Vikings: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know
3. It Was Never Meant To Be Historically Accurate
While this point could be quite obvious, there will always be people who will argue that the show is terribly inaccurate, but what do they expect? The Vikings lived more than 900 years ago. Someone's bound to get something wrong.
People will nitpick on the outfits, the tattoos and the eyeliner - which are mostly historically accurate, actually - and argue that great people like Ragnar and Rollo weren't as flawed as they're portrayed on-screen. The thing is, Michael Hirst's characters needed to be fleshed out to make a compelling series. For example history teaches us they did A and Z, but a series writer would have to fill in from B - Y, so even if Hirst doesn't always stay completely true to history, it's all in the name of entertainment.
On the other hand there's absolutely no proof that Ragnar Lothbrok even existed and most historians call him a mythological figure. Rollo however, did exist, and he wasn't Ragnar's brother. He also lived almost 100 years after Ragnar was said to have lived. In order to tell two big epic tales at the same time, what better way than to make them brothers so they are both living in the same time frame? Hirst's killing two birds with one stone.