I hope you don't know anything about history...

...because the people who made this show sure don't!

I tried this show twice, because so many people like it so much. The first time I made it into the first couple episodes of season 3 before turning it off in disgust. The second time I made it just a couple episodes further.

I really tried to just treat it as a fantasy show the second time, but they kept ruining my fantasy by introducing little bits and pieces of real history, getting them all completely and unforgivably wrong.

I couldn't possibly begin to list everything they get wrong, because it is literally "almost everything." A few touches of Norse culture are good, but most of it is complete garbage, from costuming to customs to attitudes to their religion, which is such a major element of the story and such an utter failure. The people who wrote this show have no idea of the Norse concept of religion. Rest assured their treatment of Saxon Britain is no better. There's pretty much nothing they get right.

People go crazy for the "battles" in this thing, but there's nothing more believable or historical here than what you see in Lord of the Rings. At least that was full-on fantasy (and a lot more fun). In an early episode the characters demonstrate that they know how to make a shield wall (and their Saxon opponents somehow don't, even though it was their main mode of battle), but within minutes they've devolved into individual combat and completely forgotten the shield wall that was so effective at the beginning. We practically never see one again, and the Saxons never make one. In fact, the Saxons are so dumb that they bring two armies to a battle, position one on each side of a river with no way to cross, and then are shocked when one side gets attacked and the other helplessly watches them lose. It's actually dumber than some of the stuff shown in Game of Thrones, and that show had some just idiotic battles.

The fact that they condensed a couple hundred years of history into a decade or two actually didn't bother me as much as the fact that the screwed up all those bits of history they were using. But the final straw for me was when they made Alfred the Great (one of the most important figures in British history, the only one ever to be given the title "the Great," and the progenitor of a united England) an illegitimate child of the story's priest. And it's out in the open and everyone knows it and just accepts it. Absolutely awful. The whole show is just garbage start to finish.