“ [Wisdom speaking]: There is no created thing that does not wish that it could arrive once more at its source, namely at peaceful rest and security. The rest is with God; indeed, it is God. But every creature turns about itself like a wheel; and it turns precisely so that it returns to where it previously was and becomes what it formerly was.…”
—from Alfred the Great’s English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy
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In 793, on a verdant jut of rocky land in northeast England, a longship carrying raiders from Scandinavia arrived at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to attack and loot its monastery. In a letter sent from the famous clergyman Alcuin to Æthelred, king of Northumbria at the time, the raid is described as unprecedented. “We and our fathers have now lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such a voyage was not thought possible.” Alcuin breathlessly continues, writing that “the church of St. Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans—a place more sacred than any in Britain.”
The arrival of these pagan raiders, despite historical evidence showing pre-existing contact between the British Isles and Scandinavia, is traditionally marked as the beginning of the Viking Age, an era that would transform the political and cultural landscape of Europe in ways inseparable from our modern understanding of its countries. That the beginning of this retrofitted era began at Lindisfarne—a holy site whose monastery was foundational as a base of early English missionary work—seems like something so dramatically convenient as to come from fiction. The Vikings arrived at one of 8th century England’s most important monasteries roughly sixty years before returning as a successful invasion force. By the time their “age” was finished, the descendants of these raiders would be Christians, many of them culturally entangled with the Anglo-Saxons to the point that they would be unrecognizable to their ancestors.
There’s a small detail in Alcuin’s letter that seems unremarkable at first glance. He describes England as the land where “we and our fathers have now lived … for nearly three hundred and fifty years.” He’s referring to the migration period when, as the Western Roman Empire declined in influence, colonizers and armies formerly in service to Rome, originating from Anglia and Old Saxony (in the northern regions of modern Germany) eventually took control of England. In the process, the native Celtic Britons’ political power was subsumed and replaced by the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Alcuin, with an apparently total lack of self-consciousness, writes that “we and our fathers,” meaning the Anglo-Saxons, have “never before” witnessed an atrocity on par with what the Viking raiders visited on Lindisfarne. He is, of course, forgetting or omitting the Anglo-Saxons’ own conquest, accomplished in part with fighting on Lindisfarne, of the Celtic Britons who had inhabited the Isles since prehistory.
For as frightening as the Vikings’ arrival in the British Isles may have been to people like Alcuin, they were only following in his own Anglo-Saxon forbears’ example, forming a nation by spilling blood that would go on to intermingle with their own in generations to come. In Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings: A History, the author explains the Norwegian concept of hevd, “a right established not in law but in possession and usage over time.” He points out that “hevd led Alcuin to consider the Angles and the Saxons the rightful owners of England.” Over the course of centuries, hevd would lead new settlers and invaders to consider themselves the real English or, in time, the real British despite the impossibility of that term holding up against a history of migration, invasion, and cultural change.
“Hevd is a relative concept,” Ferguson writes. The truth of this is as clear in the distant past as it is now.
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Eivor, the Norwegian protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, is largely indifferent to modern notions of cultural prejudice. Though she’s a Viking, she is as likely to trust a staunch Anglo-Saxon ally as she is to kill a Scandinavian who’s betrayed her+. At first, this seems puzzling—like the game’s writers forgot to colour in a sense of animosity between warring populations that goes beyond mechanics like guards being more alert than usual when Eivor enters Anglo-Saxon settlements. By the time the story concludes, and knowing the region’s history, this seems like an intentional choice.
Valhalla begins in 873, nearly a decade after the Great Heathen Army (named as such by the Christian writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) invaded England in 865 and two years after the Great Summer Army arrived to reinforce the first force. By the time Eivor crosses the North Sea, the English kingdoms of Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria have been conquered and only Wessex remains as a Saxon stronghold. King Alfred, the monarch who would hold off the total conquest of the English kingdoms during his reign, assumed leadership of the kingdom of Wessex in 871 and managed to resist the Vikings well enough that the Anglo-Saxons survived as a political and cultural force. Eivor enters this volatile situation after leaving Norway, soon to be unified and politically and economically centralized by the half-legendary first Norwegian king, Harald Finehair. Like the hero of a Western, Eivor apparently bristles at the notion of government control and decides to leave her home for a new one with greater opportunity. Upon her arrival in England, she links up with local Norse warlords and works with them in their efforts to finish colonizing the land.
Like all Assassin’s Creed games, this historical setting is mixed with the series’ overarching fiction—an eternal, secretive war between the authoritarian Templars (or Order of Ancients) and the Assassins (or Hidden Ones) who oppose them—and the rich details of the era are confused, contorted, or omitted in order to fit its mould. Though Eivor joins her fellow Vikings in their goals, she generally doesn’t seem as concerned with assisting in a grand military campaign as she is with seeking out the evil Order and cleaning up political disputes in ways that help accomplish the Hidden Ones’ goals. A map of England at her settlement’s great hall makes her priorities plain. Though it’s laid out and marked up as if for war, the strategic points indicated with small stone statues reference places where Eivor’s help is needed to unknot tricky succession issues that play out like novellas about small-town politics. As soon as she’s entered one of these dramas (dubbed “sagas” by the game), her status as a foreign invader theoretically working to undermine the Anglo-Saxons’ loose grip on England is buried beneath a more personal regard for the people she meets face-to-face, regardless of their allegiance.
Eivor, and the Vikings she represents, seem, by default, like they should assume the fundamentally villainous role of invaders. The player isn’t given much context for why the Norse or even Eivor would want to risk their lives to settle in the British Isles—even her own justification of fleeing Harald Finehair’s rule is a pretty loose one. We’re simply asked to sympathize with a character who joins an occupying force to spend her life meddling in foreign politics while establishing her own roots in a land whose population seems to despise her people. Over the dozens and dozens of hours that make up its run-time, though, Eivor’s motivation and the Vikings’ place in history is contextualized in ways that wrinkle the immediate impression that she’s merely part of a ruthless colonizing force. She's shown as the representative not of something as simple as an opportunistic enemy of the Anglo-Saxons, but as someone whose culture will end up blending with 9th century England's as part of the long development of a nation.
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The Viking invasions of the British Isles and continental Europe are often purported to be the result of poor economic opportunities in Scandinavia, or as activity designed to capitalize on the more extensive trading networks developing at the time of the 9th and 10th century Norse expansions. Along with the many other, contested theories behind the sudden violent activity of the Vikings, though, is one that suggests that late 8th century raiding and later invasions were a reaction to regional fears regarding the spread of Christianity.
Ferguson describes this theory in The Vikings, outlining the case for contextualizing the Viking invasions of the British Isles and Europe as a response to Christian persecution of northern European pagans. “From about 772 onward,” Ferguson writes, the future emperor and then-King of the Franks, Charlemagne, was engaged in the Saxon Wars, whose “chief preoccupation became the conversion to Christianity of the Saxons on his north-eastern border.” On his path toward uniting Western Europe as a Christian empire, Charlemagne embarked on a horrific campaign of conversion and conquest. Ferguson mentions “the infamous massacre of Verden” which followed a 782 Saxon rebellion. “As many as 4,500 unarmed Saxon captives were forcibly baptized into the Church and then executed,” Ferguson writes in a description of the massacre. “Even this failed to end Saxon resistance and had to be followed up by a programme of transportations in 794 in which about 7,000 of them were forcibly resettled."
Charlemagne’s intentions were clear: the forced conversion of pagan groups. Seen in this light, the Vikings’ invasions of regions throughout Europe and in the British Isles, can be seen as an expansion embarked upon not only as a colonial effort, meant to extract further resources from other lands, but as the delayed reaction to the massacres and forced conversions happening near their homeland at the hands of the Christians. It began as a form of cultural self-defence—an expansion sparked by Charlemagne and the Christians forcibly converting or exterminating pagan peoples.
Ferguson writes that “Charlemagne and his missionaries set the terms of the encounters between Christians and Heathens, destroying the religious sanctuaries and cultural institutions of those who refused to embrace Christianity exclusively, and the Heathens saw no reason not to respond in kind.” Further evidence of this comes from the shape of Viking raids that pre-empted the Great Heathen Army’s coordinated, full-scale invasion. In them, the Vikings sought not just to gain material wealth, but perhaps to sew terror and intentionally offend the Christians they likely despised. “The local Scandinavian cultures that felt the first stirrings of [the Christian] threat were neither compact nor centralized enough to organize themselves into anything like a structure that could have mounted a military campaign against Frankish Christendom,” Ferguson writes. “A more feasible goal, closer at hand, easier of reach, undefended and, in the parlance of modern terrorist warfare, ‘a soft target,’ was the monastery at Lindisfarne.”
Long characterized as proof of their essential ruthlessness, the Vikings’ destruction of sacred objects can be read, in this sense, as a proportionate response instead. “With an indifference to the humanity of their Christian victims as complete as that of Charlemagne’s toward the Saxons,” Ferguson writes, “a psychopathic rage directed at the Christian ‘other’ was unleashed, expressing itself in infantile orgies of transgressive behaviour that offered the same satisfactions whether the taboos transgressed were their own or those of their victims.”
In Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge’s introduction to Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, the editors write, too, that “Alfred seems to have regarded the Viking invasions as a form of divine punishment for the decline [of the Church and English learning in general],” an issue that he tried to solve by working toward one of his greatest legacies: wide-scale efforts to bolster England’s religious and educational systems. The introduction also notes that, when clergyman and Alfred’s chronicler Asser wrote his Life of King Alfred in 893, “he cast the Vikings as ‘pagans’ and the English as ‘Christians,’ thereby presenting the struggle between them as a holy war.” Just as the Vikings' great 865 army was dubbed "Heathen" in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the terms used here show that the invasions were couched in religion.
This is a far more complicated understanding of Viking activity than either the popular cartoon depiction of them as bloodthirsty monsters or, as in Valhalla, migrants who were forced by political upheaval to join a pan-Scandinavian colonial project. Instead, as Ferguson frames it, this viewpoint asks us to “see Heathen ninth-century Scandinavians not as the horde of savages they were to these early churchmen [who recorded the invasions] but as a people who had evolved a social and spiritual culture of their own. Certainly, it was very different from that of the Christians, but it was their own and we must assume they were content with it.”
The other theories mentioned above for the Norse’s increased raiding and, eventually, invasions of other countries are more prosaic and perhaps more likely than religious persecution. But the importance of religion—and, inextricably linked, culture—to the Viking Age and the development of lands like the British Isles can’t be dismissed out of hand.
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Partway through Valhalla, Eivor ends up in a fight for survival against a Christian mystic named Fulke who attacks her by swinging around a giant flaming cross. The association with racist hatred likely isn’t intentional (though it seems like a hard one for a Canadian studio to miss), but the subtext of a militant Christian trying to kill a Norse pagan with a huge cross is pretty clear. It paints the conflict between Eivor’s people and the Anglo-Saxon English as one that requires bloodshed to resolve.
Oddly, though Eivor hardly seems to care much about whether the characters she meets are Norse or Anglo-Saxon, the historical characters she encounters in the game seem to have no convictions other than a blanket hatred for foreigners. King Alfred, for one, is depicted as a far flatter person than history shows us he is. He schemes and betrays, but seems to do so for no reason other than personal spite—as if the man would be given the sobriquet of “The Great” simply because he really hated the Scandinavian invaders and not for the realpolitik he employed in shepherding Anglo-Saxon England through its most desperate era. On the other side of the conflict, the Viking general Guthrum simply wants to conquer, as does his fellow commander and Northumbrian king Halfdan, who gets sad when he can’t fight as often as he’d like to. Each of these characters are written well as fictional personalities, but the motives behind their actions are impossible to discern beyond a base hatred of their military opponents.
The reality of their situation—and likely motivations—is much more interesting. The Viking invasions didn’t take place over a short period of time, but occurred over centuries, from the late 8th century raiding recorded at Lindisfarne to periods of monarchical Norse control over much of the country. The intensity of violence between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian ebbed and flowed over this time, but it’s inaccurate to characterize it as a war between two sides consistently at each other’s throats.
In Else Roesdahl’s The Vikings, the author writes that “contemporary clerics in Western Europe … tended to record only violent events,” which were “elaborated by medieval story-tellers and historians” (including the descendants of Vikings themselves). “The Vikings were not just warlords,” she continues. “Their kings were engaged in complicated international politics, engineers built fortresses and bridges, merchants traded over vast distances” and “large groups … settled in areas they had conquered, cultivated the land, and became integrated with the native population, as in England.”
“The violence of many Viking raids,” Roesdahl writes, “must not obscure the fact that the Vikings also enjoyed peaceful relations with the world around them, based on accepted norms for social behaviour and on special agreements.” They engaged in international trade, established trading centres, and interacted with the larger world, setting up diplomatic relationships with other cultures. Their reputation for extreme violence, too, was likely embellished. The Vikings’ army and fleet sizes were “often wildly exaggerated for literary reasons or because of nationalistic fervour,” Roesdahl writes, and they were “portrayed as exceptionally blood-thirsty and cruel [though] this must have been due to contemporary reactions to their pagan religion.”
Roesdahl continues: “Plundering heathens who kill vast numbers of people are mentioned in many contemporary Christian sources, but Christians also plundered and killed each other with great alacrity.” She points out that the Norse were often “blamed for disasters that were caused by strife between local lords and rulers. Rival Irish groups, for example, were just as capable as the Vikings of plundering and burning each other’s monasteries.”
Characters like Alfred and Guthrum are fairly characterized in the sense that their political (and religious) motivations made them enemies, but Valhalla captures the end result of its historical setting more fully in its quieter, moment-to-moment scenes. Instead of Fulke swinging a burning cross at Eivor, the enduring image of the era is probably closer to the game’s Viking protagonist warily living alongside Anglo-Saxons, their two cultures informing one another as part of a process that would eventually see them merge into a new form of British identity.
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Just after Valhalla’s anticlimactic end, one of the landmark events in English history occurred: the creation of the Danelaw. While the game concludes with a confrontation between Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum, later in history the two would enter into a series of peace agreements where the legal jurisdiction of the Danelaw was established. To summarize the Danelaw quickly (and imperfectly), Norse-dominated areas of the country in the north-east came under Norse control and Anglo-Saxon-dominated regions remained under Anglo-Saxon sway. “Legal parity between the two populations was affirmed,” Ferguson writes, “with a fine set at eight half-marks of refined gold for the killing of either a Dane [the generic term for the Norse] or an Englishman.” In short, actual legal penalties were introduced for murdering those who would have earlier been considered foreigners. The fierce Viking warlord Guthrum was also baptised as Athelstan, rather than disappearing into the mist of time that Valhalla relegates him to.The Danelaw’s creation showed in formal terms the future mingling of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian that would continue to dominate the make-up of English demographics until the Norman Conquest of 1066.
In the longer view, over the centuries that follow the years shown in Valhalla, the Vikings would end up defeated—not just by decisive battles, but through the influence of religion. In 954, the Norwegian Erik Bloodaxe was driven from York. Ferguson writes of the temptation to “describe this … as the re-taking of the Danelaw, as though it involved a single and coherent campaign aimed at wresting back territories wrongly taken from ‘us’ by ‘them.’” Instead, the centuries of political and religious exchange had blurred and in some cases redrawn the lines meant to demarcate “foreign” and Anglo-Saxon England. Ferguson references a genetic survey from 2000 that “found it impossible to distinguish between the DNA of the fifth-century Saxon invaders and ninth-century Vikings.” This wouldn’t stop future conflict, of course, but it does, as Ferguson writes, demonstrate how “the notion of a persisting racial identity is one of history’s most obstinate and mischievous myths.”
There’s no example more poetic (or ironic) of this futile sense of inborn difference than the end of the Scandinavian invasions and conquests of England. In 1066, with the Battle of Hastings, both the Anglo-Saxons and Norwegian claimants to the English throne would be defeated by Normandy's William the Conqueror. The Norman conquest would establish the future of the English kingdom, giving birth, in time, to the long-lived Plantagenet Dynasty and the Angevin Empire. This was a foreign invasion in some senses, but not an ethnic one. The victorious Normans of 1066 descended from the 10th century Norse Viking Rollo, who was given control over the region by the king of West Francia in exchange for Rollo’s baptism, allegiance, and an end to the Viking raids aimed at his lands. The end of the Viking Age in England came at the hands of a force descended from Vikings. The old Norse image of the world serpent, Jörmungandr, biting its own tail comes to mind as an apt metaphor for the cyclical beginning and end of these eras.
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There’s a fantastic stand-up bit from British comedian Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle series about UKIP, the canker sore on the roof of the United Kingdom that eventually metastasized into an all-consuming tumour. In it, Lee talks about former UKIP leader Paul Nuttalls complaining about Bulgarian immigrants and follows the trail backward through time to imagine a Brit so angry about different waves of historical immigration that his anger extends, as he puts it in a Guardian article about the joke, to the “Huguenots and Anglo-Saxons and Neanderthal man to a general hatred of matter itself; to a longing for a better time where not only were there no immigrants, but there was actually nothing, just a vast void. A void in which there was no crime.”
The joke’s effect is to show, with wonderful absurdity, how ridiculous the notion of immigration fears and “authentic” national identity really is. (It’s noteworthy, too, that Lee once compared the wild xenophobia of conservative commenters—one of whom seriously put forth the argument that the modern British should despair over the evil results of the Norman conquest—to the panic of Lindisfarne monks spotting the Vikings sailing into view.) Nothing in Valhalla is pointed enough to accomplish anything like what Lee gets across in about ten minutes of stand-up. Its understanding of the uselessness of ethnonationalism is still communicated, though, in its own way. This is accomplished mostly through the long-term effect of Eivor’s lack of real concern over religious or cultural allegiance—to the sense that she doesn’t much care where another person comes from as long as they’re not trying to kill her or interfere with her plans to combat the evil Order of Ancients.
Despite the one-note hatreds of so many of its historical characters, Valhalla isn’t a game that argues for a clean binary between Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon throughout the bulk of its story. It depicts the turmoil of cultural clash—the confusion of fundamentally opposed religions butting up against one another in a way that will inevitably result in the end of Norse paganism—but it doesn’t see its setting as one that can be properly understood as a war between two well-defined factions.
Assassin’s Creed is often hampered by the self-imposed restriction of needing to position historical forces as either good or bad++. This was used well in Origin’s story of a late Ptolemaic Egypt colonized by Greeks and Romans and wisely avoided in Odyssey’s depiction of the Peloponnesian War—a conflict whose opposing sides elide easy, static moral judgement. Valhalla follows Odyssey’s example, knowing that doing otherwise falls into the kind of cultural traps that Lee parodies by tracing the long, useless trail down to the only “real” Briton.
The knock-on effect of this approach is a refutation of the very ethnonationalism that’s currently, horrifically, in vogue again throughout the world. Though it explores a period of European history so old that it hardly seems relevant to the modern world, Valhalla is about a foundational era. By embracing the messiness of the centuries that would end with the formation of a united England, it rejects an easier narrative of pre-national nationalism, and of an imagined “pure” Anglo-Saxon England fighting for its survival against a foreign horde+++.
History is complex and Valhalla shows better than most Assassin’s Creed games how important it is to embrace that complexity—not just when it comes to creating historical fiction, but also as a reminder of how inherently flawed the sort of blinkered nationalism and cultural prejudices instilled in us from the time we’re born really are. It asks us to recognize the relativity of the Norwegian hevd that led the clergyman Alcuin to lament an attack on Anglo-Saxon England as if his own ancestors hadn’t done the same to those who came before, and to see in that relativity an opportunity to rethink many of the ways ancient allegiances are used to imagine justifications for exclusionary politics today.
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+ Only the Picts and, at times, the Britons seem to be treated as semi-human others by Eivor. The sequence in which she links up with the Viking leader Halfdan to fight his war along Hadrian’s Wall portrays the Picts as animalistic beasts, emerging from the snow to babble incoherently as they mindlessly attack outsiders.
++ At its worst, this tendency gave us stuff like Syndicate’s main characters learning that Queen Victoria, not traditionally remembered as a monarch who advanced the cause of freedom at home or abroad, was an ally of the anti-authoritarian Assassin faction.
+++ This isn’t a defence of colonialism, and it’s important to recognize here that the terms of Viking Age colonialism and integration are different than in the global European imperialism of later centuries. There was no protracted genocide of the Anglo-Saxons or Britons, for one thing, and the Vikings themselves ended up assuming the religion—and, by effect, aspects of the culture—of those they invaded. It’s more worthwhile to look at the Vikings’ influence on the creation of European nations as an example of the ways in which cross-cultural exchange exposes just how thinly held together notions of racial “purity” or national identity truly are—and always have been.
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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.