I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.
I love that Viking era, but also they're a fatalistic people and that dictated their fearlessness in battle and approach to life.
Because the Vikings never documented anything - they couldn't read or write - the history is always gonna be a little up in the air.
'Vikings' has been so many different challenges, and some of that is, at times, you have to be big and imposing and violent and vicious, and then you have be pulled back and withdrawn and just more layers and more time to portray those layers, too.
In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. Now, some have argued Columbus actually discovered the West Indies, or that Norsemen had discovered America centuries earlier, or that you really can't get credit for discovering a land already populated by indigenous people with a developed civilization. Those people are communists. Columbus discovered America.
I've always been interested in the Vikings - that's, like, part of my own history.
I'm from Norway, and when kids were reading comics, I was reading Icelandic and Norwegian sagas about the Vikings. The glorification of violence, their mentality, and their way of living - that was part of my own education growing up.
One of the things that I wanted to do post-'Haven' is go after some shows I was a fan of already, and 'Vikings' was on the list.
It seems strange that almost no other traces of the strong vikings are found in America.
If you're in America or Europe, walk for three blocks, and you'll pass about 14 Vikings. Their reach was immense.
I visited the archeological site at the northern tip of Newfoundland. There is no question about it. It has been definitely determined that the Vikings were there for about 10 years - specifically, Leif Erikson and his extended family.
The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.
Up in the north of Scotland, a lot of the villages are completely Viking names. A lot of Vikings came down and settled in Scotland and in Ireland. And a lot of them didn't, but they took plenty of us with them - mostly the chicks.
When you're a Viking, you never know when you're going to get the axe.
