Raiders to traders
How Vikings: The Rise And Fall got all their boats in a row to stage a raiding party into the past.
Vikings: The Rise And Fall Season 1 Wednesdays (from 29 June) National Geographic (*181) 21:00
Hey, fans of historical drama series like Vikings, Vikings Valhalla, or The Last Kingdom – National Geographic’s latest documentary series Vikings: The Rise And Fall is like the best behind-the-scenes feature ever!
Complete with re-enactments by specialists from Hands On History and the Ribe VikingeCenter, and featuring historically accurate costumes and props, the series takes us on a 300year journey through the rise of the Vikings, from their earliest adventures around the Scandinavian coast, to major expeditions to plunder York in Great Britain, besiege Paris, and trade and terrorise through the East from Russia to Baghdad, and to West North America.
We spoke to Anna O’Malley, who was also one of the producers behind Vikings and Vikings Valhalla (and smashhit sexy period drama series Bridgerton) about Vikings: The Rise And Fall.
ANNA’S VIKING JOURNEY
What was your starting point for Vikings: The Rise And Fall? I’d worked on Vikings, the TV series for History Channel (*186) about 10 years ago. And I was execu-tive producer on Vikings Valhalla for Netflix the year before last. And I had always wanted to make a documentary on the Vikings. I was in contact with Daniel Sharp, who runs production company Dash Pictures, and we came up with the idea We started doing the research during lockdown (from March to May 2020). Pretty much everybody you see on the show – including Stefan Brink (Professor Of Scandinavian Studies, University Of Cambridge), Cat Jarman (Bioarchaeologist & author of The River Kings) and Søren Michael Sindbaek
(an archaeologist at the University Of Aarhus) – I started with their books. And every kind of source that they’d have, I tried to contact them to interview them. Everybody in the Viking world knows each other, so they’d lead you on to the next person. As soon as the reading was finished, all my learning came from chatting with everybody.
Where did you source costumes and props from? Were you able to reuse anything from the previous two Viking series that you had worked on? We looked into that – what we could source and if that would work. But in the end, we got in touch with a company called Hands On History. They are historians, and they really wanted everything to be as accurate as possible.
I knew the type of things that we would need because of my work on TV shows. And we were covering from 793, right up to 1066, so a lot of time was spent getting each era per episode correct. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without historical consultants. We really wanted historians watching the show to get excited that it’s actually correct! Where can we see that particularly? In one of the episodes (episode 3) we cover the east. There’s a lot in that episode that people haven’t seen before. We really delve into those trade networks. And, visually, what we see is a lot different than you see in the other episodes.
How did you work with Hands On History and Ribe VikingeCenter? Rather than using actors (in the series), we use people who are re-enactors. The Ribe VikingeCenter is a centre where people actually live as Vikings. They do it quite seriously. They know exactly how to live (as Vikings) and they’ve invested in the clothing and things like that. We watched them (at Ribe) for three or four days. Hands On History was part of that. Their historical consultants helped us to connect with re-enactors from all over the world. A lot of them (work in) very specifically one era, one location. Just by talking to them, we can put them in this episode or that episode. It was an interesting way to work, rather than just casting. What question did you really want answers to? How much Vikings integrated into societies, how they went from people who attacked towns to actually becoming part of the fabric of the society.
And everyone thinks that we’ve heard everything about the Vikings, but as science improves, old archaeological sites open with more information.
The series also explores the role of Viking women, from merchants and farmers, to warriors and witches.