Well, first the bad news. The final season of Vikings on the History channel will begin airing on December 4th as Devon Forward of ScreenRant reminds us, and after that the show will reach its terminus and be done. The saga of Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons will end, and as of now it’s too exciting to think of what it’s going to be like once Ivar comes back with another army looking to unseat his brother Bjorn and retake Kattegat. Thus far the show has been fairly faithful to the Viking way of life, as they were by all accounts a violent group but were also known for other things such as agriculture and farming as well as trading as well as raiding when it suited their needs. But thankfully this won’t be the end of the Viking era since Netflix has picked up the show Vikings Valhalla after a bidding war that might have seen the show go elsewhere had Netflix not stepped in. If you’re thinking that it will continue where Vikings leaves off though, that’s where you’ll have to drop anchor and set a while since that’s not happening.
As exciting and as engaging as the Vikings story line has been, and it’s been great to be honest, the next show will take place a century into the future, so long after many of those that we’ve come to enjoy have passed on and have hopefully left descendants behind. At this point in history the Viking way of life is bound to change as more and more people are going to be introduced, new faces will add to the list of those that we’ve already researched and looked up, and new stories will begin to take place as the Viking era continues to roll on. Hopefully by now a lot of people have been doing their reading and finding out that while the show has been accurate it has also taken a good deal of artistic license at times with actual historical figures and situations that were presented. This has been necessary of course since history by itself is sometimes too brutal or doesn’t fit the narrative that the directors want, and so things get changed accordingly to make it work. Much as people don’t want to hear it, Ragnar, according to Shane Cubis of SBS, wasn’t any more real than Robin Hood or other legends that were created from normal men that did something extraordinary or at least were allowed to let a legend grow from mediocrity. Rollo was real, as was his descendant William the Conqueror, who is said to be coming in the next show, and the sons of Ragnar were very real, but the man himself is said to be more legend than anything.
Also, the timing of the various events are completely off as was needed for the overall story. The occurrences, the battles, and the situations that caused them were real enough, but the decades in which they occurred were far removed from what they were in the show. In a way, Vikings was a humongous mismash of some of the most famous events that happened during the Viking era, tossed into a blender and poured out for our viewing pleasure, but in an ordered way that would require a historian or someone that knew enough of history to figure out wasn’t real. Seeing as how some of the characters would be old men by the time the siege of Paris occurred or that Rollo would never have become the Duke of Normandy by the end of season five thanks to the timeline, it’s a great story with a lot of great characters, but based on a reality that is well-removed from its own time. Joshua J. Mark of Ancient History Encyclopedia has more to say on this subject.
Most fans don’t really want to care about this since quite honestly the show has been so enticing and so addictive that reading the histories after is more interesting than deflating since it reminds us that a show is a distorted version of history most times unless a director is willing to take the absolute reality and put it in front of the camera. Vikings was created to give historical background on a people that were initially thought to be some of the worst individuals in the history of mankind as they did pillage and burn places to the ground in their conquests. But they weren’t the dirty savages that some people thought them to be, as Vikings were usually well-groomed and very ordered people. They were farmers, hunters, and raiders alike. They were warriors and even deep-thinkers in a time when many figured them to be demons sent straight from hell thanks to their fighting prowess and aggressive nature. But more than all of this they were another culture that people have found highly intriguing and are ready to see more of. Skol!
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