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Is TV's Vikings historically accurate? Who really knows

This article is more than 8 years old
The show's authenticity is hotly debated – I used to dress up as a Viking so I've got an idea, but I also know it's not cut and dried
The author and her father in period clothing. Photographs: Erica Stratton
Tue 9 Apr 2013 09.17 EDT

Between 1994 and 1998, my dad and I dressed up as Vikings on the weekends.

The interest was mostly driven by my dad, who worked days as a geologist but spent almost all his free time feeding his fascinating but time-consuming hobby in an effort to "get closer to history". He bent his own bows, brewed his own mead and sewed his own Viking shoes (you can see pictures here). As members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA for short), we'd camp out with 2,000 other people in a Pennsylvania field, living out of a Viking-style tent that folded up as easily as a camp bed. Later, my dad joined the Longship Trading Company, an amateur group dedicated to sailing and maintaining modern-built Viking longships. While other kids my age went to amusement parks, I'd be sailing on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay in a clinker-built ship, learning just how hard it was to row in synch with 11 other people, returning to shore happy and slightly windburned. As a teen obsessed with fantasy novels, I saw these excursions as adventures, even though I wasn't always clear on their exact historical significance.

viking ship
A viking-style ship

Naturally, when the History Channel started to air its new show Vikings, I felt nostalgic. Loosely based on the legendary saga of the Norse hero Ragnar Lothbrok, Vikings has moments of surprising historical clarity mixed up with a lot of HBO-style sex, mainly between Lothbrok and his wife Lagertha. It inspired a lot of online debate, particularly centred around how accurate the costumes are – which I found amusing, since Ragnar is a figure about as historical as King Arthur. For example, both men and women in the show wear eyeliner, something that's actually been recorded by Middle Eastern visitors to Norse encampments, but the outfits vary in quality – from Lord Of The Rings rejects to something you'd see at Norstead, a mostly accurate recreation of Leif Erikson's encampment.

The online debates reminded me of my time in the SCA, where there was a lot of ink spilled over what made something "period" – that is, historically correct for the time period. Much like the debates I read now where Lord of the Rings fans debate Peter Jackson's treatment of The Hobbit, these discussions about whether or not a clothing cut or armour style was historical enough often had a lot of geek passion behind them. There was also a certain degree of snobbery involved in being "properly period". I vividly remember sharing a joke at the expense of a group of people whose Viking shoes were so poorly sewn that the toes all turned up, making them look like the Keebler elves.

Despite the underlying tone of superiority (we weren't like those average people that went around thinking Vikings wore Hagar the Horrible style helmets), as I grew older I also made an effort to understand why accuracy was important beyond one-upmanship. But as I was surprised to find out, some of the most respected sources weren't as firm and pat as I imagined as a teen.

A great example is the "sunstone" Lothbrok uses for ship navigation in the show, a piece of seemingly magical rock that will light up with the sun's rays even on a cloudy day (the "sunstone" allows for the use of his sundial-compass even on long voyages, allowing him to eventually plunder England). To my surprise, the sunstone is "real" – or rather, as real as a firm theory can make it. A stone with that property certainly exists, but none has yet been recorded in an actual Viking burial mound. One of the Royal Society's papers mentions that it is generally accepted that such an item existed, but not a single example has been found, leaving historians only a little better off than some of the authors of fictional worlds that I read as a child.

Speculating on why a sunstone hasn't been found yet highlights how the simple passage of time can destroy our understanding of whole cultures. My dad, a geologist used to dealing with far larger holes in history, surmised that a piece of spar may have shattered, burst during a flaming ship burial, or that the archaeologists simply didn't know what to look for (when you consider that the average burial mound contains a lot of muddy shards, this makes more sense).

A few months ago, an example of the sunstone was finally found, but in an Elizabethan ship: still hundreds of years away from the encyclopedia-like sources I would point to as a teen in order to "win" an argument. It was a powerful lesson about how little we really know about some ancient peoples, as well as how too much confidence can work against us in history, as well as in life.