The series opens with something that really happened: the St Brice's Day massacre of 1002. It ends with men one of whom was born in 1015. In between, Leif Erikson, his sister Freydís, Harald Sigurdsson, Cnut and Emma of Normandy share a room – people who in real life partly missed one another by half a century. That is not an accusation. A drama series is not a seminar. But anyone who wants to know where the sources stop and the writers' room begins can have the dividing line here.
"Vikings: Valhalla" ran on Netflix from 25 February 2022, created by Jeb Stuart, three seasons of eight episodes, ending in July 2024. It was filmed at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow, Ireland. It presents itself as the successor to the earlier series "Vikings" and starts a good hundred years later: in the England of Æthelred, on the eve of the Danish conquest.
For the earlier series with Ragnar, Rollo and Lagertha we have a separate fact check on "Vikings". What stands there – Ragnar Lothbrok as a legendary figure, Lindisfarne, Paris, the business with the haircuts – is not repeated here. This is about the eleventh century.
The opening is well chosen because it is attested. On 13 November 1002, the feast of St Brice, King Æthelred II of England ordered the killing of Danes in the country. He returns to it himself two years later: in a charter of 1004 for St Frideswide's in Oxford he speaks of a most just extermination of the Danes who had settled in England, and describes how those fleeing took refuge in the church – and how the church was then burned down.
It is one of the rare places where a medieval king documents a massacre of his own ordering. And the ground bears it out. In 2008 building work at St John's College, Oxford, uncovered the remains of 37 people, mostly men between 16 and 25, radiocarbon dated to 960–1020, with wounds mostly to the back. In 2009 a pit at Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth in Dorset produced 54 beheaded men of Scandinavian origin, dated between 970 and 1038; whether that group has anything to do with St Brice's Day is open.
Scale matters. Historians do not assume a nationwide extermination but targeted action against Danish soldiers and recent settlers, perhaps a few hundred dead in all. That Gunnhild, a sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, died in it is reported only by later chroniclers; Ann Williams regards the story as legend.
The series has the war of revenge follow immediately on 1002. In reality years and three separate undertakings lie in between.
Sweyn Forkbeard came in 1003 and ravaged until 1005, when famine forced him back to Denmark. He returned only in 1013, this time for the crown, and was acknowledged as king in December. By 3 February 1014 he was dead. His son Cnut had to do the whole thing again: campaign from 1015, the battle of Assandun on 18 October 1016, the death of Edmund Ironside on 30 November 1016, and only then the kingship of all England.
The series compresses those fourteen years into one run of episodes. That is dramaturgy, and it costs the most important point: the Danish conquest of England was not a revenge raid but a decade of grinding, expensive, repeatedly failed warfare.
Here lies the biggest shift, and three birth dates show it.
Leif Erikson was born around 970, son of Erik the Red, and sailed west around the year 1000. He is last mentioned alive in 1018 and probably died in Greenland between 1019 and 1025. That Norsemen really reached North America has not been in doubt since L'Anse aux Meadows – and tree-ring analysis there has even delivered an exact year: 1021.
Freydís Eiríksdóttir appears only in the two Vinland sagas, and they contradict each other. In Grœnlendinga saga she leads an expedition of her own and has her companions killed; in Eiríks saga rauða she is heavily pregnant, seizes a sword, strikes it against her breast and drives the fleeing men back into the fight. Both sagas were written down around 1200, two centuries after the events. There is no second, independent source for her.
Harald Sigurdsson, later Hardrada, was born around 1015 – thirteen years after St Brice's Day. At about fifteen he fought at Stiklestad in 1030, fled to the Rus, served from around 1034 in Constantinople and rose to command the Varangian Guard. He returned to Norway in 1045/46 and ruled alone from 1047. He fell at Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066.
Leif and Harald cannot have known each other. When Harald was learning to walk, Leif was an old man at the other end of the Atlantic. The series places them side by side as companions, with Freydís, a generation older, alongside. That is the basic decision of the script: take the three best-known names of the late Viking Age and make them contemporaries.
With the English figures the series is markedly more accurate.
Cnut became king of England in 1016 and of Denmark in 1018; he died on 12 November 1035. Emma of Normandy, born around 984, daughter of Richard I, married Æthelred in 1002 and Cnut in 1017. She was thus queen to two hostile dynasties, and she remained a power after 1035: regent for her son Harthacnut, flight to Bruges in 1036, return in 1040, the throne for her son Edward in 1042. She died on 6 March 1052. In the 1040s she had the Encomium Emmae Reginae written – a justification that simply leaves out her first marriage to Æthelred. Anyone wanting to see what spin looked like in the eleventh century has a model case there.
Godwin, the great schemer of the series, is real as well. His father Wulfnoth Cild was a Sussex thegn who had to flee in 1009. Godwin inherited an estate in 1014 from Æthelstan, Æthelred's eldest son, was an earl by 1018 and earl of all Wessex by about 1020. Between 1019 and 1023 he married Gytha, sister of the Danish earl Ulf. His sons included Harold, Tostig and Gyrth – in 1066 the family stood at the centre of everything. Godwin died on 15 April 1053.
The ruler of Kattegat, Jarl Haakon, is an invention of the series. Historical bearers of the name existed, but none like this one. Hákon Sigurðarson, the powerful earl of Hlaðir, ruled Norway until 995. His grandson Hákon Eiríksson, born in 998, was twice governor for Danish kings, most recently from 1028 to 1029 for Cnut; he drowned in the Pentland Firth between Orkney and the Scottish mainland in late 1029 or early 1030.
Kattegat, for its part, is not a place. It is the sea between Jutland and Sweden, the water between the Skagerrak and the Baltic. No harbour town of that name ever existed. The series inherits it from its predecessor, where it was invented as a town. Anyone looking for the real trading places of the period should look to Hedeby, Birka, Ribe or Sigtuna.
The fall of London Bridge is one of the key sequences of the first season – and the story behind it is itself a lesson in source criticism.
It is told in Snorri's Óláfs saga helga, that is in the thirteenth century. There Olaf Haraldsson puts ropes around the bridge piers and pulls the bridge down with his ships; Snorri cites a stanza by the skald Óttarr svarti. Three things are worth knowing. First, nothing of it stands in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Second, if the attack happened, Olaf was probably fighting around 1014 on Æthelred's side against the Danes – not as part of a Danish conquest. Third, the famous link to the nursery rhyme "London Bridge is falling down" is a nineteenth-century misunderstanding: in 1844 Samuel Laing shaped his very free translation after the rhyme, not the other way round. The rhyme is first printed around 1744.
Olaf himself, born around 995, was king of Norway from 1015, driven out in 1028/29 and killed at Stiklestad on 29 July 1030. A year later he was raised to sainthood. He is the one Norwegian around whom everything in this period actually turns – and in the series a supporting character.
Visually the series works more carefully than most, but with the same habits.
Solid ground: wool and linen, women's strap dresses with oval brooches, mail and round shield for wealthy warriors. Not solid: the unbroken palette of dark brown and grey. The Viking Age dyed whatever it could get – woad, madder, weld – and Hedeby and Birka have produced silk fragments and tablet-woven braids with silver and gold thread. Rich looked rich.
On helmets the evidence stays thin: from the whole Viking Age two reasonably complete examples are known, the helmet from Gjermundbu in Norway and the Yarm helmet in England, published in 2020 and debated in its dating. Everything else is fragments. Riveted leather armour of the kind screen drama likes is not archaeologically attested. And wherever screen drama of this kind wheels out large siege engines, the date is worth a glance: the counterweight trebuchet is traceable in Europe only from the late twelfth century, some hundred and fifty years after the action.
Archaeological evidence: the mass graves at St John's College, Oxford (37 individuals, 960–1020) and at Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth (54 beheaded men, 970–1038); L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland with the tree-ring date of 1021; textile, jewellery and weapon finds from Hedeby, Birka and York.
Contemporary written sources: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1002 to 1016; Æthelred's charter of 1004 for St Frideswide's; the skaldic stanzas of Óttarr svarti and Þórarinn loftunga; the Encomium Emmae Reginae of the 1040s, partisan and therefore doubly instructive.
Later tradition: Snorri's Heimskringla with Óláfs saga helga and Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar, around 1230; the two Vinland sagas of around 1200, from which everything we think we know about Freydís derives.
Script: Leif, Freydís and Harald as contemporaries; Jarl Haakon; Kattegat as a town; the folding of 1002, 1013 and 1016 into a single war; the unbroken brown and grey of the costumes. A series is allowed all of that. We simply like to keep apart what comes out of the ground, what stands on parchment, and what was made in a writers' room. For courage. For memory. For legends that live on.
The Vikings series fact-check · Sweyn Forkbeard · Leif Erikson · Freydis · Harald Hardrada · Cnut the Great.
