Small Details In Vikings Only True Fans Noticed

Screenwriter and producer Michael Hirst has made a career out of reimagining famous historical figures, both for the small screen and the big one. The Yorkshire native popped up on Hollywood's radar after penning the Cate Blanchett-led "Elizabeth," a critically acclaimed biopic that detailed the early years of Elizabeth I's reign. Blanchett reprised the role in Hirst's 2007 sequel "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," by which point the writer was hard at work on his first TV show, "The Tudors."

"I was attacked quite a lot for 'The Tudors,'" Hirst told Creative Screenwriting. "Henry VIII is such an iconic figure that you're not really supposed to show him in any other way than he is normally shown. But it's been totally different with 'Vikings.'" The proud Brit went on to reveal that "Vikings," the saga of Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) and his sons, has had the seal of approval from the curator of the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and the head of Scandinavian Studies at Harvard (despite the many artistic liberties he took with the Viking timeline). "It's had a great response from teachers, historians, intellectuals, and all people who know about the period."

It's the little things that make "Vikings" authentic as well as entertaining, though many of the show's nods and references went unnoticed by the majority of viewers. Here's our round-up of all the small details in "Vikings" that only true fans noticed. (Warning — there are spoilers below.)

"Vikings" never shied away from showing the true nature of warfare in the Viking-age, delighting viewers with numerous bloody battles over the course of six seasons. According to the show's makeup and prosthetic designer, Tom McInerney, his team had to make "hundreds and thousands of liters of blood" to keep up with demand. "We have to make approximately ten 50-liter barrels of blood for every battle scene, and the challenge was to make something that doesn't stain costumes or the actors' skin," he told SBS. "We've invented a new type of 'blood' made of sugar syrup and food coloring that washes out."

Making fake blood is a relative walk in the park compared to fake heads, however. In one memorable Season 3 scene, Ragnar attaches the severed heads of conquered foes to his ships in a (very successful) attempt to terrify the Mercians. "I got a phone call saying I had 40 heads to make — fast," McInerney revealed. "To speed things up, we enlisted any cast and crew we could find." They did their best to meet the deadline, but McInerney admitted that they took a cheeky shortcut, one that only eagle-eyed "Vikings" fans will have noticed. He revealed, "If you look closely, Travis Fimmel's head is in there too."

Travis Fimmel gave a masterclass in silent acting during the "Vikings" Season 2 finale ... but barely anyone noticed. The tenth and final episode of the season is called "The Lord's Prayer," and the famous Christian invocation is all that Fimmel wanted to say during the entire runtime, according to Michael Hirst. Speaking online during the Comic-Con@Home "Vikings" panel in 2020 (via the Express), the showrunner revealed, "Travis said to me, 'Do you think, perhaps it would be a good idea if I don't say anything in this episode except the Lord's Prayer?' And I said, 'Well, you are in a lot of scenes,' and he said, 'Yeah, but I can do it by looking, I don't need to say anything.'"

It was certainly a "radical idea," Hirst said, though it was one that he liked. He took Fimmel's suggestion on board but told him to make it their little secret. "I said, 'Don't tell anyone. Don't tell MGM. Don't tell History.' Because no one would allow it, your lead character is not saying what's on the page that they had approved," Hirst continued. "So we did it, and I don't think anyone noticed, nobody noticed that he didn't say anything because he was still in the scenes." Aside from the odd blunt response en route to his meeting with Athelstan (George Blagden), Ragnar doesn't speak a word until he meets with his Christian captive turned confidante to learn the Lord's Prayer.

By the time "Vikings" wrapped after six seasons, fans of the show were well aware of the creator's love of T.S. Eliot. Michael Hirst, who studied English and American literature at the University of Nottingham, referenced Eliot's poetry in his "Vikings" dialogue on numerous occasions, sometimes rather subtly. For example, Helga (played by the showrunner's daughter, Maude Hirst) uses a line from Eliot's "Gerontion" in Season 3's "The Dead," and pieces of his poem "The Waste Land" have been uttered by everyone from the Seer (John Kavanagh) to King Olaf (Steven Berkoff).

Perhaps the best example of Hirst lifting directly from Eliot came by way of actor Linus Roache, whose character, King Ecbert of Wessex, recites lines from "Four Quarters" as he gazes out of his window towards the end of Season 3. "The reason that I thought I could do that is because the lines are about time," Hirst told Creative Screenwriting. "I thought that that was really what I was talking about within the show — connecting past, present, and future. ... I thought people would pick up on it and think I was crazy, but no one picked up on it until I mentioned it in an interview." According to Hirst, he tried to tweak the lines to make Ecbert's musing sound more appropriate for a Saxon king, but he found that "everything sounded stale and poor when compared to Eliot."

Some truly impressive beards popped up on "Vikings" over the years, but in the vast majority of cases, thanks was owed to the costume department rather than the guy rocking it. If you look closely enough, you'll notice that the brilliant crumb catchers featured in the show are totally fake, but only if you really squint — as elaborate as some of them are, they're generally very convincing. The show's makeup and prosthetic guru, Tom McInerney, managed to perfect the art of the fake beard during the course of his time on "Vikings," though some trial and error was needed.

During the early seasons of the show, the actors wore yak-hair beards that were personalized to fit the shape of their faces. "This method was posing problems because it didn't allow for much mobility for the actors to perform, and when they ate food, it got messy," McInerney told SBS in 2017. "We cheated a bit and now hand-lay all the beards on to the actors' faces and use little ties that we've developed here to keep them secure. It's sped up the process considerably and eliminates the micromanaging of facial hair." When he sat down for an interview with Australian grooming company Milkman that same year, McInerney was asked to name his all-time favorite "Vikings" beard, and it was a tie. He said, "For me, on this show, it was both Floki's and Ragnar's beards."

Many of the outfits seen in "Vikings" scream function over fashion, though the show has pushed the boat out with the odd elaborate get-up on occasion. "The Vikings were very adept at dying furs," Joan Bergin, the show's costume designer, told The Hollywood Reporter. "When we first tried to do it, the skins would frizzle up after a few days so we had to dye them right before the scene." Not all the costumes that she created were 100% suitable for the time period ("The era when every detail had to be historically accurate is gone," Bergin said, echoing showrunner Michael Hirst's approach), but that's not to say a lot of hard work didn't go into them.

According to Bergin, her costumes were embedded with subtle hints about the personalities of their owners. Simple things like hand-braiding the wool and using decorative hair could "give a life force to the texture," she told THR, explaining, "Adding this texture helps create the sense that there are complexities to the character." What's even more impressive is that the main cast of characters got a new look every week, according to the show's head of costume, Susan O'Connor. "Every single costume is unique to the person and the episode, so we rarely reuse what viewers have already seen," she told SBS.

When Michael Hirst began writing "Vikings," the plan was for Ragnar to die at the end of the first season, leaving the bulk of the story for his sons. "But, of course, once I started writing," he told Vulture, "I wanted to continue to be with him." Travis Fimmel's character survived way longer than the showrunner initially anticipated, though his eventual death is among Hirst's favorites from his time working on the show. Not only did it showcase Ragnar the tactician at his finest (he knew that his execution at the hands of the Saxons would unite his sons and the rest of the Norse world against them), but it was also brilliantly shot — with real snakes.

While the vipers that sink their teeth into Ragnar are obviously CGI, there were "about 60" real serpents in that pit with him, as Fimmel revealed during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "I didn't mind them at all," the actor said. "I was covered in snake poop at the end. I got bitten a few times, but that was fine — it was them pooping on me that annoyed me more than anything." According to the episode's director Ciaran Donnelly, Fimmel really was that cool about the whole thing. "He grew up on a farm in Australia and he's quite used to snakes," Donnelly told Metro. "I feel it was quite authentic in that way, and that's thanks to Travis' ability to hang with snakes."