Matt Elton: Given that your TV work has often tackled historical themes, the fact you've written a history book might not come as a huge surprise. But what made you actually sit down and write it?
David Mitchell: I started it during the Covid lockdown – which was obviously pretty frightening and depressing – when I got to thinking about the Vikings. I don't know why: there was a lot of thinking done during that time. But at some point in my thinking, it occurred to me that when the Vikings started attacking England, it was a little bit similar to what it was like for us when Covid happened. It was something desperately bad and frightening and life-changing that just came out of the blue – literally, in the case of the Vikings, if it was a clear day. And so I started typing about that, and about how sometimes in history something just happens – it's not part of a trend. You can see why it happened afterwards, but you can't really spot it in advance: there you are, suddenly, with the history happening to you.
So I started typing about the Vikings. The book's tone basically came from Simon Winder's Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern [2010]. He's extremely learned but also very funny, and I thought I'd try writing something similar – a combination of historical insights, personal anecdotes, jokes and irreverence. When I'd written 30,000 words and hadn't even got to the Norman Conquest, I thought: right, this is a new form of creativity for me – let's finish it off and turn it into a book.
You write that the most interesting parts of history “more often than not have something to do with a person wearing a sparkly
