- I was a little disappointed with the serpent,
because it's not very big.
(light medieval music)
Hi, I am Anders Winroth.
I teach medieval history
at the University of Oslo in Norway,
and I have written a couple of books about Vikings.
"Long ago, the Allfather Odin united the worlds.
"He threw down his foes,"
"and he cast them into the Tenth World."
"As glacial ages passed, kingdoms rose and fell"
"out of sight of the gods."
I sort of like that paragraph.
I mean, there were glacial ages long ago,
in Northern Europe,
when all of Scandinavia for instance was covered by ice.
There were kingdoms rising and falling all the time.
"When Odin heard his enemies"
were growing once again in strength,"
"he looked to Midgard"
"and sent his Valkyries to scour the battlefields"
"for the greatest of their warriors"
"Dead to the world, they would be born again in Valheim."
So that's very nice.
I mean, that picks up on some mythological themes
in Norse mythology.
I thought this paragraph is quite nicely alluding
to actual Viking lore.
So I guess that is a warrior
that's being carried by a huge bird,
which must be the interpretation of this game
of what a Valkyrie looks like.
I mean, that's not really what a Valkyrie looks like.
They do fly, but they are not birds.
They look like women in general.
Well, maybe with opera.
And there is a bird.
This must be a raven, because he's called Hugin.
[Anders Winroth] Hugin is the name of one the two ravens
that Odin has to get information from the world.
"The megaliths surrounding you are the sacrificial stones."
"They represent the Forsaken,"
"which you must slay in order to ascend to Valhalla."
I think it's quite clever to have megaliths,
that have big stones.
[Anders Winroth] There are plenty of standing stones
in Scandinavia from the Viking Age,
and also from before the Viking Age.
We don't really know what they were used for.
They just stand there.
Oh, here comes the ship.
Now, look at that.
Isn't that beautiful?
This looks to me like a pretty good depiction
of a Viking Age ship.
This one reminds me a little of the most famous one in Oslo,
[Anders Winroth] which is called the Oseberg ship.
We know that Viking ships had these square sails.
We don't really know what the sails looked like.
We know that they have that steering oar
that you can see at the back of it.
Look at how well the ship sails in the water.
[Anders Winroth] Viking ships were very seaworthy vessels.
There aren't any oars in the image,
which makes me wonder,
how can this ship sail without its crew?
Viking ships are almost always striped red and white
in modern depictions.
We don't actually know anything
about how the sails might have been colored or decorated
in the Viking Age.
Something else that is kind of problematic
is the dragon head at the front of it.
[Anders Winroth] Surely, Viking ships did have dragon heads
or some kind of heads at the front of them.
The strange thing is
that none has been found archeologically.
but I'm convinced that they had them anyway.
We have some depictions that suggest that, for instance.
[Anders Winroth] When I say, "the head of the ship"
we should remember that Viking ships are actually built
to be possible to sail in both directions.
That's one of the reasons
why Vikings were so feared in Europe,
because they could show up on the sea very quickly,
run the ship ashore,
and then the warriors could run ashore.
And then they could just go back to the ship
and sail out in the opposite direction,
or row out in the opposite direction.
We have a man with a huge ax
and some kind of armor.
I'm sort of surprised that they don't include chain mail,
[Anders Winroth] which I think
would be the most commonly used iron armor.
This looks more like some kind of plate armor.
Yes, that surely happened as well.
Okay, so here we have a warrior who has padded armor.
I mean, it makes sense.
If you are wearing armor, you want some padding under it.
It becomes very uncomfortable otherwise.
I'm not sure exactly what they mean other than that,
but seems like a good idea.
And this is glorious, isn't it?
Wolf armor.
That wolf skin that this man carries over his shoulders,
probably alludes to the idea of Berserks or Berserkers.
In medieval sources,
one often encounter Berserkers, together with Úlfhéðnar.
[Anders Winroth] This is a word
that should probably be interpreted as "wolf shirt".
One can imagine that there were people
who wore wolf and bear skins.
It's not very useful as armor in battle though.
I want to comment on that ax.
It's huge.
It's maybe bigger than is realistic.
But its edge looks very long,
[Anders Winroth] and that is actually realistic.
There are certainly axes preserved from the Viking Age
that have an edge of more than a foot,
or more than 30 centimeters.
This is perfectly realistic.
And here we have this very impressive guy
who has a very big hammer.
One gets the idea that the designers of the game
has been inspired by Thor and stories about him,
but it's a computer game.
I'm not so sure that Vikings often fought with hammers.
I think the idea of the Vikings fighting with hammers
might come from Marvel Comics, from the god Thor,
who of course, has a hammer.
And then we have another guy who's fighting with a mace.
There isn't a lot of evidence
for this more medieval style mace that is portrayed.
I think they picked up this idea
from later medieval history.
The sword is a very common Viking weapon.
[Anders Winroth] There are many swords from the Viking Age
that have been found archeologically.
There are swords surviving from the Viking Age
that are of a metallurgical quality
that really boggles the mind.
There's also plenty of homemade swords
that are not good weapons, because they are brittle.
Every Viking, I think we can count on,
brought a whetstone into battle,
so that he could constantly sharpen his weapons.
And here we have the spear and the shield.
A spear is a also very common weapon in the Viking Age.
[Anders Winroth] There's a lot of mythology
associated with spears.
The main god, Odin,
he, of course, carries a spear.
Then we also have a shield here.
This shield is not a Viking Age shield.
[Anders Winroth] Viking Age shields
are not usually that long.
If you were a Viking warrior,
you really wanted to have a shield,
so that you could protect yourself.
So now come the monsters.
This is very scary.
"Let all who read me, beware of the Greydwarfs,
"the skulkers in the darkness, the soulless ones."
"They are born from rot and rainfall."
So this is a marvelously scary text.
I don't get really any associations to the Viking Age
or to Viking mythology.
Okay, there's plenty of dwarves in Viking mythology.
They are not usually very dangerous.
Of course, anything in Viking mythology can be dangerous.
There is one thing about this text
that actually reminds me of the Viking Age,
and that is all the alliteration.
Viking poetry uses alliteration a lot.
We can compare that alliteration,
and I'm going to read just two lines in Old Norse.
(speaking Old Norse)
So we have the same kind of alliteration.
[Anders Winroth] And here come the trolls.
Trolls are so deeply embedded in Scandinavian lore.
They must have been thought of already in the Viking Age.
The particular troll they show in Valheim
doesn't really look like
what I think trolls would have looked like.
I don't think people imagined them that big.
[Anders Winroth] And here comes the draugr,
or draugr, as some prefer to pronounce it.
So the word, "draugr" is actually a word in Old Norse,
and it means ghost,
especially somebody who has been buried in a mound,
in a big hill of soil and earth.
They were thought to have the ability
to come back and haunt the world.
We have here,
one of my favorite creatures from Viking mythology,
the great sea serpent,
[Anders Winroth] who in Old North is called Jörmungandr.
I was a little disappointed with the serpent,
because it's not very big.
[Anders Winroth] The great serpent
appears in many places in Viking lore.
and in a lot of surviving poetry and prose.
That great serpent, the Midgard serpent,
actually goes around the entire Earth,
and it is what holds the Earth together.
I kind of liked that they actually picked up
a lot of things from authentic Viking ages.
The people who constructed the game
obviously have done their reading.
So thank you for watching.
And as the Vikings would say,
(speaking Old Norse),
or in English, "Fare thee well."
(upbeat medieval music)
- Hey, everybody,
thanks for watching another episode of "Professionals Play".
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'cause we've got plenty of more content like that.
(upbeat medieval music)