Vikings (2013-2020) built its world around Ragnar Lothbrok: a farmer who became a king, a pagan who interrogated his own faith, and a tactician who pointed his people west when everyone else looked east. What made the show compulsive was not just the raids but the politics inside the great hall, the marriages that were alliances, and the sons who could not agree on what their father meant. Creator Michael Hirst kept the Norse world viscerally physical while treating its mythology with genuine respect. The carousels below follow the threads that made Vikings matter: power and betrayal in pre-modern societies, the violence and beauty of Norse culture, and the search for meaning when the gods do not answer back cleanly.
If You Love Vikings: More Series in the Same Blood
Political brutality, warrior codes, and societies on the edge of change
Films for the Longboat Crowd
Swords, gods, and empires falling in cinema
The Books Behind the Axes
Norse sagas, historical fiction, and the mythology that powered it all
Games That Put You in the Shield Wall
From exploration to conquest, the Norse world in interactive form
The Sound of the North
Music that channels Norse drama, folk metal, and cinematic scale
The Northman Is What Vikings Always Wanted to Be at Its Darkest
Robert Eggers' 2022 film strips the History Channel gloss away and delivers a revenge saga that feels genuinely culled from the Prose Edda. Where Vikings gave you palace intrigue and character arcs across seven seasons, The Northman gives you 136 minutes of mythic brutality, landscape-as-fate, and a protagonist who cannot escape the prophecy he has made of himself. Alexander Skarsgard trained for months to look the part, and the Icelandic locations do the rest. If you finished Vikings and wanted something rawer, start here.
God of War Ragnarok Takes Norse Myth Seriously as a Father-Son Story
The 2022 sequel to the 2018 God of War reboot does something Vikings gestured at but rarely landed: it places the weight of mythology onto a domestic relationship. Kratos and Atreus are navigating a father-son bond inside a cosmology that is literally ending. Ragnarok is coming and the gods are as fallible and petty as any jarl in Kattegat. The writing treats Odin as a manipulative patriarch rather than a wise all-father, which lands closer to the actual eddic tradition than most screen adaptations. Worth playing even if you are not a games person.
The Last Kingdom Keeps the Politics Sharp After Vikings Goes Operatic
Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred of Bebbanburg is, in some ways, what Ragnar Lothbrok's English adversaries would have thought of as a hero. The Last Kingdom (and the five-season BBC/Netflix series it became) covers the same Anglo-Saxon/Norse collision as Vikings from the other side of the water. The tone is tighter, the budget lower, and the political scheming never stops. If you found Vikings most compelling in its first three seasons, before the scope became continental, The Last Kingdom maintains that register for the length of its run.
Wardruna Wrote the Actual Sound of the Show
Composer Einar Selvik (Wardruna) contributed to the Vikings soundtrack and his band's recordings of Norse-language ritual music are the closest thing that exists to what the people in the show might have actually heard. Runaljod: Gap Var Ginnunga uses reconstructed instruments, Old Norse, and Elder Futhark texts as compositional material. It is not background music; it is archaeology as sound. Play it while reading any of the saga-based fiction on this list and the effect compounds.
A Timeline of Viking Age Culture on Screen and Page
- 1958The Vikings, with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, defines Hollywood's longship template for decades The Vikings
- 1976Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead reimagines Beowulf through a traveling Arab scholar's account Novels (Congo / Eaters of the Dead / Sphere)
- 1999Antonio Banderas stars in The 13th Warrior, the Crichton adaptation that fuses Norse myth and horror The 13th Warrior
- 2004Cornwell's The Last Kingdom launches the Saxon Stories sequence that runs to 13 novels
- 2005Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising reframes the Norse world as existential art film Valhalla Rising
- 2013Vikings premieres on History Channel; Ragnar Lothbrok becomes a cultural touchstone Vikings
- 2015The Last Kingdom series adapts Cornwell's novels for BBC Two, later moving to Netflix The Last Kingdom
- 2018God of War relocates Kratos to Norse mythology, reframing him as a father navigating Ragnarok God of War
- 2020Vikings concludes after six seasons; Vikings: Valhalla announced as the follow-up Vikings
- 2021Valheim launches in early access and becomes a cultural phenomenon among survival-game players Valheim
- 2021Vikings: Valhalla continues the story a century later on Netflix Vikings: Valhalla
- 2022The Northman arrives as Robert Eggers' uncompromising take on the Amleth/Hamlet Norse saga The Northman
- 2022God of War Ragnarok continues the Norse saga with a focus on the bond between Kratos and Atreus God of War Ragnarok: Valhalla
Norse raids, sagas, and sister sagas
Vikings & Norse
Explore the Vikings & Norse guide →Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best.Ragnar Lothbrok, Vikings