How 'The Wire' Helped Pave the Way for the Time of the Vikings

TV Vikings (still via, photo credit: Jonathan Hession)

Remember when everyone was weirdly obsessed with vampires a few years back? Well, there’s a new bunch of old dudes in town now and while they want your blood just as much, they're more likely to smash it out of you than they are to suck it out of your neck. They are the Vikings, already playing their part in the Thor franchise and now with their very own TV show, 20th Century Fox’s imaginatively titled Vikings (it does what it says on the tin), created by Elizabeth-writer, Michael Hirst. Next month, the British Museum hosts a major "Viking" exhibition, its first in over 30 years, featuring a series of new discoveries and a massive warship.

While dealing directly with the Vikings and their world is only now returning to the zeitgeist, there has been a Viking feel to a lot of recent popular TV and film. “Viking” isn’t an adjective but it should be. Hanging out in a far northern wilderness? Totally Viking. Hitting the town for some boozing and some carousing? So Viking. Building a longboat and then getting together with some buddies to go and raid a few coastal settlements? Mate, that’s obviously really Viking. Game of Thrones, the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit series, Camelot, Spartacus, even shows like Southcliffe, Utopia and Red Riding: all have a “Viking” feel, something that relates to the idea of the North, darkness, moral ambiguity, violence, drinking and “winter being hard”.

Game of Thrones and the Tolkien films are very specifically influenced by Norse sagas and, as the creator of Vikings, it was Michael Hirst’s task to take these influences and make a historically plausible yet dramatically compelling show out of them.

Real Vikings (photo courtesy of the British Museum)

At a screening of Vikings, held at the British Museum, Hirst tells us that he became interested in writing about the Vikings in the late 1990s, but that no one was interested in a film or show about them then. “Vikings were always the people who come in the night to rape and pillage,” he says, and as such, studios, obsessed with having “likeable” and “relatable” characters, stayed away. But then out went Friends and along came the Sopranos, the Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men and suddenly if your hero wasn’t a deeply compromised dude with a penchant for violence, you were in trouble. “I could finally write about the Vikings because everyone was writing about morally difficult characters,” Hirst says, and while his hero Ragnar Lodbrok loves his wife and doesn’t abuse his kids, he’s also more than happy to slaughter the odd Christian monk or stab a bitching comrade in the neck till he dies like a dog at the bottom of his boat.

While the television world caught up with the darkness of the Vikings, our understanding of the Vikings has moved the other way, towards something more intelligent and complex, so that the two conceptions meet in the middle. We now know, for example, that the Vikings probably didn’t use rape as a weapon of war, and we know too that women had far more power in Viking society than was usual for the time. The Vikings travelled far and wide, reaching America centuries before Columbus accidentally bumped into it and trading happily with Arab merchants long before Christians embarked on their “holy” wars. The Viking religion, which is well shown in Hirst's show, was sophisticated and tailored to its landscape, a far “better” religion than Christianity, according to Hirst.

The democracy, religion and literature of the Vikings are all highlighted in the exhibitions currently being held around the world and a recent book from the British Museum, Viking Poetry of Love and War, is at least 50 percent about romantic complexity (and 50 percent about shattering an enemy’s skull with your spear).

The recognition here is devastating: An air of the Viking world, a feeling of it, has been present in so much of the popular art that can be categorised as “fantasy”, now the Vikings themselves are front and centre. Of course, these crazes never last. Gladiator inspired a run of Greek and Roman films that was brought to a crashing halt by Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great, at which point everyone was like, “Yeah, maybe let’s dig up some vampire stuff.” That moment will come for the Vikings. Until then, it’ll be interesting to see how much pillage and poetry will hit the screens.

@oscarrickettnow