I was actually quite disappointed by both "The Vikings" and "The Goths"

First off, the clothing was not particuarly accurate. Granted, our documentation is scant in some areas, but I saw very little effort to present what is known. I saw no Norse women wearing anything even vaguely Nordic. None of the Goth women, for instance, were wearing anything close to what Roman depictions described. The effect was more of a "generic barbarian" look than anything else.

This would not be so bad, if the armor and weaponry were accurate. They weren't. The Goth warriors were wearing what looked like Celtic helmets. The weaponry was completely bogus. I saw no Viking-style swords. In the ship-building scenes for the Vikings, the shipwrights were merrily using the axes (from a previous scene?) to build their dragon-ship. Ummm...not exactly the right tools for the job! And someone, I swear, was using a splitting maul for a weapon--yes, it can be done, but not by a trained Viking warrior.

And--I kid you not--the same EXACT weapons used for the Vikings were used by the Goths. I spotted the same (wood-cutting) axe several times in both. Apparently the Goths in 400 A.D. in Italy hoarded their weapons for over 300 years, and their decendents, in secret, sent them to the Norsemen by aliens or something.

As for the historical accuracy of the actual information, I would judge it fair. Yes, there were some minor historical innaccuracies, and I think some interpretation was off. For instance: yes, the Norse did apparently discover and colonize North America, but there was no significant long-term affects by this short-lived adventure, sorry. But to be honest, no worse than the average History Channel program.

I just don't understand, however, why oh why the producers of this series couldn't find one of the seemingly hundreds of re-enactment groups to flesh out this documentary? There's a Capitol One credit card commerical aired only a few months ago with better Viking clothing, weaponry, and armor!