Does anyone still watch Vikings on the History channel? I stopped for a few episodes. IMHO, it got kind of boring. I watched the last episode and watched Ragnar kick the bucket. I wonder where the Saxons got all those snakes. The only poisonous snake in England is the Adder and it's not very aggressive. Oh, wait, I am considering that the show is historically accurate.
Our main
Vikings thread was in Current Events last February.
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/1369866-History-s-Vikings?highlight=Vikings
It isn't hidden from history, but it is hidden from Google and I had to use the Forums advanced search to find it. Perhaps a Valkyrie dusted it.
Vipera berus, the common European adder, is venomous but not excessively venomous and not aggressive. If you step on one, it will strike and try to escape. If bitten you will probably live (unless you are allergic to venom) but the bite is extremely painful and can take a year to heal. If an insane warlord kept an adder pit and threw you in, you would be bitten many times and die an agonizing death.
Too gratuitously violent for me. I just watch the documentaries
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...93601899827128FE5F6B9360189982712&FORM=VRDGAR
[video=youtube;bcgIlVxdEuA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcgIlVxdEuA[/video][video=youtube;4tJ5ipltAzw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tJ5ipltAzw[/video]
Check out Neil Oliver's Scotland, Ancient Britain & also Time Team on youtube etc
Documentaries are based on three kinds of documents: artifacts studied by archaeologists, oral traditions studied by anthropologists, and written records studied by historians.
Vikings is based on two 13th century Norse sagas,
Ragnars saga Loðbrókar (The Tale of Ragnar Lodbrok) and
Ragnarssona þáttr (The Tale of Ragnar's Sons), Saxo Grammaticus's 12th century history
Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes), and episodes from the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Ahmad ibn Fadlan (source of
The 13th Warrior) which are not Ragnar related, but are true to the period and great cinema. They are the written historical record which has come down to us. They were not written as we write history, but they are better than no written record or one we cannot decipher. You can only go so far on broken pottery.
"Gratuitous" is uncalled for, lacking good reason, or unwarranted. Is the violence in
Vikings gratuitous? The sagas are as violent as the TV series, so the violence in the later is not ladled in without good reason. But reading is not the same as seeing, and some will not want to see this. It reminds me of Elem Klimov's film
Come and See, about a 15 year-old boy's encounter with the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS in the woods of Soviet Byelorussia. It was based on Klimov's wartime experiences, which he described as follows:
As a young boy, I had been in hell. The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. The river was also burning. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it.
