Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Experiential History, and the Roman Past

Today I found myself scaling the limestone skeleton of a Roman arch. I suppose this is somewhat less remarkable than my transformation from a thirty-year-old couch potato into a 1200-year-old viking.

Alright, fine, I’m exaggerating. But one of the merits of the Assassin’s Creed franchise is its ability to let you commune with the past. I’m a PhD student in history, studying late medieval and Renaissance England. I read constantly, my once-20/20 eyesight a sacrificial offering at the altar of insular and irrelevant knowledge. I’ve been enjoying the coincidence that Odin, whom you warg into in a side story in Ubisoft’s most recent entry in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, sacrifices an eye in his own quest for knowledge. But books have their limitations, and I’ve increasingly come to believe that video games open a window into the past foreclosed to the universe of text.

This is because text cannot conjure the totality of lived experience — it is not an experiential medium. If a social or cultural historian is interested in conjuring up the world of the past, they can merely describe it. But look around you. How would you describe the world as you experience it? Some things might be more amenable to textual description. For example, you might decently summarize certain internal, mental ideologies that shape various aspects of your worldview and your interaction with material ‘reality.’

But none of us lives in our own heads. As embodied creatures, we experience the world through our senses. Try to describe the totality of everything you see in a day. Everything you hear, you feel, you smell. Once you’ve completed this impossible task, try to recreate, in text, the baroque structure that all of these infinitely partible elements cohere into to form you as a culturally situated subject. You might pick out this or that, but it should be apparent that to fully impart your lived experience to another is impossible, and to get even partially there, that person would need to see and hear and feel something akin to what you do. And this is how the visual medium fills the lacunae of academic texts.

Movies and TV shows have the potential to rise to this formidable challenge, especially when they’re rigorously researched and thoughtfully executed. HBO’s Deadwood comes to mind. Alison Landsberg wrote a terrific article about Deadwood’s use of what she calls ‘the aural visceral’ (“Waking the Deadwood of History: Listening, Language and the ‘Aural Visceral,’” Rethinking History 14 (2010): 531–49). It describes how the show uses sound to conjure up the bodily brutality of the period of history it portrays.

But video games can surpass even the herculean efforts of Deadwood and its cognates. This is because games allow you to participate in a sensual, immersive recreation of the past. I would argue that video games, especially open world RPGs, provide the most immediate communion with history that human beings are currently able to create.

In AC Valhalla, I play as Eivor, a Norse warrior who sets out to Anglo-Saxon England in search of land and loot on the heals of the Great Heathen Army in the late ninth century. The artists, writers, and historians who worked on this game have succeeded in creating a lush, richly textured, and immersive world that’s yours to explore. Inso doing, many of the cultural appurtenances that books describe blossom into a fully realized experience.

Let’s take an older entry in the franchise for an example. In Assassin’s Creed Origins, you’re launched into Ptolemaic Egypt in the first century BC. Pick up any cultural history of this period, and you’ll learn that a first-century Egyptian living in Alexandria would inhabit a world whose multiculturalism had few parallels until the twentieth century. As a port city on the bustling Mediterranean that underwent numerous waves of conquest and assimilation, Alexandrians would have seen this cultural syncretism stamped on the landscape. They’d have heard it in the cacophony of languages permeating the marketplaces and public spaces. In Origins, you can experience this with an unprecedented immediacy. Your character speaks in English, but you swim in a symphony of untranslated Greek, Coptic, and Latin, the unintelligibility of which conjures the real aural experiences of a first-century Alexandrian. As you parkour your way through the city, you scale a hybrid landscape of indigenous temples, Greek columns, and altars to divinities borrowed from the wider Mediterranean world. In essence, the ‘globalization’ that Egyptians lived unfolds in crystalline resolution in your very living room.

I’d like to close here with something similar that Valhalla does that stuck out to me as a historian of this period. In the ninth century, the process of what we might call ‘de-romanization’ was not yet complete. The long process of deconstruction of the Roman architectural landscape that took place across Europe hadn’t yet reached its denouement. Anglo-Saxons would have lived in a world dotted with the remains of Rome’s ‘colossal wreck,’ to borrow Byron’s inimitable phrasing. The late, great historian of Anglo-Saxon England Nicholas Howe wrote about this in an essay published in an edited volume that sought to apply the model of postcolonialism to the middle ages (Nicholas Howe, “Anglo-Saxon England and the Postcolonial Void” in Ananya Jahanara Kabir & Deanne Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25–47). Howe gets to the nub of things in his typically economical prose: Despite the fact that these structures had been worn down for hundreds of years at this point, they “would still have denoted the presence of an imperial power to a later people that built, characteristically, though not exclusively, in wood” (p. 29).

For Howe, a simple narrative of decline doesn’t cut it, though. Instead, the common medieval practice of taking and repurposing the stone remnants of Rome, what scholars call spolia, reasserted Anglo-Saxon continuity with the imperial past, even as it acknowledged its distance from it. In Valhalla, you travel to Colchester, where the local ealdorman has taken over a semi-decrepit Roman building for his residence. The process that Howe describes finds a ‘living’ exponent in the ealdorman, who uses the building as the first phase of his aspiration to rebuild Colchester in the image of imperial Rome. He decries Colchester’s decline into barbarity, even noting denizens’ use of wood and wattle-and-daub hovels!

It’s hard for modern Americans to appreciate the starkness of primitive wood houses butting up against gargantuan stone structures. How haunting it must have been to hear the whispers of antiquity all around you! We’re not obliged to rely on mere guesswork here. A surviving Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Wanderer” describes a lonely poet lamenting his plight and the ephemerality of life on earth. “The Maker of men,” says the poet, “hath so marred this dwelling / that human laughter is not heard about it / and stand idle these old giant-works.” In Valhalla, laughter and much besides constitute the city soundscape, but the emptiness of the Roman Empire’s “giant-works” makes the pathos of “The Wanderer” both more moving and comprehensible than otherwise possible.

I hope to write more about the evocative and revolutionary power of video games to experience and teach the past. The medium has a startling range of benefits to those with will to seize upon them. I’ve only touched on a few here, but I hope to write more about this in the future. Please let me know your thoughts on the topic, and if there’s anything you’d like me to discuss in greater detail! Thanks for reading!