'Vikings' creator Michael Hirst knew the show's end from the very start: 'I had to kill some of my favourite characters'

After seven years of blood feuds, blitzes and searing affairs, the Vikings saga is nearing its end. It seems like only yesterday the mythic Ragnar Lothbrok began hatching plans to invade England, pulling fans along for a violent, rip-roaring ride. Since then, we’ve watched favourites – such as Lothbrok's son Bjorn, now a Viking chief – grow up in front of our eyes. We’ve also seen more than a handful of beloved characters be snatched away by the jaws of death. The second half of the show's sixth season will be released in its entirety on Starzplay on Thursday, December 31. However, Vikings creator Michael Hirst – like most of the show's cast and crew – actually said his goodbyes to the seafaring Norse warriors more than two years ago. All 20 episodes of the final season were shot in 2018, Hirst says. But as the History Channel – the network for whom Hirst wrote the show – insists on splitting each season into two parts, we’re only now going to find out how the show ends, nearly a full year after the season first premiered. "The History Channel had to monetise the show as much as they could. Every year they'd just do 10 episodes so they fell behind over the years," Hirst tells The National. In an unusual agreement, the network has struck a deal with streaming platforms to show the upcoming 10 episodes before they debut on the History Channel. While Starzplay has first dibs for Vikings in the region, the show will be premiering on Amazon in the US and parts of Europe. “Of course I owe the History Channel a great debt, but I’m glad these last 10 episodes are being streamed," Hirst says. "It’s time that the audience watch the conclusion of the saga on which I’ve worked day and night for seven years.” However, this delayed release did inspire the screenwriter and producer to look over the script again and reacquaint himself with the events of the final stretch of the show. “I became once more very emotional. I had to make some big decisions in these last 10 episodes. I had to kill off some of my favourite characters. Characters I spent years with.” Hirst – who is also the creator of Emmy Award-winning series The Tudors – always knew where and how Vikings would wrap up. When he first sold the show to the History Channel in 2011, he told the network the ending. “I didn’t know how many seasons it would take to the ending I had in mind, but I had a very strong sense of where I was going to take it,” he says. “It took 89 episodes and six seasons, but we got there.” As for everything that happened in between, a lot of it was driven by history. While Hirst does a lot of the reading and research himself, he also seeks advice from a historical consultant. “This was a fairly faithful dramatisation of the beginning of the Viking age, of what happened to the Vikings once they developed the technology to build boats that could sail across open oceans and up rivers,” Hirst says. He notes that a handful of academics have written about the show, favourably comparing it to the real history of the Norse warriors, saying Vikings was "as authentic as it was possible to be". The Vikings were not a literate people, meaning a lot of what we know about them comes via their enemies, such as the Anglo-Saxons and the French. This gave Hirst more than enough room to employ dramatic license while staying faithful to the broad strokes of Viking history. “I have no regrets because I followed historical events,” Hirst says, adding that he still made some tweaks in the name of screenwriting. “Of course, I am a dramatist, I'm not a documentary maker. The joy in writing drama is putting the characters together in a dynamic and meaningful way, because that's the reason people watch shows like this. It's not actually because they want to find out more about Viking history. That's an incidental benefit of the show.” If there's one reason Hirst prefers writing TV shows over films, it's that in the latter, characters are revealed, whereas in a series – especially one that has gone on for as long as Vikings – characters are developed. “You can live with a character for much longer and that enables you to see them more clearly, but also show the possibility of contradictions. We all have contradictions, but in movies you don’t see that very often.” One character Hirst is particularly proud of is shield maiden Lagertha, former queen of Kattegat and Lothbrok’s first wife. She was, Hirst says, every bit as mythic as her former husband. However, there are more legends about her than facts, and so Hirst had to give the character storylines that reflected different aspects of her development. “Even though the History Channel was a male-skewed channel, it was very clear in my mind that this story was going to be as much about women as men,” Hirst says. “The Viking attitude towards women was much more enlightened than the Saxon and Christian perspective. Women could divorce their husbands, they could buy property and they could rule.” Fans have been eagerly waiting for more than two years to see how the saga wraps up and “fans deserve this opportunity to watch it at their own pace and time", Hirst adds. “These last 10 episodes are amazing,” he says. “I think that I have managed to satisfactorily conclude a lot of significant storylines. And I think the audience will feel not cheated in any way as they were by some other shows.”

'Vikings' creator Michael Hirst knew the show's end from the very start: 'I had to kill some of my favourite characters'

The second half of the show's final season will be released this month