Vikings: Valhalla - Netflix Series

Vikings: Valhalla - Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
I'm not too sure about this show. It's a good story, and the production values are pretty good, but I think they bit off more than they can chew. For example, they have Viking long ships, but they look pretty small, but this was back around the 10th century, so maybe the size is accurate.

There are three story lines. We've got Queen Emma of England dealing with her minister Godwin and some sort of treachery. 

We've got Freydis who escaped from Hagar's raid on Kattegut. She ends up in Jomsburg in Pomerania (coastal area of Germany and Poland). Jomsburg is ruled by a tyrant but Freydis prevails, though it's a close run thing.

Leif Eriksson and Harold end up in Russia where Harald comes up with a plan to get rich by taking a boatload of furs to Constantinople. At first I thought they would sail west through the Baltic, past Denmark, through the English channel, around France and Spain to Gibraltar and thence through the Mediterranean. But no, they are heading due south via an ice covered river. It's 900 miles as the crow flies, but given how twisty and turny the river is, it's probably twice that. Plus, the rivers don't connect. There is one flowing north toward Vogrovod, and there is the Dneiper flowing south past Kiev to the Black Sea, but it doesn't look like they connect. Since the route didn't jump out at me, I posted a question on Quora and Boris Ivanov confirms my thinking.

Would it have been possible to take a boat from Novgorod, Russia via rivers to the Black Sea back around the year 1000 AD?

No, that was impossible. The real route was more complicated, and it included travels by land. Here is a description from the Russian Primary Chronicle:

There was a way from the Varangians to the Greeks and from the Greeks along the Dnieper, and from the upper reaches of the Dnieper you can portage boats to Lovot [the Lovat river in Russia and Belarus], and along Lovot you can enter Ilmen, the great lake; Volkhov flows out of the same lake and flows into the great lake Nero [Lake Ladoga], and the mouth of that lake flows into the Varangian Sea.

The Dnieper Rapids were also usually crossed by portaging, because they were too treacherous to sail through them.

1,800 miles (two times 900) at 18 miles a day would take a hundred days. At one point in their journey someone mentions that they have been traveling for two months, so okay. You could probably make a entire show just about this journey, but we only get the highlights, like when the ice dam breaks and when the go over the water fall. Then there is the run-in with the savage Penchengs who capture our two heroes and decide to amuse themselves by cutting them.

 

Novograd to the Black Sea

The black lines trace the easily visible rivers. The rivers extend further but they get very small and very windy. Very small is a relative term. At Mogilev, which is about half way between the ends of the two black lines, the Dnipro (aka Dnieper) river is 250 feet wide.

They went to a lot of trouble to shoot the ice boat scenes:

Vikings: Valhalla Season 2 | Behind the Scenes: Ice River | Netflix
Netflix: Behind the Streams
Wikipedia page here.
Season 1 post here.