"Vikings" : the tale/history between text and object

Bibliogr., streszcz. po ang.

In the article the author - inspired by Hayden White’s works - reflects on history, which uses the category of so called "historical truth" i.e., positive knowledge of facts in the past. In order to achieve said certainty, historic events are usually presented by the historians as narratives. Such method allows to connect seemingly unrelated facts to reveal hidden causality. Unfortunately, it also blurs the boundaries between historical and fictional texts. One can easily observe the areas of merging between history and fiction in the historical novels, as well as historical motion pictures or television series. One of the latter is an extraordinarily popular series Vikings, created for the television channel History. The author will interpret the aforementioned series and demonstrate that Vikings are more than just a popular historical production simply portraying the life of Ragnar Lothbrok (whose very historical existence is questioned), but primarily a meta-historical source approaching a question: "what is the history?" The creators of the series do not deny that history (as a narrative rooted in language) virtually does not give any opportunity for us to reach the real past, which is irreversibly gone. They point out, however, similarly to White, that there is another intermediary between people and history - the objects. Series’ approach to objects in general is consistent with the latest trends of (post) humanities which turns to materiality as subject of a story. The objects, if properly "listened" to, can disclose the course of history as they are the only ones to have "ived" through the distant past until today.