As a fan of the TV-show and a resident of contemporary "Kattegatt" or what I assume they intend to be somewhere along the Danish/Swedish coast, I was struck by how vastly different the show looks compared to what I imagined this place looked like back in the day. Which is why I have some questions.
Now I do realise that the show is actually shot in northern Ireland and that 99% of the entire thing is pure fiction, but what I wanted to know was what this place of the world, eg Scania and surrounding parts, was actually like in say 850, as compared to the show.
Wasn't there strong central Danish leadership back then? Wouldn't the Danish vikings have answered to someone bigger than a chieftain?
In the show they explain viking raiding with the need to find new land because of the poor quality of the earth in Scandinavia, but to my knowledge Denmark and southern Sweden are actually known for having very high quality soil throughout the entire area. Was this not the case back then?
Are the sizes of the settlements accurate? Would there be no more than 50 or so individuals in a given village/holdfast?
Thanks for any help or information !
There was a Danish king, yes, but he would have been pretty weak by most standards of kingship. He had his own personal guard, royal estates and the right to collect tolls and taxes from traders, so they had some power. But they were very much subject to a larger class of freedmen. The source I have describes the king thusly: "As elsewhere in Scandinavia, kingship [in Denmark] combined hereditary and elective aspects. The candidate for the throne should be of royal blood, but he must be accepted as king by the free men at their assemblies. If he lost their favor, they could put him down, or try to." Free men still held a significant share of the political power in the country. It doesn't seem like they would have needed permission to go out on a raid, or anything.
This is tangential, really, but the history of Danish kings in exile can be fascinating. Claimants to the Danish throne, if they were ousted or forced to flee Denmark, frequently made a living raiding the Frankish coastline in order to secure money to make a comeback. Sometimes they would even secure political patronage from the Franks. Take Harald Klak. He was the king of Denmark from 812-14 and then was forced to flee. In 815, Frankish king Louis the Pious tried to reinstall him as king, and fails. In 819, he's made co-king with two sons of an ex-king, Godfrid. In 823, he appeals for Frankish help against the sons, and presumably gets it. In 826, he was baptized at Mainz; in 827, he was promptly ousted again and headed for Rüstringen, in Frisia. They made another attempt to restore him in 828, which failed. In 833, Louis's son Lothar exhorts him to attack Frisia, which is Louis's possession, because the Carolingian dynasty is crazy and Lothar is ambitious. In 841, Louis's son Lothar, now in power, grants him the immensely valuable island of Walcheren (at the mouth of the Scheldt river, in position to control trade up and down the river). He's eventually killed in 852 by his Frankish patrons, who feared him turning traitor. Womp womp.
Sources:
Rosedahl, Else. The Vikings. London, England: Penguin Books, 1987, 1998. Print. ISBN 0-14-025282-7.
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings. Ed. Peter Sawyer. Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. ISBN 978-0-19-258434-6.
Just to add to when Ragnar shows Horik the soil in England (which is the scene I think you're referring to [S2 Ep3]), it wasn't because of the soil quality alone that they wanted more land.
It's due to feudal fighting (ie general ownership of land, what we see between Jarl Borg and Horik), and if you remember back to Season 1 Episode 1, Ragnar is being scolded by Earl Haraldson for speaking up to him about sailing West. When Haraldson calls Ragnar in private he says something along the lines of "You're a farmer, and you should be content with what you have... (something-something) shortage of land and demand for more."