How ‘Vikings’ reignited a love for Norse mythology

After seven years, six seasons and 89 episodes, hit historical drama Vikings is preparing to join the great television Valhalla in the sky – but it leaves behind an enormous legacy as one of the most popular TV series in the world, rivalling Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.

Although Vikings, which first launched in 2013 on the History channel in the US, has never quite won the big accolades as Emmy award-winning Game of Thrones, it has consistently proven to be a force in its own right. The drama is among the most-streamed shows on Amazon Prime Video, which carries it in Britain, Ireland, Germany and other countries, and at one point it was second only to The Walking Dead in online demand ranging from internet searches to social media chatter. Less auspicious, Vikings is also one of the most-pirated shows around the globe. Whether it’s the cinematic reenactment of Europe’s little-known viking history, the sprawling long shots of scenic Norwegian fjords, the visceral and bloody brawls or the high-stakes political intrigue for the throne of Kattegat – the seat of power in the show’s mythology – fans have flocked to Vikings over the last six seasons.

“It’s spread around the world and people watch it in the Sahara desert, and they watch it in many places where the vikings themselves never went to,” the show’s creator, Michael Hirst, tells me.

Just 10 episodes of Vikings remain as the show returns for the second half of its sixth and final season. Instead of airing on US television first, Amazon Prime Video will release all episodes on 30 December – a testament to Vikings’ streaming success. “Amazon wanted it and bought it from History, which is extraordinary,” says Hirst, noting that a spinoff series, Vikings: Valhalla, has also been snapped up by Netflix. “They just looked at the figures and bought it based on that.”

Vikings initially chronicled legendary Norseman Ragnar Lothbrok, played by Australian actor Travis Fimmel, as he expanded the viking kingdom beyond Norway to new lands across Europe. Early seasons depicted real-life viking invasions including the 793 attack of the Lindisfarne monastery in Northumbria and the 845 siege of Paris. In later seasons, following Ragnar’s death in the fourth season, his equally famous sons – including Bjorn Ironside (Alexander Ludwig) and Ivar the Boneless (Alex Høgh Andersen) – have continued to conquer new lands, such as the Mediterranean, Russia and Iceland.

Hirst is particularly proud of the show reigniting interest in the viking age and Norse mythology. “I never think of my dramas as educational. But I do think people can learn unexpected things about different cultures,” he says. “We disinterred four, if not five, dead languages. We had academics arguing about what Frankish sounded like – it’s a Germanic root language that people in France spoke – what Northern Anglo-Saxon was.”

Noah Tetzner, host of the History of Vikings podcast, credits the drama with sparking his interest in the viking age. “[It] is one of those periods in history that’s sort of ambiguous – our archaeological sources are limited, our literary sources obscure. But the show really took some of those sources that we have and brought them to life,” says Tetzner. “Many people probably aren’t aware the vikings made it as far as Muslim Spain, the Muslim emirate of Córdoba. That really drew me in.”  

Tetzner says that he’s experienced the “renaissance of interest in the viking age” firsthand through his podcast. “I started the podcast back in 2018 and within five months it was receiving 10,000 listeners per episode. I’ve received many emails from listeners that they were turned on to this period of history because of Vikings,” he says.

Tourism to dreamscape Norwegian fjords – vast bodies of glacial water surrounded by breathtaking mountains – has also seen “continuous growth in international visitors since 2014”, the year after Vikings began, said Fjord Norway, the tourism board for the western Norway region. The tourism board’s web page dedicated to viking attractions, meanwhile, is most visited in countries where the series has a substantial fan base: America and Germany, followed by the UK and Norway, it said.

“It’s become a huge international show. It’s extraordinary,” says Hirst. “A few years ago, I was invited by the curator of the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. He took me for a private view around the museum, and he said, ‘I just want to say thank you … We’ve doubled the number of people who come to the museum. We can double this site and we’ve got excavation teams now in various Scandinavian countries unearthing new boat sites.’”

Hirst recalls the Oslo museum creator telling him there is “huge interest now in Scandinavia in our own culture”, which hasn’t always been the case. The end of the viking age resulted in Scandinavian countries converting to Christianity and effectively disavowing Paganism. “There was a lot of unease in Norway and Sweden about their own past,” Hirst says. “Christians didn’t like Pagans. Paganism wasn’t to be talked about. Temples were destroyed and Christian churches built on top of them. Now they feel they can celebrate it because [Vikings has] shown the positive aspects of viking culture.”

The screenwriter, who, unusually for a show of this scale, wrote all 89 episodes of Vikings himself, took great care to explore the often surprising order of viking civilisation rather than just focusing on raids and pillaging. “When I was approached about doing the show, certain friends said, ‘You can’t really do that. They can’t be your heroes, because they’re the other, they’re the bad guys,’” says Hirst. “We [think we] know who the vikings were and what they did, but you don’t actually. You don’t know about their society and how democratic it was, based on a meritocracy. You don’t know that the vikings’ attitude towards women was far more enlightened than the attitude in France, England or the Christian countries – women could buy houses, divorce their husbands, they fought alongside their husbands.”

Viewers have frequently praised Vikings for its portrayal of viking women like Lagertha – played by Katheryn Winnick – a renowned shieldmaiden who went on to become queen of Kattegat. According to Hirst, the equal treatment of women led to the series experiencing an uptick in viewers in the US. “Because of Lagertha and some of the other female characters, after the second season, it had a 50/50 audience ratio, male to female. I was so proud and thrilled by that,” he says.  

Through Lagertha, Hirst says, Vikings has been able to explore the human issues that connect the past to the present. In the show’s second season, Lagertha, having divorced Ragnar, finds herself in an abusive relationship with the Dane earl Sigvard. The storyline reflects the complex dynamics of domestic abuse in a poignant way. “Katheryn was really concerned about this. She said: ‘We’ve seen how strong she is, how determined she is … she would never marry an abusive man,’” says Hirst. “I said, ‘I think you’ll find there are a lot of strong women today – intelligent and smart – who are married to abusive men.’”

Hirst recalls telling Winnick: “I think if I show Lagertha in that situation, a lot of women will identify with that. It isn’t the point of you being with an abusive man, it’s how you get out of that situation, how you deal with it that will be the mark of your character.”  

It is storylines like this that made Lagertha one of Vikings’ best-loved characters until her shock death in the first half of season six. With numerous story arcs to wrap up in the final 10 episodes, Hirst says he wanted to ensure his leading woman had a send-off fitting her legend – hence killing her off earlier in season six. “I set out an ending I thought was worthy of her. I wanted that to be a huge occasion,” says Hirst.

Hirst was coy about whether fans might see Ragnar and Lagertha one last time in Vikings’ final episodes, only commenting that the upcoming 10 episodes are “absolutely full of surprises”.  

Luckily for viewers, Vikings was unscathed by the coronavirus pandemic, which has affected so many TV and film productions in 2020, because filming wrapped at the end of 2018. But that also means Hirst and his cast have had to remain tight-lipped about the end of the series for nearly two years. “There are a lot of spoilers in these last 10 episodes that are difficult to talk about,” Hirst admits.  

When Vikings returns, the stakes are ratcheted up a notch as half-brothers Bjorn and Ivar battle for not just the kingdom of Kattegat, but all of Norway. Meanwhile, Wessex’s King Alfred the Great poses a serious threat that could bring about the end of the Viking Age.  

Hirst didn’t give much away but did reveal that he has long-planned how the show will end. “When I first pitched the story to History, I told them what the end would be. I didn’t quite know it would take six years to get there,” says the writer. “I was able to close the saga with the kind of satisfaction you don’t always get. A lot of TV shows, even very successful ones, have unsuccessful last seasons or last episodes because the producers or writers are hoping there’ll be further episodes to come, so they try to leave things in midair.”

The writer says he felt “a great responsibility” to give his large cast of characters “a significant conclusion”, particularly Ragnar’s sons – “whether they live or die”.

Fans of the show will be fulfilled with how things are wrapped up, Hirst adds. “I’ve taken the audience with me … I don’t think they’re going to be disappointed because I couldn’t let my characters down. I thought if I was emotionally happy with how I dealt with the endings, then hopefully the audience would share that sense of satisfaction,” he explains. “I think that people are going to be surprised in places but also feel very, very emotional about things in the show.”

The two-year wait for the final episodes to air has given the screenwriter plenty of time to say goodbye to the show and his beloved characters. “I did a bit of [mourning],” says Hirst. “I did do quite a bit of that when we were shooting, because some of these characters that I’d been with and loved so much over so many years, I killed them, they died.”

But after seven years, “I said everything I wanted to say about vikings,” says Hirst. “I had no more to give, really. I wanted to get on and do other things.”

Although Hirst will serve as an executive producer and advisor on the Netflix spinoff, he won’t be writing the show or supervising production. “That’s [creator] Jeb Stuart. Jeb is a great writer. I knew it was going to be different,” he says. But Hirst could be tempted to return to the world of vikings on the big screen. “There is talk of a Vikings film with Travis. We’re talking about that.”

The veteran writer is the first to admit that Vikings is the biggest project he’s worked on – more popular than his previous show, the controversial Henry VIII drama The Tudors, and the two Elizabeth films he wrote and which starred Oscar winner Cate Blanchett. Reflecting on the show’s legacy, Hirst says the global fandom for all things Vikings has meant more than winning an Emmy or any other industry accolade.

“I would have wished occasionally this show had got some [awards], but at the same time I knew how big it was getting,” he says. “When we went to Comic-Con, we were in a bigger room every year until we were in the biggest room of all. There were many American shows that won lots of Emmys and not many people actually watched.”

“It will stay alive, the show. It’s well-enough made, significant enough, that it will stay around for a long time,” Hirst adds emphatically. “That kind of result is a lot better than having a little statue in my toilet.”

‘Vikings’ concludes on Amazon Prime Video on 30 December