The Massacre at St. Brice will be the entry point to Vikings: Valhalla.
Set more than 100 years after the end of the original Vikings series, in the early 11th century, Vikings: Valhalla. follows the heroic adventures of some of the most famous Vikings of all time, such as the legendary explorer Leif Eriksson (Sam Corlett), his fiery, strong-willed sister Freydis Eriksdotter (Frida Gustavsson) and the ambitious Prince of the North, Harald Sigurdsson (Leo Suter). When tensions between Vikings and English royalty reach a bloody breaking point, and the Vikings themselves diverge over their pagan and Christian beliefs, these three iconic characters embark on a journey that takes them across oceans and to battlefields, from Kattegat to England. and further, in the struggle for survival and glory.
Vikings: Valhalla first trailer
Vikings: Valhalla will release exclusively on Netflix on February 25th.
“When I came on the project, I said that I didn’t want to write a script for the seventh season of Vikings, the continuation of the Michael Hirst series,” says Jeb Stewart, showrunner, writer and executive producer. “This is a series that follows its own course, its own rhythm and has a new historical context. I have done a lot of research. I advanced my study of Viking history until I was invincible. And so I learned about the massacre on St. Bryce’s Day (when King Æthelred the Deluded ordered the killing of all Danes in the Kingdom).
I thought “Wow”. For me, it has a great cultural resonance and current relevance. I felt that we should start Vikings Valhalla here because there were pagan Vikings and Christian Vikings at that time. As in our contemporary American culture, there are Republicans and Democrats. And then when you go to war – for example, when it was September 11 – you suddenly forget your ideology, you become an American and form only one nation.
Inadvertently, King Æthelred gave the future King Cnut the Great an excuse to unite the Vikings. He gave them a reason to stop killing each other over religious differences. A reason to be viking again and I thought it was a really cool place to start a new series. Then, bringing Freydis and Leif from Greenland, we were able to arrive 150 years later…”