VIKINGS Season 3 – Preview!

Images from VIKINGS on the History Channel used here only as illustrations for this show. All rights belong to History Channel.

Tonight is the night! Lissa Bryan and I will be watching VIKINGS on History Channel. 10 pm Eastern time, follow @HistoryVikings, @LissaBryan, and me, @sandyquill on twitter. Lissa Bryan is an historical fiction writer, as I am, and she is brilliant. You’ll appreciate her insights, I am sure.

What will be happening this year on VIKINGS? The History Channel has provided some peeks into the upcoming season. Check out their video preview as well as their official Tumblr site: Vikings on HISTORY.

Well, we hear Ragnar is taking his people to England and even PARIS. But, as he asks, “Since when does any of this have to do with my happiness?” I have to think that the battles are hard for him. Not so much physically as much as emotionally and psychologically.

He is confronted with a need to be loyal to divergent people. “How many of us must die for your Christians?” Floki demands.

“We fight. That is how we win, and that is how we die,” Ragnar tells his son Björn.

Princess Aslaug asks Ragnar if he loves her, but we don’t hear the answer, here.

And I always, I confess, wonder how Ragnar’s heart stands in relation to Lagertha. (Hey, I’m a romance writer, too, yeah? The relationships are HUGE to me.)

Writer Michael Hirst was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter, and has much else to say about Ragnar, Björn, Lagertha, the Seer, and even about Kevin Durand (whom I have enjoyed watching since I saw him ages ago in Mystery, Alaska with Russell Crowe) and his role this season. It’s so exciting! Hirst says, in summation:

Season three is our best season yet it’s our most ambitious season yet, and there are a lot of shocks and tragedies and unexpected events along the way.

Clive Standen, who plays Rollo, has been around and about on social media as well. He talks about Rollo’s future. He has more tattoos, the actor says, and “goes more down the rabbit hole of being a berserker.” But as we know, from watching him throughout the other seasons, Rollo can and does surprise us. Standen says:

So I think that’s midway through season three, maybe Rollo might surprise you and you’ll see a complete transformation, almost a phoenix from the flames.

Also, there have been rumblings that Athelstan will not be with us for the entire season. (George Blagden has a role in another historical production, and that is going well, so I have heard.) How will his crisis of faith play out? There is a series of short videos called Athelstan’s Journals on History Channel’s Vikings page. Check out their Videos section and look for them. There are several, each about five minutes in length.

And if that’s not ENOUGH to keep you occupied ’til the episode airs, check out the quick three-minute Behind the Scenes video. The actors chime in with words like “epic” and “better every year”. It sounds like everyone is really excited about what they got to film to share with us.

Find Lissa and me tonight and say Heill! We’re raiding England!

Image taken from the official Vikings Tumblr.