Posted on 03/13/2013 10:42:29 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
It’s been more than fifty years since Kirk Douglas and his production company produced what most people still consider the best Viking movie ever made, The Vikings. Within the limits of the information available at the time, they made a good faith effort to do the thing relatively authentically. We’ve learned much in the years since, especially due to advances in archaeology, and many reenactors around the world (of whom I am among the least) work hard to re-create authentic Viking Age life. Dozens of accurate replicas of Viking ships have been built and put to sea, to the wonder and delight of many. The time would seem to be ripe for a depiction of the Viking Age that would surpass Kirk Douglas’s film in portraying of one of the most exciting and colorful eras in human history.
The History Channel’s new series, Vikings, is not it.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Yep, I had to drop what I was doing to watch such a rare occurrence, lol.
No, wait...
-PJ
This program should be so much better. It is a disappointment on almost every level.
The Y DNA haplogroup for a great many Scandinavians is labeled as “I1” and it is also found in present day England, France, and scattered around Europe. Russia, etc. Viking raids, travels, and settlements can be traced with this genetic heritage, also known as the Viking Gene.
Ragnar is the hero of a viking story.. in other words, this tv series has been "wrong" (in terms of perfect historical truth) since it was told over a milenia ago! And half this thread is filled with people making vague and horribly inaccurate generalizations about Viking technology that came 200 years after the story. Did some vikings know about England? Well where the heck else did Ragnar hear the stories from? Certainly not all Vikings knew that the British Isles lay directly west since they had no mode to navigate over open waters. And it is precisely those discoveries in navigation (the water wheel and the sun stones) which allowed the Vikings to start raiding the isles. There was a very real gap in understanding and knowledge throughout the world and even more severely in the rural areas during the Dark Ages. The northerners who had made earlier incursions into England did not sail west over open seas, but rather came up from France over the English channel which narrows to 21 miles.
Anyway, the series beats the snot out of the typical lawyer/doctor/police drama crap that spews from the airwaves on a nightly basis.
Yeah, the kind Charles is the Prince of! Lol!
Well...I guess we can figure out who the bad guys will be in THAT one.
Well, at least they don’t have them wearing those dopey helmets with horns on them. But I’m waiting for the Beserker episode...
That’s the thing...I don’t give a rip about those lawyer-doctor-police shows. They’re all the same to me, and I can’t remember the last time I watched network TV. If Vikings gets another go-around, I may DVR it JUST because it has a historical setting and it’s something different & more interesting to watch.
” . ..the X chromosome is from Whales.”
Rather different from being from Wales, one supposes.
I have no tv. I watch a few shows that I can stream online that are worth me going out of my way. This Viking series is the best "tv" I have watched in some time.
Our internet speed is too slow to stream TV or movies; at times I even have problems with Youtube. Right now we have Directv, and there is never anything on. If we could get a faster connection out here, I could see doing what you’re doing.
The show was never advertised as being a factual series, but rather a different viewpoint on how the Vikings may have lived. So far I have really enjoyed the series in that respect and I think they did well with the clothing, weapons, and such. My biggest complaint would be that I have been brought back to reality several times when they use words or phrases that would in no way have been used back then such as “culprit”, “do you have the balls?”, “rape”, and others.
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