It's great ... for about five minutes. The first five minutes do a decent job of placing the Viking Age in a deeper historical context. Many of the things and styles that we think of as characteristics of the Viking Age may in fact be traced into the earlier period, which Scandinavian scholars typically call the Late Iron Age (ca. 500-800, i.e. after the 'Roman Iron Age') or the Vendel Period (named after finds from the Vendel cemetery in Scandinavia, which dates to this same period). Continental scholars sometimes refer to this same time as the Merovingian Period, naming it after the family that ruled the Franks between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the Carolingian dynasty.

There are a limited number of spectacular finds from across northern Europe during this time. The video does a decent job of assigning specific places to these finds, although it doesn't really show where they were or when they were active. Overall, society across Europe was deeply impoverished during this period. The plutocratic elites of the Roman period had risen and fallen in conjunction with the Roman state, and once the Roman administration collapsed, so to did the routes for trade and taxation that the elites and their state had sustained. Perhaps surprisingly, this might have been good news for average people, who no longer had to pay such high taxes and who seem to have put less effort into agricultural production by the year 500.

Nevertheless, at least some small parts of society remained highly mobile, allowing some of the fancy items featured in this video to circulate even to the furthest reaches of Scandinavia. The problem is that without a highly stratified society, it's difficult for elites to demand or organize the labor needed for resource extraction. As a result, many of the fancy things that archaeologists dig up and museum curators love to feature must have been imports, even though many of them were reworked by local craftsmen.

This means that very different people often looked alike because (1) the things they fancied came from similar distant places, and (2) the shiny things that we like to look at came from the highest and most mobile strata of a society, who, however, were not necessarily the best representatives of their societies at large. In particular, this video highlights the similarities between the artifacts excavated at the Sutton Hoo cemetery north of London and the Vendel and Valsgärde cemeteries near modern Stockholm. I'm of the opinion that the persons burying their dead at Sutton Hoo were indeed trying to foster connections with people in central Sweden, although it's hard to say how much the people buried at Vendel knew or cared about these England-dwelling wannabes.

So where does this leave us? Well, it should make us skeptical of claims like:

The shared material culture indicates that there was a pan-Germanic culture across northern Europe, who shared religious beliefs, too. This vast cross-Continental culture with its rich artifacts was thriving long before the so-called 'Vikings'. @4:57

This conclusion is plum wrong, and unsupported by this otherwise good video on the best artifacts surviving from the Vendel Period. The existence of a primitive 'pan-Germanic culture' is a myth that dates to the 19th-century heydey of German nationalism and was later exploited by the Nazis. Although most people in northern Europe probably spoke derivatives of a proto-Germanic language, that's no reason to assume that they could understand each other or shared some sort of mutual identity. The archaeological record evidently proves that despite the purported linguistic similarities, these people were wont to fight amongst themselves and often looked to outside cultures as inspiration or as sources of exotic prestige goods.

With this in mind, we should be doubly skeptical of claims about shared religious beliefs. No texts survive from the period, which should perhaps give us greater clarity. (We need not assume, for example, that everyone who possesses a bible shares in a single culture or believes the same things.) The archaeological record, however, again emphasizes diversity. The big burial mounds at Uppsala do compare well with Sutton Hoo, but Uppsala was the center for a massive cemetery whereas Sutton Hoo was not. The Oseberg ship burial in Norway might be compared to these other sites as well, but there they have evidence for human sacrifice which these other sites are lacking. In places like Uppåkra in southern Sweden or on the Danish island of Bornholm, cult life seems to have focused around a very limited number of temple sites. If all these people believed the same thing, or even if they had some universal ritual practices regardless of what they may have meant, I have yet to see evidence for anything of the kind.

In sum, the video rightly highlights the Vendel Period as a time of exotic finds in central Sweden. And it points to connections with eastern England that scholars are still trying to make sense of. But these thin strands of evidence are not enough to tie together a story about pan-Germanic cultures and shared religious beliefs. So the things are great, but watch with care.