So much yes! I, too, adore this show and find it utterly compelling. Even as I sometimes have to look away from the screen because I can’t cope with the gore. But the personalities, beautiful (often half-naked) men and women, storylines etc make me impatient for season three!
For Viking-culture material without the distraction of beefcakey shirt models and fashionable hairdos, try some books–specifically, Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series. Technically it’s about 9th- and 10th-century Anglo-Saxons fighting off Danish invaders, but the narrator moves, physically and psychologically, between the two cultures. I spent some grad-school years immersed in Old English poetry, and Cornwell captures the feel of that world very well.
Lindisfarne.
Never forget.
I should try those. Sounds like a good follow-up to the Warlord ones, but now the bad guys are the good guys?
I started watching this not too long ago - I’d say it’s not great but it’s good. It drags a little towards the end of season 1, but I haven’t made it further to know if it picks up again.
My wife asked me if it was good (I watch it in when she’s watching other intolerable programming) and I told her it was like Sons of Anarchy, but with boats instead of motorcycles.
I like the show quite a bit, though I do wish they would dress them in the clean, colorful clothes actually worn in period rather than the muddy muted stuff they wear on the show. We all have our peeves. But as entertainment, it’s great, and it has spurred many a Googlin’ to find out who these characters actually were in history and/or legend, etc.
It goes a bit further than “not perfectly historically accurate” from what I understand. This blog is fun, and also contains some good criticism of the show:
Ultimately its fine that its less than historically accurate, apparently the show is more based on literature and legend than it is in real history. Some what explicitly so. It works in nice historical detail when it can, grounds things nicely in a believable reality. And its been doing a good job of letting the Norse characters be quite strange while working around the confines of network demands and typical TV/Film tropes and character/story arcs. That last bit is sort of creator Michael Hirst’s thing. Nothing he’s done has been too far outside typical Hollywood structures and themes, often it hasn’t been particularly good or interesting. But most of it has been pretty entertaining.
I picks up significantly later. And it continues to improve the longer it goes on. I tend to think of it like Walking Dead. Its frequently entertaining trash that’s actively working its way towards being genuinely and consistently good.
Yeah, it’s surprisingly enjoyable (I originally hadn’t expected much from the History Channel).
So now I have a character in Skyrim named Lagertha who beats the crap out of people. It’s made its mark 
Giggity.
This show would be a gold mine for RPG character names. Unfortunately my current policy is that all characters are exclusively named using references to Peter Stormare.
alienness
They were not as alien as Hollywood depicts them. There is a lot of evidence for cultural transfer/ties (trade) to regions in central europe. Just look at the saxons of the sixth to ninth century (those that Charlesmagne fought). Religious motives/deities, weapons, laws etc are closely related.
The Oseberg Buddha, for example. Buried in 834 CE.
Well nifty. See also the Helgo Buddha ( http://irisharchaeology.ie/2013/12/the-helgo-treasure-a-viking-age-buddha/ )
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