In this article I discuss Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in terms of meaning and value extraction.
Before you continue, please have a look at the following articles :
Assassin’s Creed : PsychologyAC Valhalla : a clash between two perspectives
AC Valhalla’s main context is the clash between the pagan Vikings and monotheistic English, a clash between two different worlds. That subject, in the last 20 years, has been a big source of interest and discussion. One of the reasons for this to happen, is that the same type of clash is between two worlds is happening now, internally in the west.
When we play AC : Valhalla, what do we expect to find (except from resources to collect) ? What is behind the narrative of the game ? How do we relate ? Why does it make such an impression on so many people ?
Background
Introduction
This chapter gives some background information in terms of culture, art and philosophy in order to explain how problematic the topic of Norse mythology can be in modern eyes. This is the quite critical, since AC Valhalla relies much more on modern ideas and narratives (interpretation that is) than trying to get us acquainted with the old Norse ones. I will try to explain why I think this happens and provide with references. I reference to Niel Price those who want to get deeper on professional archeological research. For me, it is not so important to discuss.
Christianity vs paganism : the end of the world as an end to a culture
“I am a strong supporter of individual responsibility. No one died for my sins. This is a slightly pagan body of thought: the gods help those who help themselves. It mirrors that you are your own God, that it is your responsibility how you behave, what you contribute in this world.”
Einar Selvik
The quote comes from Einar Selvik, One of AC Valhalla’s soundtrack authors, ex-member of the Norse black metal band Gorgoroth and a founding member of Norse folk band Wardruna.
“The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.”
Nietzsche, The twilight of the idols
Some researchers tend to interpret Ragnarök (in terms of narrative), as criticism of the pagan religion, its failure to affirm life. According to this interpretation, what comes after Ragnarök, is the correction of the world, Christian salvation. The post-viking world.
Nietzsche saw Christianity as a religion of pity, one that does not affirm life. Reaffirmation according to him comes in the form of eternal reincarnation. In the pagan religion and in the AC franchise cyclic time occur as a ritual of reaffirmation, the vitality of life, regeneration.
In the realm of eternity, ideas are not born, they do not die, they surface and dive into history and time.
As portrayed in the history channel’s Vikings, this invasion of viking to Britain was a clash between two beliefs, the Pagan and the Christian. Christianity is a missionary religion and therefore spreading a message. Its ideas are meant to dominate, its creeds are the foundation of the Christian belief. God, Jesus Christ, the Church, the second coming, judgement day, redemption, confession and salvation, these are the beliefs and practices, that Christianity as an institution, seeks to spread among its followers.
From our modern point of view, post-modern that is, Christianity is a story, a narrative, its beliefs are being realized by being its missionary character, carrying its message, the story, sharing it, extracting values and their hierarchy, and putting it into practice, meaning living one’s life with its story, lessons and morals and translating it into ethics, actions carrying out in the name of one’s belief, a way of living.
Paganism of fundamentally different from monotheistic religions. Thats one of the reason it did not survive. Monotheistic religions have common ideas. Paganism and Polytheism were eradicated by monotheistic religions in the geographic location in which monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) dominated.
Paganism and the viking way of life, weren’t missionary, strict or uniform. The vikings had their myths, legends, stories, culture and code of honor. Notions like conscience, morality and remorse are very different in the eyes of different cultures and relate to their idea of creation of the world and its formation, as well as notion of belonging, commitment, honor, respect, destiny, fate etc.
Today, Northern and Western Europe do no longer hold a firm Christian belief. In addition, a lot of information about the way of life of past pagan people is available to us, though it is sometimes being interpreted through a post-Christian view :
“It is crucial to stress right from the start that until the 20th century, people did not call themselves pagans to describe the religion they practiced. The notion of paganism, as it is generally understood today, was created by the early Christian Church. It was a label that Christians applied to others, one of the antitheses that were central to the process of Christian self-definition. As such, throughout history it was generally used in a derogatory sense.”
Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction, 2011
Ragnarök
History channel’s Vikings, showed how in the 9th century, Ragnar Lodbrok holding pagan viking beliefs, had visions of Ragnarök or Ragnarøkkr (Old Norse for ‘”Fate of the Gods” and “Twilight of the Gods,”. In the TV show, The Norse fear of the end of times took shape in the form of the war between heathens and Christians.
Ragnarök is the catastrophic event of the end of the world. In the eyes of the common Western, materialistic, modern people, it relates mostly to a natural catastrophe, like depleting all our natural resources, getting hit by a star, meteors, floods, etc’. In the modern world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, is that same catastrophic idea – “the unexplained and continual strengthening of Earth’s magnetic field …which started to disrupt global satellite communications and is adversely affecting the environment.”
Twilight of the gods’, Ragnarøkkr, the viking narrative, is not so much about the physical world, but rather, it relates to the spiritual, the world of ideas, of World-feeling. There is a post-Ragnarök world, one without Odin and his laws. Richard Wagner, portrayed this event, Götterdämmerung, in his last title of the Der Ring des Nibelungen operas. Wagner depicts the end of the world as the process of dying of the old ideas, and reborn of new ones, such as his protagonist, Siegfried, brings to the audience a new world order. The opera brings a message so strong that it goes beyond the Diegesis, and touches our reality.
The Wagnerian new world order, by interpretation, is one of socialism and the development of unconscious archetypes in the mind, leading towards individuation, I write about this in another article. Aesthetically it is a milestone. To say the least : its musicology is considered revolutionary.
The romantic period in arts, music, literature, etc’ terminated the domination of classical type thinking and started a new type of thinking. The new type of thinking is our modern one, one of ultra-individualization, breaking of all hierarchy and tradition.
The classical tradition was a solid model of a subject, the unquestioned, blind Socratic belief of a solid dichotomy between good and evil, the ultimate belief in the power of rationality, as the perfect tool, and its goals, which later developed into Christianity, and reached a peak during Scholasticism. Philosophically it is most identified with René Descartes and the Cartesian thinking.
Tonal indeterminacy was heightened by the increased freedom with which he used dissonance and chromaticism. Chromatically altered chords are used very liberally in the Ring, and this feature, which is also prominent in Tristan und Isolde, is often cited as a milestone on the way to Arnold Schoenberg’s revolutionary break with the traditional concept of key and his dissolution of consonance as the basis of an organising principle in music.
About Wagner’s music, WIKIPEDIA
A new world order did begin with Wagner’s opera. The world was transformed with the help of old Germanic narrative, which originated from the Norse legends. The Nibelungen are the Nifelheimers, ontologically. The AC storyline identifies them with the Judeo-Christian Nephilim as well.
Event like Wagner’s Ring, in the context of time and history, changed aesthetics, ideas, how we look and feel the world. We are able to feel and conceptualize the world differently, because we have new creative ways of looking at it. But what happens then to the old world-feelings ? Does it mean that we can no longer grasp and understand the old worlds ? What does our modern perspective do to meaning in relation to history ?
Some of these Ideas were picked up by Nietzsche who further developed them. He saw Wagner as a great educator and much more. Nietzsche based much of his philosophy on ideas preceding Christianity. Although coming from a Lutheran family, he brutally attacked Christianity. Only a title from one of his books : Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, “how the ‘true world’ finally became a fable”, can give as a slight clue about its content.
Nietzsche criticizes German culture of the day as unsophisticated, decadent and nihilistic, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key French, British, and Italian cultural figures who represent similar tendencies. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of cultural “decadence”, Nietzsche applauds Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier and stronger types. The book states the transvaluation of all values as Nietzsche’s final and most important project, and gives a view of antiquity wherein the Romans for once take precedence over the ancient Greeks, albeit only in the field of literature.
WIKIPEDIA, Twilight of the Idols, Synopsis
In the chain of evolution, after the reign of rational classical order in thinking and arts, came a revival of an ancient type of thinking, one that undermines rationality in its foundation, one which can potentially return to the epic / mythical thinking and narration which preceded classical western society, in order to create value and order.
It’s not to say that we return to a primitive way of thinking, but we understand how we can extract value in methods, that now have become unknown to us, lost in time and dust, lost in the same way that Odin’s world was lost.
Going back to AC Valhalla, the moment we look at history to extract meaning, we have to adopt a perspective, it never goes unfiltered. The game tries to relate and to reflect on these ideas, the Viking, Pagan, Anti-christian in the context of invasion to Britain. Thought about values and ways of living.
Further we put it into context.
Themes and analysis
The whole Assasin’s creed series is based upon its own meta-method of story telling : by experiencing and re-living the tales of heroes, main figures in history, helping good triumphing bad, we gain experience and knowledge ourselves, we learn a lesson, which can be used to reinforce our action, inside or outside the game, and so forth… that’s the formula.
There are two main elements that makes the stories different from those we can read from a history book about these ancient Egyptian, Greek, Viking times.
First is technology : man made tools and inventions, can help us gain control over our environment and predict the future, and the contemporary idea is also looking at the past.
Second is seeing old things with new eyes. Storytelling has a contemporary narrative blend into it, such as the post-modern ultra-individualization, lack of solid subject, meaning in the game – being able to take the form of different characters, genders, identities, beliefs etc.
There is also the matter of interpretation and depiction of historical events that are not loyal to historical research. While in the past considered heresy, today the whole idea of truth becomes a dynamic thing. If we are able to use a story to extract value, to learn a lesson, what does it matter if it happened or not ? Here is also where we return to legends, myths and epic tales.
Time, memory and reality
Philosophically, The idea of looking at the past might sound obvious : if talking about a picture or a film, which documents something that happened, it enables us to re-live it through experience and memory. The only thing we tend to forget, that it takes a copy, an imitation, a simulacrum of the physical world.
The only thing, for every one of us, as individuals, that connects the past with the future, is our memory and our mind, which has the nature of an illusion. Memories are like photo-copied paper that has been copied many times, they are never fully objective, not accurate representation of reality but paradoxically at the same time they are what makes reality for us as humans. Only the present can be true, made of facts, and real to us (when we are sober). This subject is investigated in films like Blow-up, Vertigo, Memento and many more. It is part of our post-modern approach towards reality, it tries no longer to be a mirror of nature but rather a narrative, a story. Our classical belief of our mind being a mirror of the world around us proved to be outdated or not fashionable, a narrative by itself. This conclusion is the result of a long research in the fields of Language, Logic and science in the 20th century.
Visual and aural technology has the power to manipulate the mirror image of reality. Much of modern society still holds the superstitious belief that it can alter reality itself, although in fact, it just creates different variation of reality which can be quite close to reality, and therefore create the impression of truth, of facts, of reality itself. That whole terminology is being undermined by this modern confusion. To be more posistive and less deterministic about it, it is a (neo) Kantian approach, one of the main narratives the west follows. One that helps connect the dots.
To put it in a bad way, a person who believes that there will ever be a way to view the unrecorded past through technology is not that far from a person who believes that a camera captures your soul. It is just a confusion or misinterpretation about how our mind deals with time and memory in terms of synthesizing our reality.
Christianity utilized this type of confusion as tactics, to base itself as an institution of religion. By story telling and by spreading fear in the heart of its believers, by making man small against god in its churches, by bringing the horror that awaits the sinner closer, by story telling, by the illusion and confusion and the fear that these stories will ever be part of our physical reality, by superstition. By having certain ideas about what is possible for humans.
To say it in other words, during the Middle Ages, or any other period in that sense, the only obstacle that stood before man, before they could realize their own power to control his own life and environment, was just his interpretation of reality. If fear from punishment is the main narrative generator of Christianity, as a main narrative for the west, then it limits its ability to act. In the same way Wagner’s main protagonist in the Ring, Siegfried, is just fearless, moral-less, Pagan in spirit, therefore he can achieve greatness. He is the same type person whom Nietzsche and Einar were quoted about.
The contemporary post-modern approach acknowledges every man as a storyteller of his own story, makes us humans gods in our own universe, but the problems is, that gods, when taking human form and vice versa, are bound to be far from being ideal, from being ‘perfect’.
Man, as beings, between gods and animals – is what we are according to the pagan beliefs of Ancient Greeks and Vikings. We have the Godly ability to conceptualize ideals, but never to fully achieve them as mortal animals bound in a biological body. (AC : therefore we have technology).
Gods
“Worship required by the Norse pantheon was not adoration, or gratitude, or even unreserved approval, and was thus utterly unlike the Christian relationship to the divine. The religion of the Æsir and Vanir demanded only a recognition that they existed as an integral and immutable part of human nature and society, and of the natural world, and that as such they possessed an inherent rightness – perhaps even a kind of beauty. If one wished to avoid disaster, it was necessary to come to terms with the gods, and the terms would be theirs, not those of their followers. ”
Neil Price. “The Viking Way”
Pagan – man is nature
Monotheistic – nature is man
Basic symbology
The leading characters of the game represent modern interpretation of old representations.
| Character | Alter Ego | Symbology | |
| Eivor | Odin1, Havi | Courage, heroism | Action |
| Sigurd | Tyr2 | Friendship, trust | Values |
| Basim | Loki3 | Egoism, deceit, Code of conduct and morality | Knowledge and intelligence |
| Layla | Heir of memories | Animus | Ideals |
| Angrboda | Alethea | Truth | Experience |
this corresponds with the runes
1 Odin is part of Eivor, Odin is two-faced. He is the Jungian shadow, the dark side of his conscience, his moral complex, the raw unbalanced crave for power. Odin is the namesake of the Ansuz rune (ᚨ)
| Ansuz rune (ᚨ) Positive | Negative |
| Inspiration, insight and foretelling, excitement, ellequence, blessing, wisdom. | Illusion, boredom, false boasting, trickery, fraud |
Odin according to pagan tradition is associated with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, victory, sorcery, poetry, frenzy. Today war and battle are not crucial for survival like in the old viking times, so of course the meaning of war and battle as positive values are not accessible to us.
- Eivor can also be associated with the son of Odin, Víðarr. During the Ragnarök, Víðarr avenges Odin’s death by killing Fenrir, and therefore he survives.
2 Tyr in the Norse mythology sacrifices his arm to the monstrous wolf Fenrir. Týr is the namesake of the Tiwaz rune (ᛏ).
| Tiwaz rune (ᛏ) Positive | Negative |
| Honor, justice, leadership, logic, judgement while in danger, willingness to make sacrifices, victory, argumentation. | lack of initiative, not being able to think, lack of judgement, woe, defeat, running away from resposibility. |
3 Loki is associated with the Bjarkan rune (ᛒ), meaning “birch”.
| Bjarkan rune (ᛒ) Positive | Negative |
| Pregnancy, birth, fertility, continuation, physical and spiritual development, freedom, renewal, spring, love affair. | Family trouble, abandonment, loss of control, alienation, sterility, indifference. |
**The son of Loki and Angrboda is Fenrir. He is about to bring Ragnarök.
The true god of the game is the storyteller, the developers, they created a universe. Regeneration is the re-telling of stories and myths through memories as life reaffirming experiences.
Things missing from the story :
Loki’s daughter Iðunn (Idun) is the keeper of apples and granter of eternal youthfulness. This is how the gods keeps their youth until the Ragnarök.
TO BE CONTINUED….