Viking Facts & WW2 Fiction

Replica runestone at Denmark´s perhaps best Viking museum: Kongernes Jelling.

There have been some amazing Viking discoveries in recent times, enabling us to more clearly view those seafarers who "...ventured so fearlessly and so far from their homeland". But, at the same time, the relatively recent events of World War Two are being mixed up with fiction.

Heather Pringle, author of the best book about the SS-mystics of the Ahnenerbe, wrote a wonderful summary of the major new findings about the Vikings, in her well-illustrated 2017 National Geographic article "What You Don’t Know About the Vikings". For example, Pringle pointed out that a very real disaster in 536 AD seems to have given birth to "...one of the darkest of all world myths, the Nordic legend of Ragnarök". She also describes the unique excavation of a Viking raid - a raid that took place "...nearly 50 years before Scandinavian raiders descended on the English monastery of Lindisfarne in 793, long thought to have been the first Viking attack."

Add to that the even more recent discovery of the remains of a female Viking commander.

Well, what is starting to bother me quite seriously is that at the same time as we are getting a better picture of history, from the Vikings to the First Cold War, we are getting movies and TV series so loosely based on actual events that the words "based on" sound worse for every passing year. I can buy the "Viking fiction" trend, because there is not an abundance of sources, but why invent 1940s history? Two examples that IMHO stand out, the TV series "Manhattan" and the more romantic movie "The Exception". While both of them have a great look and some brilliant acting, they are filled with invented plots and even leading characters that never existed. These fake men and women interact with utterly real characters, such as the exiled German Kaiser Wilhelm II in "The Exception". To me, new research is constantly providing more and more drama that actually took place. But for some reason, several movie makers prefer making "WWII" movies based on mostly fictional stories. I find it rather frustrating.