Huh, seeing this thread revived. I did eventually get season 1 on Netflix and watched a few episodes into season 2 before a scratched disk sabotaged me. By that time I was losing interest.
To their credit, they are (or were) trying to piece together a modern TV plot line out of historical sources. I could recognize where they got various bits from. But it was a hodgepodge of stuff from wildly different sources that don't really all belong together, and the final result was stitched together like Frankenstein's monster. The plot premise they built the whole first season around, that no Scandinavian had ever sailed west to Britain or France before and it was all a huge risk and gamble whether there really were legendary lands there - that was absurd. The Sutton Hoo burial shows Scandinavian influence in Britain already in the 6th century, 200 years before the Viking era, and Gregory of Tours reports a raid by a Danish king Chlochilaich (the Hygelac of Beowulf) around the same time. The king's burial scene (with the slave girl being sacrificed and all that) comes from the Arab writer Ibn Fadlan describing the Rus. Ibn Fadlan's account is problematic in lots of ways (he may have confused Rus and Bulgars in his notes) and there's no evidence of any such practice (other than the ship burial aspect) in any other source or archaeological find. The English king who wore his crown around on a daily basis as though it were a baseball cap was rather amusing too.
The notion of "shield maidens" among the Vikings is also problematic. We have a tendency to imagine past societies as some sort of feminist paradise, and movie studios need to find a way to work female characters in, so they make the most of even the slightest hints. But the only references to such persons are in mythological sources, not historical ones. If there had been women among the Vikings burning monasteries, you can bet the Christian chroniclers of the time would have harped on it - and none do. There has been a bit of a flurry recently over interpretation of burials. Burials used to be classified as male or female based on grave goods - swords and spears mean male, spindles and jewelry mean female. But there's been more forensic work lately looking at the actual bones, and it turns out that grave goods are not as gendered as used to be thought. There are quite a few females buried with weapons. However, it's unlikely that makes them "shieldmaidens" who actually used weapons in life. It more likely means that weapon burial was a mark of status, not gender, and those women came from warrior-class families.
I hate being the nitpicky historian tearing these things apart. A good story is a good story, and they definitely did better than past efforts at Viking movies, like that godawful Kirk Douglas one. But it seems like they tried to position this one as realistic and carefully researched, and I'm afraid on that front what I saw didn't pass muster.
