History Channel's Vikings has been given the big budget Netflix spin-off treatment with Vikings: Valhalla, coming to the streaming service on February 25.
As the original Vikings came to an end in 2020, and its major stars like Katheryn Winnick have moved onto other projects, viewers may be left wondering what exactly links this new show to the original show.
Luckily, the first few episodes explain all the major connections between the two Vikings shows—and Valhalla's showrunner has spoken to Newsweek about the link between the two.
Warning: Minor spoilers ahead for Vikings: Valhalla (though only about the characters: no major plot details are revealed in this article).
How Vikings Links to Vikings: Valhalla
Both shows are set within the same world, and largely within the same space—like Vikings before it, much of Valhalla is set around Kattegat, the real-life sea areas between Denmark and Sweden.
What separates the two shows, however, is time, and lots of it.
By the start of Valhalla, heroes and villains such as Lagertha, Rollo and Ivar the Boneless are long dead. The show is set 100 years after the events of the History Channel original (which streamed on Amazon Prime Video outside of the U.S.).
What has happened in the century between Vikings and Valhalla is explained in an opening text crawl that opens Episode 1 of the latter. It reads: "The exploits of the great Viking Ragnar Lothbrok have faded into legend.
"In the 100 years that followed, Vikings left their northern homelands and settled across Europe, many in England. But as the settlements prospered, they became a threat to their Saxon neighbors and the English king, Aethelred II (also known as Aethelred the Unready), was urged to find a solution to the Viking problem."
Though the show contains an entirely new set of characters, they do have some links to the characters we have met before. The character of Prince Harald (Leo Suter), for example, is revealed to be a descendent of Vikings character Harald Finehair (Peter Franzen).
In an interview with Newsweek, Valhalla showrunner Jeb Stuart offered his own spin as to what has happened in the 100 years between the two shows.
He said: "I just thought that there was another part to the Vikings story. I thought that the [Vikings creator] Michael Hirst's story really handled the beginnings of the Viking era but there's a lot of that story that happens on the tail end of the Viking era, and great characters that we deal with, like Leif Erickson, Freydis and Harold Sigursson, and King Canute.
"There's also a lot that's changed in that world. You know, the world of the original (series) was a very homogenous group of Vikings and as we move forward into the 11th century, now, we have pagan Vikings and Christian Vikings, and we have all sorts of other looks and characters out there."
Do I Need to Have Seen Vikings to Watch Valhalla?
Well, according to the new series' showrunner, no.
He told Newsweek: "This is really based on what was going on in Scandinavia at the turn of the 11th century. Christianity was kind of a hard pill to swallow up there and Scandinavia is one of the last parts of Western Europe where Christianity came in. A lot of people didn't want to give up the old gods and didn't want to change their beliefs. And so it was a very bloody time, it is a Viking show after all.
"But anyway, for me, it was fun, because it allowed me to play with it, it gave the audience that hadn't seen the original [a chance to] come into a story that was fresh, and for the old audience [they were] used to seeing a sort of very staunch pagan Viking world. Now it had different colours to it, in different layers to it, than the old one."
Uncommon Knowledge
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