Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: A Historical Check — The Viking Age Between Game and Reality

873 AD, on England’s east coast: a Viking clan under Eivor leaves harsh Norway behind to carve out a new home in Anglo-Saxon England. So begins Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – one of the most ambitious Viking games of recent years, for which Ubisoft says it worked with great care on the clothing, food, dances and social rituals of the period. But how much of what Eivor experiences on screen holds up against chronicles, sagas and archaeological finds – and where does artistic licence begin? This historical check takes the game apart section by section: from the English kingdoms through real historical figures to the question of how the game ultimately reinterprets Norse mythology itself.

The historical foundation: England in 873

The framework Valhalla chooses for its story stays close to reality. At the start of the game, England is indeed divided into four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Northumbria in the north, Mercia in the Midlands, East Anglia in the east and Wessex in the south. This political fragmentation is not an invention of the developers but the historically documented state of the island before the land-taking by the so-called Great Heathen Army (Old English mycel hæþen here), which landed in East Anglia in 865 and campaigned systematically against all four kingdoms in the years that followed.

By 873, the game’s starting year, the invaders had already achieved considerable success: Northumbria had fallen in 867, East Anglia in 869 after the killing of King Edmund, who was later venerated as a martyr, and Mercia was on the verge of collapse. Only Wessex in the south still offered organised resistance. That Valhalla sets its plot precisely in this phase – shortly before the army subdues Mercia in 874 and installs Ceolwulf II as king there – shows that the writers engaged closely with the chronology of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

This chronicle, a collection of Old English annals, was compiled in the late 9th century in the circle of the West Saxon court; whether Alfred himself commissioned it cannot be established with certainty from the sources. It remains the most important written source for the events of these years – but it must also be read as a work of the Wessex dynasty, which naturally cast its own role in the struggle against the invaders in a favourable light. The same applies to its portrayal of Ceolwulf: the chronicle depicts him as a mere puppet of the invaders, while more recent scholarship, pointing to joint coinage with Alfred, reads him as a considerably more independent ruler.

The Great Heathen Army and its legendary leaders

The game places the leaders of the historical Great Army as relatives and companions of Eivor – and in doing so captures a core element of the tradition. According to the chronicle, the invasion was led by several brothers whom later Icelandic saga texts, above all the Ragnarssona þáttr, identify as sons of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok. Whether Ragnar himself was a historical person or a saga figure condensed over generations, blending the deeds of several real Viking leaders, remains an open question in scholarship – the sons attributed to him, by contrast, are largely historically tangible.

Valhalla thus faces a problem that runs through all research into the Viking Age: the written sources were composed almost exclusively by Christians, often decades or centuries after the events, and mix historical detail with legendary embellishment. The game adopts precisely this ambiguity instead of resolving it – and in doing so sits closer to the actual state of the sources than one might expect from an action-adventure.

Alfred the Great: from national hero to game antagonist

The clearest dramatic liberty Valhalla takes concerns its central antagonist. King Alfred of Wessex, who appears in the game as a cold, power-conscious adversary of Eivor, is historically the exact opposite of a villain: he is the only Anglo-Saxon king to whom posterity has given the epithet „the Great“. Alfred ascended the throne of Wessex in 871 – the only one of the four kingdoms never permanently subdued by the invaders – and inflicted a decisive defeat on the army at the Battle of Edington in 878.

What followed is often loosely summarised as the „Treaty of Wedmore“. In fact, the leader Guthrum was baptised at Aller with Alfred as his godfather, and a few days later at Wedmore was released from the white baptismal robe; the actual written treaty between Alfred and Guthrum was drawn up later and survives separately. The episode nonetheless marks a turning point in English history: it laid the foundation for the territory later known as the Danelaw under Scandinavian rule in the east and north of England, while Wessex in the south remained independent and became the nucleus of a later unified England.

Alfred also initiated an educational reform and had Latin texts translated into Old English – measures that firmly anchored him in English historiography as a founding figure. That Valhalla makes him the principal antagonist therefore follows no historical source but a narrative necessity: a game that adopts the Viking perspective needs a human counterpart on the other side, and Alfred is the best-known figure of the era. What is interesting is that the game does not conceal this reinterpretation but draws Alfred’s religious zeal and political constraints with some nuance – if in considerably darker colours than the king’s historical role warrants.

Ivar the Boneless and Ubba: between chronicle and saga

Ivar the Boneless is among the best-documented figures in the game. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle names him explicitly as one of the leaders of the Great Army, and several independent sources – including Irish annals that record an „Ímar“ as Viking king of Dublin – suggest he was also active in Ireland. Whether this Ímar is genuinely identical with the Ivar of the English chronicle is debated in scholarship, but the density of references makes him one of the best-attested individuals of the early Viking Age. His byname „the Boneless“, by contrast, remains unexplained: later sagas hint at a physical disability or illness, while scholars have also read it as a sexual allusion or as an image of exceptional agility in combat.

His brother Ubba, also present in the game, is more weakly attested but not undocumented. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports for 878 the death of a brother of Ivar and Halfdan in a skirmish in Devon, but gives no name; only later sources identify this leader as Ubba. His opponent Ealdorman Odda, by contrast, is already named by Asser around 893. The episode counts among the few clear military setbacks of the Great Army in this phase.

The blood eagle legend – according to which Ivar and his brothers avenged their father Ragnar on King Ælla of Northumbria by severing his ribs from the spine and folding out his lungs as a „bloody eagle“ – is among the best-known and simultaneously most contested images of the Viking Age. The core of the tradition is an early skaldic verse; the fully elaborated, gruesome version emerges only in the later prose tradition, which probably misunderstood and embellished that verse. So runs Roberta Frank’s influential reading, at least. An anatomical study published in 2022, however, concluded that the procedure as described would have been feasible on a human body – which leaves the question open rather than settled. What might be historical about it and what is not is examined in detail in the dedicated blood eagle article on Hrafn – Valhalla itself largely omits this episode from its plot.

Ravensthorpe and the settlement: a village that never existed

The heart of the game, the settlement of Ravensthorpe built up by the player, is pure fiction. The name, however, is plausibly formed: -thorpe derives from Old Norse þorp, a widespread place-name element for „farmstead“ or „secondary settlement“ that survives to this day in numerous English place names – evidence of the deep traces Scandinavian settlers left in the English language and landscape. An Old English throp existed in parallel, which is why not every place name in -thorp is necessarily Scandinavian.

The underlying game mechanic – a fortified base from which raids are launched while land is cultivated around it – reflects a real strategic practice of the Great Army: overwintering in fortified camps. Archaeological excavations have documented several such winter camps well, for instance at Torksey (872/873) and Repton (873/874). Finds of craft activity, burial sites and children’s graves show that these were not purely military camps but temporary settlements with craftspeople, traders and family members – a picture close to the idea of a growing, self-sustaining base like Ravensthorpe, even though the location in the game is entirely invented.

Weapons, armour and the image of the Viking

In one respect Valhalla fares better than most of its pop-cultural predecessors: none of the main characters wears a horned helmet. This most widespread of all Viking clichés has no archaeological basis whatsoever in the Viking Age itself – it goes back to 19th-century costume designs, in particular Carl Emil Doepler’s designs for the 1876 premiere of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and from there became a pop-cultural fixture. That the developers deliberately avoided this error is among the game’s most frequently praised details.

The game is less consistent when it comes to the details of armament. Eivor wields two weapons at once and throws axes at range – neither matches the known use of this weapon: Viking axes were primarily a close-combat weapon and a tool, not a throwing weapon, even if isolated throwing axes are known from other early medieval contexts. In helmet shapes and armour components, too, the game mixes elements from different centuries; some pieces of equipment look more like the High Middle Ages than the early medieval period.

Mail shirts, worn by some characters, are attested in principle for the period but survive exceptionally rarely – from Scandinavia there is essentially only the find from Gjermundbu. Given the enormous effort of manufacture, they were probably reserved for a narrow elite. What the ordinary fighter wore instead can hardly be determined archaeologically: the leather armour omnipresent in the game and in popular culture is precisely not attested for the Viking Age and is itself a modern construct.

Eivor, the shield-maiden question and the Birka grave

One of the game’s fundamental design decisions concerns the protagonist herself: Eivor can be played freely as a man or a woman without the plot or the acceptance of other characters differing significantly. Historically, this premise is contested. The debate about armed women in the Viking Age – commonly referred to as „shield-maidens“ – flared up again when a DNA analysis of the warrior grave Bj 581 at Birka, published in 2017 by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and colleagues, showed that the person buried there was biologically female. She had been buried with full warrior equipment including sword, arrows and two horses, and since her excavation in the 19th century had been taken as a matter of course to be male.

The find triggered a specialist debate that continues to this day: part of the scholarly community sees it as the first solid archaeological evidence for actual female warriors, another urges caution – grave goods could just as well indicate social status, inheritance or ritual significance without the buried person ever having fought. There is broad agreement that political and military power in Viking society lay predominantly in male hands and that women appearing as warriors would, if at all, have been rare exceptions – not the socially unproblematic normality suggested by Valhalla’s equal treatment of both Eivor variants. The game thus touches on a real, currently debated point of contention in scholarship, but flattens it into a matter of course that the evidence does not support.

Blót, belief and the Christianisation of England

In its depiction of religion, Valhalla proves more nuanced than one would expect of a mainstream action game. The sacrificial rituals shown (blót) draw on sources such as Adam of Bremen’s description of the temple at Uppsala. That account, however, was written around 1070, roughly two centuries after the game’s setting, and is not based on first-hand observation. The ritual human sacrifices to the Æsir hinted at by the game likewise find correspondences in several medieval sources – how reliable these Christian-authored reports about a religion alien to them and condemned as „heathen“ actually are remains the subject of ongoing scholarly discussion. Readers interested in the religious practice of the Viking Age beyond the game will find a detailed treatment on Hrafn in the article on Ásatrú, the modern revival of the Old Norse faith.

The game is less precise about the overall religious picture of the British Isles in the 9th century. Valhalla draws clearly separated, often violently colliding worlds of belief – warlike Norse paganism against a threatened, mostly passive Christianity. In fact, the Christianisation of the native population across large parts of the isles, and especially in Ireland, had long been completed by this point; non-Christian practice there was essentially a phenomenon of the Scandinavian newcomers themselves, for instance around Dublin. It has also been noted that the game portrays faith in general as bloody and exploitative, regardless of the particular religion – a dramatically understandable but historically simplifying sharpening.

More robust, by contrast, is the premise that monasteries and churches were attractive targets for raids: they held land, supplies and valuable liturgical equipment, often lay near the coast and were comparatively poorly defended.

Where the game leaves mythology behind: Isu, Odin and the mead of poetry

Perhaps the greatest break with tradition lies not in the history but in the mythology – and it is entirely deliberate. In the lore of the Assassin’s Creed series, the gods of all cultures are in truth members of the „Isu“, a fictional, technologically highly advanced precursor civilisation that existed long before humanity and was mistakenly worshipped as divine by early humans. Odin becomes, within this framework, „Havi“, an Isu leader of the so-called Æsir, and Eivor relives his memories in recurring dream sequences – a narrative device that allows the game to incorporate mythological motifs without having to treat them as genuinely supernatural events within the game world.

What is remarkable is how closely some of these sequences follow the transmitted material. The episode around the mead of poetry takes up the myth of Kvasir, the dwarves Fjalar and Galar and Suttungr’s daughter Gunnlöd almost unchanged in content: Kvasir, created from the spittle of the Æsir and Vanir at their peace settlement and so wise that he has an answer to every question, is killed by the dwarves; his blood is turned into a mead that grants poetry and wisdom to whoever drinks it. Odin obtains the mead through cunning and three nights spent with Gunnlöd, and escapes in the form of an eagle.

This myth, however, survives as a connected narrative only in Snorri Sturluson’s Skáldskaparmál; the Poetic Edda contains only allusions, for example in the Gunnlöd stanzas of the Hávamál. The game also situates the story not as an independent myth but as a „remembered“ episode within the Isu framing. Those seeking the material in its unbroken form will find it told far more directly in the Old Norse sources.

The frame narrative: Animus, Layla Hassan and the claim to truth

Valhalla’s entire Viking Age plot is itself only the second narrative level of a game that begins in the present: via the fictional device called the „Animus“, the modern protagonist Layla Hassan relives Eivor’s memories from her genetic inheritance – a frame narrative that has shaped the whole series since its first instalment and that in Valhalla also brings Layla’s own multi-year present-day story to a close.

Formally, this construction allows the game to present itself simultaneously as carefully researched and as pure fiction: the world, the clothing and the political conditions are meant to be reconstructed as accurately as possible, while the actual plot – Eivor, the assassin-like order of the „Hidden Ones“, which in this form is a construct of the game series, and the character Basim as well – remains invented. The game uses no explicit „based on true events“ notice of the kind some historical films display; the claim to authenticity is conveyed instead through the setting and through accompanying marketing material.

What Ubisoft’s own historian says

Ubisoft itself is open about the limits of this reconstruction. Thierry Noël, who worked as a historical consultant, explained in an official studio post that the Viking Age is strikingly poorly documented by written sources compared with the settings of earlier instalments – ancient Egypt or classical Greece – which gave the team greater creative freedom but also greater uncertainty in reconstructing individual details.

This self-assessment matches the findings of this historical check: wherever the sources are good – the broad political situation, the historical figures named, many everyday details – Valhalla stays close to current scholarship. Wherever the sources are thin or contradictory – gender roles, religious practice in detail, the precise appearance of armour – the game fills the gaps with dramatically effective but historically vulnerable choices.

Conclusion: where Valhalla holds and where it breaks

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is not a historical document, but neither is it an arbitrarily invented fantasy setting with a Viking coat of paint. The political frame – four kingdoms, a real invasion army, attested leaders, a starting year that fits cleanly into the chronology of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – is researched carefully enough to serve as an entry point into the real history of the Viking Age.

On the broad lines of politics and the names of those involved, the game is largely right; on equipment, gender roles and the overall religious situation in England it takes considerable, partly deliberate dramatic liberties. The break is clearest where the game leaves the level of history altogether and folds Norse mythology into its own science-fiction cosmology of the Isu – a device that is narratively elegant but only loosely related to the tradition itself.

Readers who want to learn more about the real background after playing will find good starting points on Hrafn in the profiles of Ragnar Lodbrok, Ivar the Boneless and Björn Ironside, as well as the concept articles on shield-maidens and the blood eagle ritual.

Sources

The political and military foundations of this historical check rest above all on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and on the archaeological investigations of the winter camps at Repton and Torksey. The mythological references follow the Prose Edda, in particular the Skáldskaparmál, as well as the Gunnlöd stanzas of the Hávamál. The assessment of the shield-maiden debate draws on the 2017 DNA study „A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics“ by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and on the critical reassessment by Neil Price et al., „Viking Warrior Women? Reassessing Birka Chamber Grave Bj.581“, in Antiquity (2019). On the blood eagle question: Roberta Frank, „Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-Eagle“, in The English Historical Review 99 (1984), and, offering a differentiated view, Luke John Murphy et al., „An Anatomy of the Blood Eagle: The Practicalities of Viking Torture“, in Speculum 97 (2022). Statements about the making of the game and the role of historical consultant Thierry Noël come from official Ubisoft publications.

As with all reconstructions based on sagas and medieval chronicles: many details cannot be conclusively resolved from the present state of the sources, and new archaeological finds may shift existing assessments.