6x60' | History/People | 4K

CAN 2023

West One Int.

Our series combines a first hand, real life adventure documenting this journey with all the new information scientists, archeologists, and researchers have discovered to form a new, more complete, picture of the Viking story that is more real, more relevant, and more recent than any ever told, including a recent, 1,000th anniversary transatlantic voyage along the historic Viking route to North America.
From the end of the 8th through to the 11th century a mass exodus of Scandinavians leaving their homelands to seek their fortunes elsewhere changed the course of history forever. These strong sea-faring warriors - collectively known as Vikings or Norsmen - undertook large scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading adventures through Europe and beyond. Though their history was passed down orally and eventually recorded in story telling tools like rune stones, modern records and writing were mostly made long after the fact and most popular conceptions are based on observers and victims accounts. The great mystery of their motivation lies at the heart of an ocean of mysteries about their rise and fall, their technology, the knowledge, their needs, ands culture.
The arcing story of our series is a real-life modern journey. In our story the largest Viking ship ever built in modern times, Draken, is designed, built, and sea tested. A crew is recruited and the ship sails successfully through the ancient route to Iceland, Greenland, and on to North America. This story forms the crucial spine for a full accounting of the many new breakthroughs in Viking research, discoveries, and understanding.