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.
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.