In that sense, Valhalla provides Stuart a strange playground: like the original series, historical events can root the drama (the massacre that kicks off the pilot happened on Nov. “In other words, it all comes from the people that you know, that you’re watching as opposed to, you know, a comet is about to hit Earth or something like that.” Having minted his writing career with action classics of the 1980s and ’90s, Stuart wanted Valhalla to have “more action”, particularly in his vein of “character-based action” writing. “If you’re an action writer it’s a good place to be working,” Stuart says of the conflict-philic Vikings at the heart of the story. That conflict is set across a new cast of characters, including the legendary Leif Erikson ( Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Sam Corlett) and his sister Freydis Eriksdotter (Frida Gustavsson of The Witcher), who leave Kattegat with their own goals and their own thoughts on religion. And in true Viking fashion, conversion was fitful, violent, and unsparing. Stuart notes that Scandinavia was the last part of Europe to be Christianized (“Those Catholic monks stood up there, you know, in northern Germany, in the Netherlands, and they looked across the Baltic. True to history, Christianisation played a major role in the dissolution of the Viking era. The old gods of the pagan Vikings offending the new Christian Vikings, who would prefer everyone just get on board with Christ already. Brice’s Day massacre) but also themselves. Set 100 years after the final episodes of the original series, the Vikings have found themselves in conflict with the English (who burned the Danish encampments on their shores in what’s come to be known as the St. If “wistful” isn’t a description typically applied to the brutality of both Vikings and Vikings, allow Valhalla to correct the narrative.
So my goal would be, at the very end, that you suddenly look back on this incredible period of time of both shows and say, ‘Wow, it was really good when they were just killing those Saxons. “The goal of the show is that, as we move from season to season, there’s parts of it we’re going to have to give up.
“I what he meant immediately,” Stuart tells Polygon. When Jeb Stuart ( Die Hard, The Fugitive) signed on to take over and continue the Vikings franchise with Vikings: Valhalla, Michael Hirst, creator of the original History Channel series, gave him just one piece of guidance: He wanted the Netflix spinoff to feel nostalgic.