Is Vikings Historically Accurate? What It Gets Right

The series Vikings that we know and love is based on a Scandinavian tale, The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, which follows the adventures of Ragnar and his family, particularly his sons. (Side note of little consequence: Ragnar's name translates to "hairy breeches.")

A saga is a historical account in the broadest sense, but we need to remember that sagas weren't recorded until long after the actual events went down and are filtered through the time in which they are written.

This means, according to Dr. Godlove, "they are based on oral history, passed down by descendants and are more historical fiction than fact, more legendary than accurate depictions of the past of great heroes and warriors."

While the Ragnar of the History Channel's series probably really existed, what we know about him is colored through years of storytelling and retelling and might not be the most historically accurate depiction of actual events. All we heard was "legendary" and "heroes and warriors," so we're mostly OK with this.

The sagas themselves are pretty unreliable narratives, adding and subtracting characters and plot devices as needed, and the show holds to this tradition as well. It is highly unlikely that Ragnar's BFF would be an apostate Anglo-Saxon monk, and it's pretty doubtful that Athelstan's bastard child with the Anglo-Saxon princess would be the future King Alfred of Wessex.

In fact, Dr. Godlove added a hearty "ha ha ha" to that notion just to indicate its absurdity.

Here's what you need to know about the timing: the show is both radically compressing and extending eras. For instance, in season one, Ragnar and his crew raid the monastery on the coast, which is probably representative of the famous "Sack of Lindisfarne" that took place in 793 AD. But if you fast-forward to season three, the "Siege of Paris" plot line mimics events that took place in 911 AD. That's over a century's worth of action jammed into just a few short years, probably to touch on all the historical highlights.

But Dr. Godlove has predictions, like any fan would. She predicts that Vikings' writers are setting up Rollo (our favorite shirtless warrior) to be the Rollo of medieval lore "who struck a deal with the Frankish King Charles the Simple, that allowed him to settle in the Northwestern territories of Francia." (France to us laymen.)

This means the story line with Rollo and Gisla (which means "hostage," oddly enough) is destined to join up for season four. We saw that look he and the princess exchange. We've been shipping them ever since.

As a medievalist and expert of sorts, Dr. Godlove isn't bothered too much about the time discrepancies. As a fan, however, she does have a major "no way in hell" moment of her own: "When they crucified Athelstan. I just felt like that whole scene was gratuitous."

She goes on: "For the record, Anglo-Saxons did not crucify people, and I guarantee you that they would have seen crucifying an apostate as blasphemy. It was a very heavy-handed tactic on the part of the writers and producers. I like the Athelstan character, and I like what the show is trying to do with his story of spiritual crisis, but for goodness sake, don't crucify him."

In terms of costumes, everything about the show looks so well-crafted and so artfully wrought that it just seems a little too good to be true. Some of it is, and some of it isn’t. The costumes, Dr. Godlove says, "are so good that I can tell which manuscript illumination inspired the characters' outfits. In terms of 'look and feel' of these different people and their cultures in the early Middle Ages, this show gets it right."

Their hair is historically on-point, too. While we're not sure exactly how accurate Lagertha's immaculate braids and faux hawk are, the men's styles are pretty close. In fact, Dr. Godlove points out that "a problem with Christian Anglo-Saxon men cutting their [hair] in the style of the Danes, which as I understand it, was more or less of a reverse mullet."
The Anglo-Saxon men essentially stole their look, but it's plainly obvious who wears it better. Rollo's man bun is downright swoon-worthy.

As a professor and scholar of "dead languages," Dr. Godlove totally geeks out over the way the characters communicate with each other. "I still can't get over the fact that there is a show on TV where characters speak medieval dead languages to each other. This makes me so happy."

Maybe because her life's work is teaching these languages to other folks or maybe because it's just pretty darn cool, but Dr. Godlove got her world rocked when she heard the Franks speaking to each other in what she thinks is Vulgar Latin mixed with Reconstructed Frankish, or just Frankish for short.

She'd never heard it spoken before, so well done, Vikings, for being awesome at getting things right.

Don't pretend you haven't noticed Ragnar's crazy eyes and lingering sneer. But Dr. Godlove assures us it's the real deal. The Ragnar character is typically "Odinic — a kind of 'son of Odin' character — which is totally an Old Norse archetype in the sagas."

His creepy leering makes sense, since Odin only had one physical eye but had an excellent, psychic, second sight.

Even the character of Floki holds true to the saga tradition. There is always a character like Floki in the sagas, a figure who is just a little . . . off . . . but has some ill-defined connection to the gods.

So, love Floki or hate him, he's legit.

One of the most striking things about the Vikings series is the portrayal of women as independent contributors to the culture and the raids. The female characters don't feel subject to their male counterparts, and this is mostly true.

Also, it is true that women who had been widowed or divorced had greater freedom to determine their sexual and marital relationships than women in other parts of early medieval Europe. This was almost completely unheard of in the Middle Ages when women were viewed as property. Remember when Lagertha publicly divorces Ragnar and then later decides when and whom she should marry? Completely true.

Women did fight alongside the men, but recent reports suggesting that 50 percent of Viking warriors were women is slightly overinflated.

The concept of the "shieldmaiden" is a kind of mythological figure. That probably wasn't a real position a woman would occupy in Norse society. Lagertha acts as a representative of a legendary, warrior-woman type, pulled from Scandinavian myth and legend. This totally makes us love her even more.

But even if "shieldmaiden" wasn't an actual thing, Dr. Godlove assures us that "women had a great deal more political influence and many more legal rights" in this particular society than in any other known medieval cultures."

It was the ladies’ jobs to protect their families by inciting the men to do great deeds and avenge wrongs and killings. The Siggy character epitomizes this to the extreme. Think of all the whispering she did in her men's ears.

Now that we know that Vikings has been renewed for another season, pay careful attention to a few things:

• King Charles pimping out his daughter to Rollo — it has big implications
• Ragnar's sons: both Bjorn Ironside and Ivar the Boneless
• The discovery of Normandy on the horizon
• Ragnar and his future as alive or dead