If you’re expecting a sober history lesson from a show called Vikings: The Immersive Experience, then you have not been paying attention to the current trend for large-scale, teched-up, AI-slop-kissed international touring ‘experiences’ that take an unashamedly fast-and-loose attitude towards historical fact.
Even by the standards of the form, Vikings feels unusually batshit. There’s a reasonable amount of sensible historical stuff around the fringes, meaning you probably will learn something if you want to. But there’s no denying that the core of it lies in a couple of grandiose filmed works of incoherent CGI pro-Viking slopaganda (with a girlboss edge).
Let’s take the sensible stuff first. For starters, some lovely interactive maps provide a clear overview of the Viking Age, which is here defined as running from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 until its end, 300-ish years later. Every visitor is issued with headphones that play a sober initial commentary; although the exhibition isn’t exactly heaving with facts, figures or period artefacts, when you get to certain symbols in it, you can press a corresponding button on the handset to conjure sensible, detailed historical exposition. commentary.
But this is not what you’d call the meat of the exhibition. Using animation, VR and a big sloppity slop immersive film that you watch from a recreation of a longboat (obviously that’s cool), the show nominally tells the story of Kraka, a young woman descended from the gods themselves, who marries the Viking lord Ragnar Lodbrok and sires him multiple children with badass epithets like Ivar the Boneless and Bjorn Ironside, who grow up to violently persecute the English and the Irish.
I’m not a #justice4lindisfarne guy
Putting a fictional female figure at the heart of this show is an interesting choice: the exhibition doesn’t have a huge amount to say about Viking women generally, but one assumes Kraka was picked to broaden the appeal and upend expectations of Norse society just being one big sausagefest. To be honest, Vikings is maybe a bit too mad for that to land in any meaningful way, though I can imagine bloodthirstier young girls might find Kraka quite cool.
The largest area of the show is a twinkly, magical forest which has more straight-down-the-line exhibition-y bits tucked away in it, but is more about Insta-friendly enchanted glades, magic pools, etc. There’s a VR bit that offers some background to Kraka’s family – something about a magic sword and evil wolf – before tracing her courtship to slightly Aragon-ish local king Ragnar.
Really it’s just the warm-up act for the immersive film, which we enter via a dry ice-filled chamber called ‘the mists of time’. The film is pretty nuts, in the sense that it’s basically shameless Viking propaganda, showing us – via the medium of CGI that looks like an extended Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla cutscene - how Ragnar and his sons were just a great bunch of lads and how Kraka did a bang up job of looking after their home while the menfolk were all off doing… something not really discussed.
The exhibition as a whole certainly acknowledges that Viking raids were a thing, but its main attraction is determined to paper over this. At one point, Kraka becomes righteously angry with the British for killing Ragnar, and it’s all a bit ‘er, but what was he doing in Britain, exactly?’
I don’t really think this matters – I’m not a #justice4lindisfarne guy – and indeed if this were a Norwegian production I’d see where they were coming from. There is just something a bit eccentric about sitting in London watching a CGI film made by, I think, Germans, about how it was good the Vikings ravaged the British Isles, actually.
But then it’s an eccentric show, and this is the fundamental point: if you want to see a really great exhibition about the Vikings, you could always pay a visit to the Jorvik Centre. If you’re looking to kill some time with the kids and would be happy to do it via the medium of lurid CGI and the odd salient factoid about the Norsemen – well, Dock X is right here, and a lot cheaper and easier than a day trip to York.
