"The Vikings" is what a historical epic should be: an excellent film in its own right, and a striking evocation of period. It is fiction against a carefully researched historic background, shot wherever possible in the proper locations, and presented with feeling for its subject...it is the North on film, rough and cold and raw and beautiful to see, the longships gliding in sunlit triumph up magnificent fjords or slipping away into clammy mist, the gangers carousing in the coarse splendour of their hall, the minute detail of costume and weapon and custom, the triskelion shields advancing over dune and promontory, the axes whirling away and thudding into a raised drawbridge to make a ladder into a besieged fortress — among them Fleischer and Jack Cardiff and their artists and researchers have managed to conjure memories of Beowulf and the sagas; there is a fine fury about the action sequences, the playing is robust, and the whole thing looks and sounds as though it might well have happened around Lindisfarne a thousand years ago.
— George Macdonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World, Page 37.
