). Additionally, our best Viking-era description of Viking navigation makes no mention of any such tool. And, I would add, the disk dates from about 150 years after the end of the Viking raids; just because the 12^th century Norse might have had a bearing dial is not evidence that Ragnar Lothbrok could have had one 400 years earlier.

So if it’s not a navigational aid, what is it? The simplest explanation is just that it was a piece of decoration of some sort. But it’s also been suggested that it might have been part of a child’s top or, more intriguingly, a tool for tracking the number of parishioners who came to confession. (To me, it also looks like it could be a spindle whorl for a drop-spindle.)

What about sun-stones? Scientifically, they’re genuine. Certain types of crystal, including Icelandic feldspar, do have the capacity to amplify light in the way described in the series. There are references to them in late medieval Icelandic church records, and in a mid-14^th century Icelandic saga, one is used to locate the sun. But what this proves is that sun-stones were known by the 14^th century. It does not prove either that they were known to the Vikings half a millennium earlier, or that they were used as navigational aids. In 2013, the first evidence for the use of a sun-stone as a navigational tool was discovered on an English ship that sank in 1592. Is it possible that Ragnar Lothbrok could have used a sun-stone? Yes. Is there any actual reason to think that he or other Vikings did use such a thing? No. The series is relying not on actual facts here but on Internet wisdom.

The Ship

In the series, Floki (Gustav Skarsgård) builds Ragnar a knorr, or longship, on his own, in secret. The ship and the various equipment all look reasonable to my non-Norse-naval-archaeologist eyes. In recent decades, our understanding of Norse ship-building techniques has grown enormously, thanks to the work of many experimental archaeologists. And the show seems to have paid attention to at least some of this information. But there are still problems.

Floki apparently lives almost alone, with just Helga for company. I’m not sure how the two of them would manage to cut and haul all the lumber needed for a longship, especially the 60-ft keel. A long ship required a substantial group of skilled craftsmen, including both carpenters and smiths. So Floki has managed the equivalent of assembling a BMW out of spare parts. (In the pilot, he declares that he will get two good planks out a particular tree, which is remarkably wasteful, since he could actually get about 20 planks out of a tree.).

Also, the idea that he could build this ship in secret is rather silly. It’s a ship—it has to be built down by the fjord it will be launched on. But the men of Kattegat live along that fjord—it’s their main street. So he’s somehow secretly assembling his longship in the driveway of his house without any of his neighbors noticing.

When the ship is finally launched, Floki is incredibly nervous, uncertain if it will sail or sink. That’s plausible, since ship-building was not an exact science. Rather Floki has to rely on his past experience, his sense of how strong the wood is and how far it can flex, and so on. So I could imagine a lot of shipwrights breathing a sigh of relief when they realized that the ship they’ve just spent a small fortune to build is not going to sink.

The series gets another small detail wrong. When they raid England, Ragnar ‘parks’ the ship away from the shore and the men are ferried to the beach in a small rowboat. That would have been unnecessary for a longship. Longships were quite wide in the beam, but shallow in the keel. Because they were not very deep, they could easily be beached in shallow surf and then pushed into deeper water (they were quite light for their size). That was one reason why they were ideally suited to raiding; they can land and sail away very quickly.

The Gokstad ship; notice how wide and shallow it is

So once again, what we’re seeing in the series is a modest amount of attention paid to technical issues, such as the ship, while mixing in a lot of inaccurate ‘common knowledge’ and some total fabrication for dramatic tension.

Want to Know More?

Vikings Season 1 is available on Amazon. For a discussion of the military aspects of the raids on Britain, see my post here.

There aren’t a lot of accessible books on Norse longboats, although James Graham-Campbell’s The Viking World has a good brief section on them. Five Viking Ships from Roskilde Fjordis a nice look at one of the most important archaeological finds, five Viking Age ships that were sunk in Roskilde Fjord in the later 11th century to create an artificial reef. Known today as the Skuldelev Ships, they were a cross-section of ships in use at the time, and thus an excellent window into Norse ship-building.

The Vikings: The Problem with Earl Haraldson

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Earl Haraldson, Gabriel Byrne, History Channel, Legal Stuff, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scandinavia, Norse Law, The Vikings

In my previous post on the History Channel’s The Vikings, I discussed the main characters of Ragnar Lothbrok, Lagertha, and Rollo, who are sort of a mishmash of historical and legendary characters. This post is going to focus on the last remaining major character, Gabriel Byrne’s Earl Haraldson, who is the main villain of the first season. For some reason he doesn’t seem to have a given name, being known only by his patronymic, which is pretty unlikely. Most of the important figures from this period are known by a given name and then a patronym (‘Haraldson’), loconym (based on a place—‘of Møre’, for example) or a nickname (‘Hairypants’, which is what ‘Lothbrok’ means). So this character should probably be something like Jarl Eirik Haraldson, and generally referred to as Jarl Eirik, instead of Earl Haraldson. Last names in the modern sense don’t exist in this period, and actually are a very recent development in Scandinavia. Iceland still employs a system of patronyms to this day.

Earl Haraldson is presented as being a stock oppressive ruler. In the pilot, he oversees the local community, has the power to make boys adults by giving them their arm-ring, presides over the local court system, and controls where all the raids happen. This last point is explicitly connected to his ownership of the boats used, but he also seems to have some sort of exclusive right either to own boats or control how they are used, because Floki has to build his boat in secret. In the second episode, he executes a smith for the crime of making an anchor for Ragnar. In the third episode, he apparently has the right to know where Ragnar is, and when Ragnar isn’t around, has the authority to take a hostage as surety that Ragnar will return. When Ragnar returns with riches plundered from a monastery, the earl simply declares all the plunder his property, over Ragnar’s objections and declares the boat his as well. In other words, the earl is a totalitarian ruler whose authority cannot be openly disputed.

In the context of late 8^th century Scandinavia, this makes little sense. Norse society in this period operated on a much more egalitarian footing than other parts of Europe. Norse society was managed by popular assemblies termed things. Things had multiple functions; they were local markets, places to make business deals and marriage alliances, and simple legislatures. They had no executive officers, however, because Norse society had no clear notion of government as a public institution. Instead, enforcement of any of its decisions fell to those who would benefit from those decisions.

Jarls were local strong-men, men who controlled enough resources to have substantial influence. These resources might take the form of good farmland, wealth, boats, respect for fighting prowess, noble lineage, a priesthood, and so on. But they did not automatically convey the right to rule. Political authority required the general acceptance of the community, and that was achieved through a combination of generosity, wisdom, success in battle, intimidation, and good will. A jarl who governed as abusively as Earl Haraldson does would quickly find himself without any political support.

Byrne as Haraldson

Military support required significant bonds of loyalty between the leader, jarl or otherwise, and his men. The basic deal was that the leader of the warband would lead his men to victory in battle and they would fight to the death for him. After the battle was over, the leader took the plunder and then shared it out among his men, enriching them while also enriching himself. He was also expected to support his men in peacetime, usually by sheltering and feeding them.

But in the series, Haraldson does the exact opposite. He sends men out to raid in the Baltic, but apparently doesn’t go himself, so he was failing to take the military risks his men were taking, something that would probably have undermined his authority in a substantial way. When Ragnar returns from his first successful raid, the earl confiscates not only the majority of the plunder but also Ragnar’s ship. Yes, he does allow each man to take one item, but the whole emphasis in the scene is on the earl’s grasping, tyrannical nature. So rather than enriching his men he is stealing their property.

Haraldson takes the rest of the treasure and buries it in the ground, saying that Odin will allow him to take this treasure into the afterlife. This completely misunderstands the fact that many Norse treasure hoards were buried at some point. The Norse buried bodies with grave goods, sometimes quite lavish ones, which strongly suggests, although not conclusively, that the dead were expected to enjoy those goods in the afterlife. But there’s no indication that the Norse believed in some sort of “afterlife safety deposit system”, in which goods could be buried before death. Rather, burial of treasure was a means of keeping it safe during times of turbulence, with the intention of digging it up when things had settled down. So the earl’s burial of the confiscated plunder is just absurd. In the ground, it’s no use to anyone.

Haraldson also apparently puts his men through a rather perverse loyalty test. In the second episode, he tells one of his men that he can sleep with Siggy, the earl’s wife, if he wants to. The man goes into the earl’s bedroom, and Siggy invites him into the bed, but then attacks him. Haraldson walks in with guards and orders the man taken out and killed. Aparently, the earl is checking to see which men want to get busy with his wife, so he can kill them and prevent her from committing adultery. But the damage this would do to his reputation and the loyalty of his men would be enormous.

Sure, we can justify a lot of this by saying that the earl is a bad ruler; Norse literature has its share of abusive or stupid rulers. But almost no one other than Ragnar ever seems to challenge the earl’s right to do what he does, even when the earl and his men are not present. Everyone seems to assume that the earl has the right to do these things, when in fact he doesn’t. In the fourth episode, the earl asserts that Ragnar owes him loyalty simply because he is the jarl, which is false. Ragnar owes him loyalty only if he has sworn oaths of loyalty which Haraldson has justified with gifts of wealth and political support.

To get around this, the series invents a custom that the jarl performs an adulthood ceremony for 12 year old boys, giving them an arm-ring for which they must swear loyalty. This arm-ring is considered sacred and oaths sworn on it must not be broken. This is all sheer nonsense. Jarls and other leaders did give out arm-rings as a sign of favor or as reward for support, but they weren’t sacred objects or signifiers of adulthood.

What’s really going on here is that the series is resorting to the modern assumption that rule by nobility and kings must be abusive, because it’s not democratic. Hollywood has a long tradition of pandering to American political ideals by treating any other political system as inherently bad. What’s particularly frustrating about this is that the Norse were actually much closer to traditional American notions of the independence and the moral rights of the individual than most other medieval cultures.

Haraldsson’s chief skill is sitting menacingly

The Lack of a State

Another major problem with this series’ depiction of Norse government is that it assumes that Norse society, like modern America, has a notion of the state as formal institution with its own recognized coercive authority. The place where this comes through most clearly is in the trial scene in the pilot. In the scene, the earl conducts a court in a manner similar to a judge. There is an accusation that a man has killed another man in a quarrel over land. The man claims that he admitted the killing, so that it was not murder, but Haraldson points out that the man walked past two houses where he did not announce the murder, and thus must have intended to keep it secret, since the law specifies that a killer may pass the first house without announcing a killing if the victim’s relatives live there. Then Haraldson asks the community to vote on the man’s guilt, and says that the verdict must be unanimous. When the community condemns the man, Haraldson orders the man executed.

There’s so much wrong here it almost deserves its own separate post. The series has presented Norse law as operating as a primitive version of American or British law, with the earl acting as both the judge and the prosecutor, the community acting as the jury, and Haraldson’s men acting as the police force and executioners. This presumes that the earl has some sort of formal right to act as a judge and enforce the law.

But Norse society operated on a completely different model. Norse law was understood to be the possession of each individual, and thus was something that the individual enforced for himself. Crime was understood in terms of injury to a specific victim and that person’s kinsmen; if there is no injury, there is no crime (this is another reason that Haraldson’s confiscation of the boat is wrong—Ragnar has not injured the earl in any way). If a man injures someone, either physically or through taking of property, the victim acquires the right to avenge the injury by inflicting reciprocal damage to the perpetrator. If the perpetrator has taken the man’s cow, he is allowed to take goods of equal value from the perpetrator; if the man has caused physical injury, the victim and his relatives are allowed to inflict a reciprocal injury on the perpetrator or his relatives.

In this system, there is no judge, because the victim and his kinsmen have the right to act as the judge of their own injury. This means that the system treats every injury as a new injury, even if it was inflicted as a punishment for a previous injury, because each kin group thinks in terms of its own injury. So if Hrolf injures Svein, Svein and his brothers will attack Hrolf and injure or perhaps kill him. But that gives Svein’s relatives the right to kill Hrolf or his relatives, which gives Hrolf’s relatives the right to retaliate. This could be extremely disruptive to the community, but it was understood as legally and morally right. When Haraldson claims that secret killings lead to revenge feuds, he’s wrong; open killings lead to revenge feuds, and that’s seen as appropriate, because that’s how the law works. Secret killings were a problem precisely because no one knew who to take vengeance on. So when the dead man’s wife realizes he’s been killed, she doesn’t go to earl Haraldson; she goes to her husband’s family and rallies them (and perhaps her own birth family) to go after the killer.

Obviously, feuding could be a serious problem, so Norse law recognized an alternative. Each person in this society had a recognized cash value that was a reflection of their social status and function in the community. When an injury or killing occurred, the perpetrator could offer to buy off the victim’s right of vengeance by paying either a fraction of the victim’s value (for an injury) or the whole value (for a killing) to the victim or his relatives. If the victim accepts the payment, he is agreeing to forego his right of violent vengeance.

So the thing that deters violence in Norse society is the threat of reciprocal violence from the victim and his kinsmen. Once violence has happened, the community would either begin taking sides or start pressuring the two sides to reach a peaceful agreement about how much financial compensation should be paid. The jarl’s role in this, to the extent that he had one, would be to either support one side in the violence or help negotiate peaceful compensation (and then engage in violence against whichever side broke the agreement later on). He doesn’t maintain a police force because there’s no need; the thing that stops crime is fear of retaliation. He doesn’t act as judge because he has no formal right to get involved unless one party or the other seeks his support. There’s no trial, because none is necessary. There’s no jury here, because each man has the right to enforce the law for himself and his kin. In fact, there’s virtually no notion of the state as a formal institution at all.

A key element of this system was family solidarity. Men were unlikely to achieve vengeance if they did not have strong kinsmen and family alliances to support them. There was a powerful cultural pressure on men to stand in solidarity with their kinsmen, and men without relatives were in a very vulnerable position. This is why the tension between Ragnar and Rollo, and Rollo’s desire for Lagertha is such an issue. The two men ought to support each other to the death. When the earl tries to bribe Rollo to betray Ragnar, this is the sort of thing a Norse saga might have explored, so on this point, the series is capturing something of the spirit of Norse literature, although it’s getting the legal details wildly wrong.

Another example of the series getting Norse law wrong comes in the fourth episode, when Ragnar is accused of killing Haraldson’s half-brother Knut. Ragnar acknowledges the killing but insists that it was justified because he caught Knut trying to rape Ragnar’s wife. In other words, Ragnar shouldn’t be considered guilty, because it was justifiable homicide. But Norse law doesn’t have the same sort of notion of guilty or innocence that modern American law does. In Norse law, intention and motive is entirely irrelevant. It does not matter if Ragnar had a good reason for killing Knut, or if it was done in self-defense. All the matters is that Ragnar acknowledges the killing. Having killed Knut, he and his family are now legitimately the targets of Haraldsson’s vengeance. The earl doesn’t need the sanction of the court to kill Ragnar.

Haraldson confronting Ragnar about Knut’s death

What we’re seeing here is the series just making up whatever nonsense it wants to in order to advance its plot. Instead of trying to show the audience how a very different legal system operated, it just imposes modern American notions of justice back on Norse society, picking and choosing whatever historical bits sound interesting and ignoring the rest. That detail from the pilot about a killer being allowed to walk past one house without announcing his killing is an authentic element of Norse law, so the scriptwriters clearly know something about Norse law, which means they’re making conscious choices to misrepresent the Norse legal system.

And the sad thing is that it would have been easy enough to get the law right and still serve the series’ goals. The writers could have worked Ragnar’s killing of Knut into this plot in a very Norse way. Here’s all they had to do: the earl stews on Knut’s death for a while, and then launches the attack on Ragnar’s farmstead in episode 5, not to punish Ragnar because he’s a criminal, but to avenge his dead brother. This would have made Haraldson a more nuanced character and allowed Gabriel Byrne to demonstrate that he can do more than glower. American television has for some time recognized that audiences are interested in more complex villains, bad guys that the viewer can have a little sympathy for while still rooting for the hero to win. But for some reason, the Vikings hasn’t recognized this.

Want to Know More?

Vikings Season 1 is available on Amazon.

To understand what’s so wrong with Earl Haraldsson, you’ll need to do some reading about the political arrangements of Norse society. P.H. Sawyer’s Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe AD 700-1100 is, as the title suggests, partly concerned with political systems of the period. Another good option is Birgit and Peter Sawyer’s Medieval Scandinavia: From Conversion to Reformation, circa 800-1500 (The Nordic Series), although it runs down to the 15th century, long after the Viking period ended.

The Vikings: At Least It’s Not Aliens on the History Channel

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Gabriel Byrne, Katheryn Winnick, Lagertha, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scandinavia, Michael Hirst, Ragnar Lothbrok, The Vikings, Travis Fimmel

In 2013, the History Channel debuted a Canadian-Irish tv series, The Vikings, starring Travis Fimmel at Ragnar Lothbrok and Katheryn Winnick as his wife Lagertha. While the series has some problems, it’s a significant step up from the History Channel’s traditional “ancient buildings were produced by aliens” programming. There’s both good and bad things to say about the series, and there’s enough that I plan to do several posts about it.

The focus of the series is Ragnar Lothbrok, a typical Viking living somewhere in Scandinavia in the 790s. He is married to Lagertha, a “famous shieldmaiden”. Together they seem to run a small farm and have two children. They are ruled over by Earl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne), whose title should really be ‘jarl’ since that’s the Norse root-word for the English ‘earl’, but that’s a tiny quibble. The earl, who is a fairly stock-villainous character, owns the ships that his men use to go Viking, and he insists on taking them into the Eastern Baltic every year, to raid Russia. But Ragnar complains that the Eastern Baltic is plundered out, so he would rather go west. He’s heard rumors that there are countries there ripe for the picking. But the earl is extremely skeptical of these claims, and people think that there’s just sea to the west. And besides, it’s impossible to sail west because no one can calculate latitude and no one can navigate when it’s too cloudy or foggy outside, because Vikings navigate by the stars.

However, a stranger has told Ragnar there is land out west, and has given him two tools that will help him navigate. His friend Floki is a boatmaker and has secretly built a longship for him so Ragnar can assemble a crew and go wherever he wants. But the earl doesn’t want this, apparently because he’s a control freak, so Ragnar is going to have to do this on the sly.

Ragnar Lothbrok

The series’ creator is Michael Hirst, the screenwriter for Elizabeth and also contributed to Elizabeth the Golden Age. He’s also the executive producer for the Showtime dramas The Tudors and The Borgias. So this is a guy who’s seriously interested in history.

Hirst’s choice to focus on Ragnar Lothbrok is an interesting one. Lothbrok (or Lodbrok; they are essentially variant spellings of the man’s nickname, “Hairypants”) is a semi-legendary character from the Viking age. Historians use the term ‘semi-legendary’ when they can’t decide if someone is basically historical or basically fictional. According to different sources, he was the son of either a Danish or Swedish king and eventually became king of Denmark himself (or at least part of Denmark). He is reported to have raided widely in Britain and France, including attacking Paris. Various sources say he had three wives, Lagertha, Thora, and Aslaug, a Swedish princess whom he rescued from two giant serpents. He fathered a number of sons, all of whom seem to be genuine historical figures, and was supposedly killed by King Aelle of Northumbria by being thrown into a pit full of snakes, where he composed a famous poem before dying.

Fimmel as Ragnar

This ‘biography’ appears to be a confused muddle of several different historical figures including three different kings and two Viking leaders, as well as possibly one woman. The historical events attributed to him are contradictory in terms of chronology, but most of the sources seem to place him in the early to mid-9^th century. The attack on Paris happened in 845, and his sons reputedly invaded England in 865 to avenge his death. One of these sons, Bjorn Ironside, figures as a character in The Vikings, played first by Nathan O’Toole and in later seasons as an adult by Alexander Ludwig.

The series gives Ragnar a brother Rollo (Clive Standen). Rollo is loosely modeled on the Viking Hrolf, also called Ganger Hrolf (“Rolf the Walker”), who founded the duchy of Normandy in 911. There is no evidence for any connection between Hrolf and Ragnar in the sources; Ragnar seems to be a mostly Danish figure, whereas Hrolf is more typically associated with Norwegian families, including the Norse jarls of Møre or the Yngling dynasty of kings, who are also connected to Sweden, although one source claims him to be the son of a Danish noble. Are you starting to figure out how confused Norse sources for the 9^th century are?

From what I’ve just said, it should be clear that Hirst has taken a very umm…lenient approach to the facts here. He’s taken a probably legendary character who would have been in his prime in the 840s, made him the brother of a man who was probably only born in the mid-840s, and pushed both of them back into the 790s. That means that his son Bjorn, who is 12 years old in 793, according to the series, will be terrorizing England when he’s 84.

Lagertha

And then there is the character of Lagertha. In the series she’s a ‘shieldmaiden’, which seems to mean that she’s a trained female warrior. Shieldmaidens occasionally feature in Norse literature, but there is no solid historical evidence for any formal practice of women warriors in Norse society. The whole question of whether Norse women carried weapons or fought is a complex one. Most of the women mentioned as fighting in the sources are Valkyries, essentially Norse angels who choose the dead for the god Odin. There are a few literary women who kill people, such as Freydis Eiriksdottir, who slaughters a number of women with an axe in the Saga of the Greenlanders, but she is not a warrior, just a killer. Stories about valkyrie warrior women marrying mortal men seem to be a masculine fantasy to demonstrate male sexual prowess (the way that many recent action films have included a ‘tough female fighter’ character, who ultimate yields to the male hero sexually).

Winnick as Lagertha

Archaeological evidence is patchy. A small number of female graves have included arrows, spears, and even swords, but scholars have debated how to interpret this fact. In some cases, it is possible that the grave originally held a male body that has now been lost, making the man’s weapon appear to be buried with his wife. In the case of swords, it has been argued that the woman inherited a sword because she was an only child, so that it might not be evidence of actually using the weapon, simply owning it. But on the flip side, the sex of the body is sometimes only established by the grave goods that accompany it, with the assumption being that bodies buried with weapons are men and bodies buried with cooking implements are women; this assumption was recently disproven in one case by DNA testing. What this means is that there may well be more women buried with weapons than scholars now recognize. Given that bows and arrows and spears can be used for hunting and for self-defense when men are away, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some Norse women did occasionally use weapons. But it is a huge step from that to a claim that there were ‘warrior women’ of the sort that The Vikings seems to be picturing.

The series appears to be drawing heavily on the Gesta Danoroum, written by the late 12^th century Christian Danish author Saxo Grammaticus. Saxo’s work is an amalgamation of history, legend, and conjecture, all filtered through Saxo’s Christian viewpoint. (It’s also the source Shakespeare used for Hamlet.) Saxo mentions a few warrior women but usually in a way that makes it clear he is disapprovingly contrasting the pagan Danes of the past with the Christian Danes of his day. So his discussion of pagan Danish warrior women might be fictions intended to indicate how barbaric the Danes were before they converted, rather than evidence that pagan Danes included female warriors. By refusing to be mothers, warrior women were rejecting the proper, subordinate, role Christian society expected of them.

What he tells us about Lagertha is that she was a virginal warrior woman (note that the term ‘shieldmaiden’ implies virginity), whom Ragnar fell in love with. She set a bear and a dog on him, but he killed both and thereby got her hand in marriage. They had a son (not Bjorn Ironside) and two daughters. Then Ragnar abandoned her to marry the Swedish princess Thora. Later, when he needs assistance, she leads an army to rescue him. He also at one point describes her as “flying about” the battlefield, which might be a reference to moving quickly, but has also been interpreted as literal flight, which would tend to support the notion that Lagertha is essentially a valkyrie rather than a mortal woman.

The decision to treat Lagertha as a real woman and as a warrior in her own right clearly owns a lot to contemporary ideas of strong female characters in film and television, and much less to an interest in historical accuracy.

So thus far, the hero of the story is semi-legendary, his brother and his son are real, but are half a century too early, and his wife is basically fictional. However, all of them have at least some basis in the sources of the period, so Hirst gets credit for using actual literary characters and real people rather than just making up his own.

Earl Haraldson is entirely fictitious. But I’ll talk about him and what’s so seriously wrong with his character in my next post.

Want to Know More?

Vikings Season 1 is available on Amazon.

There are a lot of general introductions to Norse society and the Vikings. One good readable one is Else Roesdahl’s The Vikings: Revised Edition.

A nice introduction to the general culture of the Norse is James Graham-Campbell’s The Viking World. It’s got good visuals.

If you want to know about Ragnar Lodbrok, you can read The Sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok. They’re not very long.

If you’re interested in Norse women, the two books I’d recommend are Jenny Jochens’ Women in Old Norse Society and Judith Jesch’s Women in the Viking Age. Jochens’ book is very much about average women in the period, with a good exploration of their economic roles, while Jesch’s book does a nice job of looking at what various literary sources can reveal about Norse women. (Full disclosure: I studied under Jesch for a year as an undergraduate.)