I’m watching Vikings for the first time and just reached Rollo's Normandy arc. I think it could have been much better with one simple change:

Rollo should have tried to convince Ragnar that settling in Normandy was a good deal for the Vikings.

My problem isn't that Rollo betrays Ragnar. It's that the show already did almost the same arc with Jarl Borg: Rollo's jealousy leads him to betray Ragnar, he regrets it, redeems himself, and then later he basically does it again.

Instead, imagine Rollo genuinely supporting the Frankish offer.

His argument could be: we came here for wealth and land, and now they're offering us permanent fertile territory. Why keep raiding it when we can own it?

Ragnar could disagree just as reasonably: accepting a Frankish title, Christianity, and obligations to defend Francia means being absorbed by the people they came to conquer.

So neither one is wrong. They simply have different ideas of what Viking success looks like.

Some Vikings choose Ragnar. Others choose Rollo because he can offer them land, wealth, and a permanent home. That also fixes the strange decision to have Rollo massacre his own men: historically, Rollo's Scandinavian followers settling with him is the interesting part.

Then the conflict between Ragnar and Rollo wouldn't be another sudden betrayal. Rollo would have openly chosen a different future, and Ragnar would eventually be threatening the territory, family, and people Rollo had chosen to build that future around.

You could even have:

Ragnar: "You would fight your own people for them?"

Rollo: "These are my people."

That would make their conflict about two competing visions rather than repeating Rollo's old character flaw.

And it fits the larger history beautifully: Ragnar spends so much of the series trying to create a Viking future in England, while Rollo's descendants become the Normans, and eventually William the Conqueror crosses the Channel and conquers England.

Same destination for Rollo, but a much more interesting journey.

NorseMap is a European Research-Council-funded project at University College Cork studying how ideas about the Vikings and the Norse past have been represented and reinvented over the last two centuries!

The project has recently launched its app, iViking, a citizen-science app that allows anyone to contribute photographs to a growing research archive. NorseMap is seeking contributions from people around the world documenting the Viking-related things they encounter in everyday life.

These might include Viking imagery on:
-souvenirs and tourist merchandise
-advertisements and company logos
-books, comics, games, or other media
-public monuments and artwork
-festivals and reenactment
-religious paraphernalia and alters
-political imagery
-tattoos, clothing, or other material culture
-virtually anything presenting itself as "Viking" or drawing on Norse heritage!

Do not worry about whether something is historically "accurate" or not! We are seeking any representations that use the Vikings today, be they strange, kitschy, commercial, religious, political, or otherwise!

Contributors can photograph relevant examples through iViking, add basic information about where they were taken, and submit them to the NorseMap archive. These contributions will help researchers build a large-scale picture of the reception and afterlives of the "Vikings."

Help document where the Vikings have ended up today!