Professor defends historical inaccuracies in The Last Kingdom and Vikings

Two popular shows about the Viking age wrapped up in the past few years: Vikings on History and The Last Kingdom on Netflix. Both of these shows featured high drama, spectacular battles, and gritty depictions of life in the ninth century. Both were very entertaining, and both took a whole lotta liberties with actual history, although they folded in real historical facts as well.

I don’t think most people watch shows like this thinking that everything they’re watching is 100% true; these are TV dramas, not documentaries. And those who get down on The Last Kingdom and Vikings for not checking every historical box may be missing the point.

That’s according to Søren Michael Sindbæk, a professor of archeology at Aarhus University in Denmark. He talked to Express about how neither The Last Kingdom nor Vikings are entirely historically accurate, and that’s okay. “They are not accurate when you look at it from an archaeological perspective,” he said. “But that is not how you are supposed to look at those kinds of things.”

"If you did make them accurate in terms of [for example] dress and hairstyle, the feeling you would get as a modern audience would be quite wrong. A modern drama is always about creating a feeling and I think in terms of the feeling, that epic feeling of what it’s like to live outside a state and to live in that kind of society might actually be coming through in a convincing way. And that’s also, I think, one of the appeals for modern audiences in seeing drama like this."

And watching a drama like The Last Kingdom or Vikings can always lead someone to actual scholarship on the time period, so folk learn something one way or another.

Why do we love Vikings so much?

Our love of the Viking Age isn’t going anywhere, with the movie The Northman making a splash earlier this year. Sindbæk spoke on the enduring appeal of these seafaring warriors.

“In modern society, the Viking Age probably has an important message for people,” Sindbæk said. “We tend, because of the way the modern world works, to link back to what we call ‘the greats’. The Vikings were something different, they are a group that are pretty well-described in late prehistoric or early historic northern Europe, and in many ways culturally very alien. But also very recognisable to us, and nobody can read about the Vikings and not feel some affinity.”

"This is strange because why would you feel affinity with somebody who is ruthless? Everybody can find something there…That’s something that strikes us, that people in the past could do so and we today can do so."

He’s onto something, because both Vikings and The Last Kingdom are getting follow-ups. Vikings: Valhalla is between seasons on Netflix, and a Last Kingdom movie called Seven Kings Must Die is coming to the service down the line.

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