Brian Boru must wonder if it was really all worth it. He may have vanquished the Vikings, but they’ve come charging back in recent years. There have been Viking video games, such as Assassins Creed: Valhalla and Hellblade, Viking bands – the “enigmatic ritual collective” Heilung play Dublin next week – and even a Viking board game, A Feast for Odin, in which players oversee the development of medieval Cork and Waterford. Think of it as a sort of Monopoly: Berserker Edition.
A driving force behind this mania for bloodthirsty Norsemen is the Vikings TV series. The show started in the forbidden wastes of the History Channel a decade ago. Today it returns to the bountiful kingdom of Netflix with the second season of the spin-off Vikings: Valhalla.
It’s filmed in Co Wicklow, in and around the Ashford Studios complex, and the first episode is unfussily directed by Ciarán Donnelly. But that’s the limit of Valhall’s Irishness. Taking place 100 years after the original Vikings, the season continues with the story of Leif Eriksson, King Canute and a Norse settlement in London.
There is, as fans would demand, lots of shouting, axe swinging and people saying things such as “Where is Olaf?” and “I must meet Forkbeard and demand what is mine”.
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Few concessions are made to newcomers. Vikings is wall-to-wall indistinguishable “stage Norse” accents. (The cast is largely British and Australian.) Everyone is smudged in identikit dirt, facial hair pointing in six directions. We’re straight into the action, too, joining Leif Eriksson (Sam Corlett), Freydís Eiríksdóttir (Frida Gustavsson) and Harald Sigurdsson (Leo Suter). They are on the run after the sacking of the city of Kattegat, a pagan stronghold in Norway.
At this stage in their history, Vikings were all across the map and splintering along pagan versus Christian faultlines. There is a sense of that expansiveness when two characters announce they’re off to Novgorod, realm of the medieval Rus.
Over in England, meanwhile, Queen Emma (Laura Berlin) and Earl Godwin (David Oakes) are doing their best to hold on to power and to keep the locals in check. It’s a round-the-clock job, as becomes clear when they foil an ingenious attempt at assassination by poisoned Holy Communion.
You expect blood and thunder from a series called Vikings. Actually, Valhalla is generally slow moving and dialogue heavy. That will please diehards, for whom the origin story of Leif Eriksson is apparently a subject of ongoing fascination. Viking virgins may, however, become lost in all the hair, tunics and glumness. It’s a show that does exactly what it sets out to do – but, for newbies, Valhalla is a longship destined to pass in the night.
