that practically all of the ones that are set in the early Middle Age--such as the Arthurian epics--show stuff that belongs to the late Middle Age, such as stirrups in saddles and well developed heraldry, not to mention stuff that does not belong in the Middle Age at all such as the telescope and the violin.
Which Middle Age films would you recommend as accurate?
God is subtle, but He is not malicious. (Albert Einstein)
What I don't like with Viking in American and British films are that Vikings are always depicted as villains.
Viking is not an ethnic term. It is a job description. Vikings were pirates.
Accusing Viking movies of wrongly depicting Vikings as evil is like calling all eighteenth century Algerians Barbary Corsairs and then complaining that the movies always depict Barbary Corsairs negatively. It is like calling all seventeenth century Englishmen buccaneers and then complaining that the movies always depict buccaneers as evil pirates.
If you go around calling all eight to eleventh century Scandinavian by a word which means pirates you have no right to complain about movies which depict eighth to eleventh century Scandinavian pirates negatively. You contributed to spreading the negative Dark Age Scandinavian stereotype when you started calling all Dark Age Scandinavians Pirates.
Why don't you call them Norwegians, or Norse, or Swedes, or Danes, or dark Age Scandinavians? Or Scandinavians who lived during the Viking age? Why do you insist on calling them all, even the landlubbers, pirates?
But there is nothing inaccurate about depicting Scandinavians who went on Viking raids as being cruel, evil, and violent pirates.