Vicious Vikings!

Before I ever wrote the first page of my Viking series, I had to answer a question that had bothered me for years. Who were the Vikings really?

Not the horned-helmet warriors from movies. Not the mystical giants of legend. Not the larger-than-life figures who seem to stride through mythology with lightning in their hands and destiny at their backs.

I wanted the people.

To prepare for the series, I spent months surrounded by books on Viking lore, sagas, archaeology, and Norse mythology. My desk looked less like a writing space and more like the reading room of a small medieval library. I read dozens of sources—some ancient, some modern, some scholarly, some speculative—all trying to understand where the legends ended and the human beings began.

The sagas are fascinating, but they are also layered with poetry, symbolism, and generations of storytelling. A warrior becomes invincible after enough retellings. A clever leader becomes half god. A brutal battle becomes destiny rather than desperation.

But underneath all of that mythmaking are real people. Farmers. Traders. Explorers. Parents. Friends. Rivals. Men and women who lived in cold climates, who worried about harvests and storms, who built ships not because they were mythical heroes but because they needed opportunity beyond the horizon.

The deeper I read, the more I realized that the Vikings were far more complex than the caricatures we often see. Yes, they could be violent. Yes, they raided. But they were also navigators, merchants, craftsmen, settlers, and lawmakers. They built communities. They argued about land and honor. They told stories about themselves that grew larger with each generation. That human complexity was exactly what I wanted to capture in my series.

I didn’t want magical warriors marching through fog. I wanted flawed people making difficult decisions. I wanted readers to feel the wind on the deck of a longship, the uncertainty of sailing into unknown waters, and the tension between ambition and survival.

In other words, I wanted to know the Vikings not as legends, but as neighbors... from another century.

Research became the foundation of everything. The clothing they wore. The ships they sailed. The laws they followed. The beliefs that shaped how they understood life and death. Every small detail helped build a world that felt authentic rather than theatrical. Only after I felt I understood them as people did I begin writing.

Because history, when you strip away the mythology, is still full of extraordinary stories. The courage to cross an ocean in a wooden ship. The stubbornness to build a settlement in a hostile land. The pride, loyalty, ambition, and tragedy that exist in every generation of humanity. Those are the stories I wanted to tell.

The legends are wonderful. But the people behind them are even better.