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Assumption should be any and all media products set in past are ahistorical garbage. Modern casting choices are secondary. When they get casting right, and these days they may get look of the props right, they still get it wrong how the weapons and armor works, how society works, how interpersonal relationships worked. Occasionally such things may no be entirely incorrect when the producers got good source material and scriptwriters did not warp it beyond recognition.
Drawing inference about historical past from regular entertainment products is failure. It's like trying to understand cold war era intelligence work watching Goldfinger, and your biggest complain about inaccuracy concerns the gadgets in Bond's Aston Martin. Yes, the car is not real, but it is not the only not-real thing in the movie.
Can't say anything about the Northman, but the only TV series about the Viking Age that I have heard any positive feedback from archeology/historians is Vinland Saga, and that is faint praise as it obviously suffered from overabundance of shonen conventions. (But it was the first anime I saw that had nearly intellectual treatment of Christianity, usually Japanese authors warp the Western religion to unrecognizable goth aesthetic that is present for visuals only.)
It's a copypasta.
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