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Originally Posted by Paul Openfold
Liked the newest episode but also agree on things moving a bit fast. Maybe they wanted to get Ragnar to become the new Earl quickly or whatever, but then they flash forward to the next spring aka raiding season right away? Also lol at the King of Thumbria's pit of vipers being brought out so early, given that is Ragnar's eventual downfall.
Still a good show so far though. Just wondering how they're going to progress the story from here.
Well, the show is called
Vikings, not
Ragnar, so if they are in it for the long haul, there are at least a couple of places they can go. For one thing, according to background material on the website, Brother Rollo is indeed intended to be Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy (otherwise known as Hrolf gangr, in English Ralph the Walker), a known badass. It is historically impossible for Ragnar and Rollo to be brothers, but clearly despite all the "historical" background on the website, Hirst doesn't give a damn about that. So the show could eventually follow Rollo's conquest of Normandy.
Also Lagertha is now pregnant, and she could be gestating Ivarr the Boneless, who is a major psychopath. The Ragnarssons, listed in various sources as Ivarr the Boneless, Halfdan the Black, Ubbe, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Bjorn Ironside (the one we have met), and several others, were the leaders of the Great Heathen Army, that wreaked havoc in England, invaded Ireland, and committed all sorts of mayhem. Plenty of historical cum legendary material there for several seasons of raping and pillaging and cleaving people from neck to navel. There are good reasons why the Christian folk of Europe prayed to be delivered from the Northmen, and those reasons would certainly make for good action tv.
Or the show could drop the saga of Ragnar and his sons and move on to Eirik the Red and his son Leif and the settling of Greenland and the excursions to Newfoundland. And then there's Eirik BloodAxe, King of York, and his wife Gunnhild the Witch and their encounter with the great skald Egill Skallagrimson and the poem he wrote to save his head.
The point being that Ragnar is not the only colorful badass to come out of the North and terrify people from Rus and Constantinople to France, England, Ireland, and Newfoundland. Lots of stories to tell if Hirst and the History Channel want to.
On another point, I was a bit surprised as to how they handled the single combat. In the various texts we have about the Viking Age, single combat is called a holmgang (island-going). Two men would go to an island (usually in a river) and fight heads-up. The idea was that if the combatants were alone on an island, then their friends, relatives, hench guys and random hangers-on could not jump in and make it a melee. Who knows what they really did in such duels, but in the sagas and other literature, such a battle would be a holmgang, not a couple of guys clobbering each other surrounded by a screaming crowd just a few feet away. It would have been more "authentic" and colorful to stage the fight on an island--I'm sure they could have come up with one.
The funeral OTOH came right out of the trip report of ibn Fadlan, a 10th century emissary from the Caliph of Baghdad to the King of the Volga Bulgars, who observed such a funeral during an encounter with the Volga Vikings, also known as the Rus and the Varangians, This is one of the earliest surviving accounts of Vikings. Most of the familiar stories of the Viking Age date from the 12th-13th centuries. Historically the story of the Vikings begins with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and ends with the death of the last great sea king, Harald Hardrada, who invaded England and died at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, just weeks before Rollo's descendant William the Bastard, son of Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy, won the Battle of Hastings and conquered England.