In general, Vikings isn't doing too badly re accuracy issues, I think. They introduced real things like the sun compass, and they've avoided the whole horned-helmet trope. I was delighted to see Ragnar's wife actually weaving with their daughter on a warp-weighted loom in the first episode. They were weaving from the top down, and beating the fell line upward, which is exactly right. If anyone was spinning, though, I missed seeing it.
What I really wanted, though, was to see a fair number of women surreptitiously spinning and weaving extra fabric for the sail of this boat that Ragnar & Co. are secretly building. No luck there. Sigh... I'd really like some historical drama, sometime, to make that point--that without dozens of women with hand spindles, spinning dawn to dusk, not one Viking ship would ever have tasted saltwater.
SPOILER ALERT!
In this week's episode, I thought they did really well with just how clueless the Norsemen would have been at their first exposure to the monastics at Lindisfarne. It's an interesting take on 'first contact' stories; their reaction was not, "we hate these guys and their religion,"; it was more like, "huh? Why do they have all this gold and stuff, and they're not protecting it?" Another one says, "Maybe they think their god will protect it." The response to that is, with a gesture toward the crucifix on the wall, "If that's their god, then he's dead. Who worships a dead god?" or words to that effect; I don't remember the line exactly. In another building, one of them enters the scriptorium, and is fascinated with this flat crinkly stuff and the marks on it, because he's never seen parchment. He crinkles it, tears it, sniffs it, then discovers that it burns, and cheerfully sets the whole place on fire with pages of manuscript. No textile content here, but intriguing historical issues.
I don't know if there was a king of Norway who actually forbade anyone from exploring westward; it just doesn't ring true for me. They were a pretty opportunistic lot, on the whole, and I just can't see it happening. It seems to be more like an artificially constructed conflict for dramatic purposes, and it's wearing thin already.
