My favorite TV show of all time is Vikings (2013–2021, now on Netflix), and here’s how it connects to other sources of inspiration and with the themes behind my own stories.
Vikings
Yes, Vikings is gory, and not just because of the battle scenes. I had to look away during those blood eagle executions, and the human sacrifices at Uppsala didn’t sit well with me either. And yes, it’s historically inaccurate. Characters who lived decades apart meet on screen, and the writers borrow from history at large to build drama, like sending Bjorn Ironside into battle in a way that echoes the legend of El Cid. But despite all that, I really love this show and its sequel, Vikings: Valhalla (2022–2024, Netflix).
What grabbed me was how Michael Hirst (writer, producer, and also the creator of The Tudors, another favorite of mine) used religious belief as a force that shaped every character’s choices and drove the story forward. The tension between Norse paganism and Christianity pushed good and bad people on both sides to do terrible things. The intensity of that drama left me awe-struck at times and blurting to my husband that the writing just blew my mind.
One of the most powerful moments in the entire series is the conversation between Ragnar Lothbrok (chained in a cage) and King Ecbert in Season 4: two men trying to understand each other’s gods, fears, and even each other’s hopes. Ragnar had considered Christianity and lost faith in his own gods, and Ecbert was fascinated by Ragnar’s worldview and troubled by his own faith’s contradictions. Their exchange is must‑watch TV about faith and identity, the longing to understand our place in the universe, and the human cost of believing different things about the unknown. It’s a perfect example of belief driving story conflict. (Nah, I can’t do it justice with my fancy words. You just gotta see it.)
I aim for that kind of narrative force in my own historical fantasy novels. In my series, where the Roman Empire of the 2nd century CE presses against the borders of my fictional kingdom of Dhawosia (based on ancient Dacia in Eastern Europe), every character is shaped by the gods they believe in. Dhawosia has three major belief systems: the Old Gods, an only-god named El, and a splinter movement called the Path. And of course, the Romans bring their own pantheon into the mix. When these systems collide, the conflict spills into people’s lives and does real harm.
Watching Vikings was the first time I saw a mainstream story built on the same forces that fascinate me: belief, identity, and the collision of worldviews. Until then, I thought the stories I was writing were too niche. Seeing those themes resonate with wide audiences, season after season, felt like permission to write the stories I love because they’re rooted in what makes us human.
The Evolution of God
Because my work centers on this clash of belief systems, I’ve been thinking about a book I read some years ago: Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God (2009), which traces the long arc of how humans have imagined the divine. Wright’s arguments resonated because I grew up in Romania and lived through the post‑1989 shift from state‑enforced secularity to Christian Orthodoxy. That abrupt transformation is one of the reasons I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of belief ever since.
Wright’s historical journey begins with animism, the belief in the existence of spirits separate from bodies. For ancient people, animism shaped how they thought about why good and bad things happened, and whether there was a way to influence those unseen forces.
Since their first attempts to explain how the world works, humans have adapted their understanding of the gods based on the conditions on the ground, Wright argues in his book. That’s why beliefs evolved over time. When an army lost a battle, it said something about the patron god of that army. When a plague struck, it could be interpreted as the gods sending a stern message to their people, which in turn changed how the gods were perceived. When ancient astronomers discovered that solar eclipses were predictable, the belief in heavenly creatures snatching the sun was abandoned.
The earliest supernatural world was crowded. Hunter-gatherers believed in at least five types of beings: elemental spirits such as the winds and the moon, strange creatures controlling parts of nature, organic spirits hidden in animals, ancestral spirits, and also, a high god who might have been a creator but not a manager or a moral god.
“In the hunter-gatherer universe, the problem of evil isn’t so baffling, because the supernatural doesn’t take the form of a single all-powerful being, much less a morally perfect one. Rather, the supernatural realm is populated by various beings that, as a rule, are strikingly like human beings: they’re not always in a good mood, and the things that put them in a bad mood don’t have to make much sense.” — The Evolution of God, p. 21
The hunter-gatherers worshipped their gods, but they also haggled with them and tried to cheat them at times. Gods were useful for explaining what people couldn’t otherwise understand. But the moral side of life (cheating, stealing, killing) was handled inside small communities where bad behavior was punished or discouraged through family loyalty and mutual support among friends.
“If you live in a hunter-gatherer village, most of the people you encounter fit into one of these two categories and so fall naturally within the compass of your decency.” — The Evolution of God, p. 25
The initial relationship between humans and gods was simple: they both needed something the other side had. The gods needed sacrifice and praise (for some reason), and the humans needed protection. From the very beginning, leaders emerged who claimed to have access to the gods and be able to negotiate with them: the shamans. If their track record was good, they could live long enough to establish their line as seers and prophets. From among them emerged the first rulers, and, in the age of chiefdoms, 7,000 years ago, these rulers competed for regional power.
Once city-states appeared during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE in places like China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, managing large numbers of people who weren’t friends or family became the responsibility of the city rulers. They received help from the priests who worshipped the gods, and the gods began to have ethical and moral concerns (for the first time ever). For instance, the gods invested the king “to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers.” — Hammurabi’s Code, Ancient Babylon, 18th& century BCE.
And once cities got in contact with each other through trade and war, they had to assess and decide how to treat each other’s gods.
“Suppose you are king of a city and you want to trade with another city’s king. You know that his local stature is tied to the stature of his city’s chief god; as king he maintains the god’s temple, which is thus a kind of showcase for him as well as for the god. What’s more, the temple’s priests are major economic players, and may control some of the intercity trade you’d like a piece of. So the last thing you want to do is start disrespecting that god, and the first thing you want to do is embrace it. Thus theological open-mindedness can boil down to economic self-interest. Because both parties in a trade can benefit from it—because economic interaction is “non-zero-sum”—two once-alien gods may find common ground. So too with military alliance or any other non-zero-sum game that one king wants to play with another: interfaith harmony can emerge from enlightened self-interest.” — The Evolution of God, p. 81
Gods coalesced into pyramids of power that shifted and changed based on the facts on the ground. And it wasn’t long until some kings wanted to streamline their pyramid when it became too unwieldy. Marduk, the chief god of Mesopotamia, absorbed all the other gods for a while and became the ultimate explanation for all natural forces. Pharaoh Amenhotep IV of Egypt raised the sun god Aten to the top of the pyramid, then got rid of all the other gods—and their inconvenient priests—and became the sole ruler Akhenaten (“Helper of Aten”). Unfortunately for his effort at monotheism, it was reversed with his death. Others around the world tried that path too (emperor Ashoka in India and the savior Zalmoxis in Dacia), but it took many centuries until the only-god idea finally took hold. Wright continues his historical journey from here, and it’s a path worth exploring further.
The Pillars of the Earth
I think of my characters’ religious beliefs changing in response to the conditions on the ground as I build my story world with the Old Gods, El, the Path, and the Roman gods. And that’s why I love The Pillars of the Earth (1989) by Ken Follett. In that novel, two good-hearted characters end up hurting each other because of their religious beliefs. I don’t think I had ever felt as heartbroken by the conflict between two characters before. And that heartbreak stayed with me far longer than any story built on a simple hero-and-villain dynamic.
This book’s backbone is also a model for the structure of my work-in-progress. It follows the construction of the cathedral at Kingsbridge, an engineering marvel for its time, just as my project follows Emperor Trajan’s building of the first stone bridge across the Danube, an unprecedented feat of Roman engineering that wouldn’t be matched for a thousand years.
For all these reasons, I think of my Delight of Humans and Gods series (which includes The Exiled Queen, The Regolith Temple, and my upcoming The Foreign King) as Vikings meets The Pillars of the Earth, with the exploration of changing beliefs described in The Evolution of God.
One more thought… While my work is about ancient fictional worlds, I believe we’re still dealing with the same problems today. When religious convictions collide, people’s lives are hurt and even lost in the process. We live in a globalized world where people of all faiths—and no faith—must coexist, and it feels urgent to me that we get better at treating one another with more humanity. Because we’re still wrestling with the same questions our ancestors asked, and the forces that shaped ancient beliefs still shape us now.
