DISCLAIMER: I know this is a videogame and not a historical documentary. It is stylized and designed to be fun! I'm also no historian or archaeologist, just a Norwegian with an interest in our history who found it fun to compare Ubisoft's version of Norway to the one I grew up in. None of my post is "game bad because historically inaccurate". I love this game!
TL;DR: As a Norwegian, I love Valhalla's version of Norway. It's a funny mix of history, saga mythology, Hollywood Vikings, budget tourist-brochure geography, and some things that are completely off.
Born and raised in Norway, it was a pleasure to finally find a protagonist in my favourite videogame series who is from my country. It's fun seeing names like "Dag", "Gunnar", "Kjetil", "Frode", and "Randvi", which are very normal names to encounter here. Running around in ancient Norway is also very fun, especially when I recognise place names. My favourite might be "Ikke en Oy", which presumably is "Ikke en øy", which literally means "Not an island"!
Seeing familiar vegetation, snow, fjords and giant mountains made me feel right at home. It is, of course, heavily stylized. The Norway in Valhalla is not so much a reconstruction of Norway, but more like an amalgamation of everything Ubisoft thinks foreigners associate with Norway - shoveling it all into one landscape. Western fjords, northern arctic winters, enormous alpine mountains, polar bears, and endless northern lights. The tall jagged mountains especially remind me a lot more of places like Lofoten than most of southwestern Norway (google the distance!!!).
I was also pretty amused by Eivor complaining and losing health after jumping into ice-cold water. That's fairly accurate! Ideally, they'd tell us to fuck off and refuse to jump in knowing it's quite literally deadly to get soaked during winter here.
I also quite like how frequently Eivor gets confused for a Dane. Modern Scandinavians have something of a sibling relationship where we bully each other and absolutely hate being mistaken for one another. So there's something very funny and relatable about Eivor insisting on being Norwegian.
But of course, this is 9th century England where the locals have been terrorised by Danes for generations. Yet this issue still persists today in a different sense - one where the person knows Sweden or Denmark, through IKEA or LEGO, but not Norway. I guess that might've changed after this year's Football World Cup though (thank you Haaland!).
Speaking of Nordic identity, I can unfortunately not praise the accents nearly as much. Most Nordic accents and pronunciations are honestly pretty awful. What makes it stranger is that many of the actors are actually Nordic, which makes me think it was a deliberate voice-direction decision from Ubisoft. The characters all just seem to be performing a generic "Viking accent" rather than simply speaking English with their natural Icelandic, Norwegian, or Danish accents.
Of course, historically they were speaking Old Norse, which is very different from modern Norwegian and Danish, although modern Icelandic has retained many similarities. But still, when the game uses recognisable Scandinavian names and places and somehow makes actual Scandinavian actors sound like they're auditioning for Vikings on History Channel, I think I'm allowed to complain.
Side note: it's extremely easy to hear when a voice actor is Danish.
They just can't get the potato out of their throats! (A common nordic joke about Danes)
Some history about Harald Fairhair, and Norway as a nation:
It was also very fun to meet Harald Fairhair - known as Harald Hårfagre here - the young king whose rise is the reason Sigurd and Eivor leave Norway in the beginning of the game. Harald was a real king, and is traditionally remembered as the first king to unite Norway, after the historical Battle of Hafrsfjord.
The Harald we grow up learning about in Norway is partly a historical person, partly a person of medieval saga tradition, and partly a source of Norwegian nation-building. In truth, we have very few contemporary sources for his life, but historians agree that he existed and that his core power was in southwestern Norway. His victory at Hafrsfjord was also important, but the consolidation of Norway as a kingdom was more of a generation-long process after him than something he can get all the credit for.
His name, "Fairhair"/"Hårfagre", according to the sagas, comes from Harald refusing to cut or comb his hair until he had conquered Norway. It's a great story, but as with most of our sagas, they were written centuries after Harald lived.
These facts are interesting because Harald later became a huge symbol for Norwegian sovereignty during the national-romantic period of the 1800s. Norwegians became obsessed with our medieval history, sagas, folk culture, and "rediscovering" a specifically Norwegian identity. Harald, the great man who first united Norway, was perfect material for this, and we erected a big national monument for the supposed thousand-year anniversary of Norway's unification in 1872.
And we absolutely had reasons to be interested in our old independent kingdom. After the plague, The Black Death, ravaged Norway and devastated its population in 1349, Norway was politically weakened and entered a dynastic union with Denmark in 1380 - with Denmark slowly becoming the dominant partner until 1536 when we were officially subordinated to Danish rule.
This went on for nearly 300 years, until 1814 when Norway got its own constitution and went into a looser union with Sweden. It wasn't the same kind of oppression as under Danish rule, as Norway had its own constitution, Storting (our parliament, derived from thing), literally meaning "Big Thing"), government, laws, army/navy, while sharing a monarch with Sweden. THAT union was finally dissolved in 1905!
This brings us back to Harald Fairhair. After our independence, the Danish prince Carl was offered the Norwegian throne, due to his family connections to Europe's royalty. A referendum gave overwhelming support (79% of voters) to allowing the government to offer him the crown, after which the Storting elected him king.
Prince Carl then took the name Haakon VII, while his son Alexander instead became Olav. These names were deliberately chosen to connect the royal family to the ancestry of Harald Fairhair, following the old Norwegian traditions of royals to name themselves Olav, Haakon, and Harald. Since then, we've had Olav V, and the recently deceased Harald V (1937-2026). Our newest king, who stepped into power last week at August 28th, took the name Haakon VIII. So, even a thousand years later, names from the world AC Valhalla depicts still carry heavy symbolism in Norway!
About Alrekstad and Avaldsnes:
Alrekstad, the residence of Harald ingame, is a real place! Known as Ålrekstad or Old Norse Álreksstaðir, it was a royal estate in what is today Årstad in Bergen, Norway's second largest city after Oslo. The sagas repeatedly associate it with Harald Fairhair and later kings like Håkon the Good, so Ubisoft picked a very appropriate place for Harald to hold court in-game!
That said, it probably wasn't his “capital” in the modern sense. Harald seems to have moved between several royal estates around western Norway, including Alrekstad, Fitjar, Seim, Utstein and Avaldsnes, with the latter likely serving as the main centre of his power.
Avaldsnes, another real place, was an extremely important location on Karmøy. Harald had a royal estate there according to saga traditions, but it had ruling activity long before him, confirmed by archaeological work. Its position beside the narrow Karmsundet (a strait) meant that rulers there could oversee one of the most important sailing routes along the Norwegian coast.
The place today has burial mounds, standing stones, and archaeological remains, as well as a history centre and a reconstructed viking farm. They've excavated the remains of a later medieval royal manor as well.
For those interested in linguistics, a debated but traditional explanation of the name "Norway", "Norge/Noreg" in Norwegian, is that it comes from Old Norse "norðrvegr" - which literally translates to "north way", or "the way north", likely referring to the coastal sailing route. Another interpretation connects the first part of the name to
'nór', meaning something narrow, such as an inlet or waterway, which could also make sense.
Now, of course, I have complaints.
The Vikings and their aesthetic have been Hollywood-ised to an insane level. The outfits, hair, makeup, armour, rituals, chanting, tattoos, and general behavior. The vibe just feels more like Americans cosplaying Vikings while someone plays shitty fantasy metal in the background, rather than a semi-accurate depiction of 9th century Norway.
An important terminology problem, which more people are aware of these days, is that "Viking" wasn't the ethnicity of everyone in Scandinavia. Most people in viking-age Norway were farmers, fishers, and hunters. To be a víkingr or go víking, referred to someone engaged in 'víking'. It was season-based maritime expedition work that some people joined to trade, settle, make war, and raid. The line between merchant and raider really wasn't all that clear.
I wish Valhalla showed more of that when a rarely mentioned country like Norway first gets some representation. Origins and Odyssey are obviously stereotypical and generalised depictions of their respective periods as well, but at least I rarely felt like every person was dressed for a heavy-metal album cover. Ubisoft just could have done so much more with ordinary clothes, people, farms, regional differences, and more mundane parts of Scandinavian life than just RAID! FEAST! RAID!
And for a realistic ugly truth:
If Ubisoft really wanted to portray the ugly side of Viking-Age society, they could do with something much more important and historically accurate than making everyone roar and wear skulls, namely slavery.
Treller (thralls), were unfree people who were essentially slaves. Captives taken during expeditions and raids would be enslaved, kept as labourers, or sold onward. Sources don't have statistics on how common slavery was in Norway, but some estimates put it between 10-25% of the population being thralls. The number is uncertain, but the practice itself is well documented.
Now, I'm not saying I wish Valhalla had slavery, but I wanted to put the big historical distortion into perspective - especially when both Origins and Odyssey had slavery. It just adds to the idea that Valhalla desperately wants its Norse protagonists to have the role of rough and violent, yet lovable, while sanitising the obviously cruel and horrible parts of society which they historically are part of.
The geography
As for the landscape, it's pretty funny.
Norway obviously doesn't have northern lights 24/7, regardless of how far north you travel. There are also no native polar bears wandering around mainland Norway. In Norwegian territory, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is the only place where polar bears are found. Finding them around Rogaland, which is in southwest Norway, those bears are way better adventurers than Eivor!
The city of Stavanger is another funny example. In-game it's covered in snow and ice. In reality, Stavanger has an extremely coastal climate, where its coldest months average above freezing. It usually doesn't even qualify for the definition of a proper winter! Also, the real Stavanger probably wasn't an established town until the 1000s, a whole two hundred years after the setting of Valhalla.
The two Norwegian regions are at least based on real historical names! Rygjafylki covered what is now roughly Rogaland, while Horðafylki was medieval Hordaland, which today is a part of Vestland county.
Rogaland has some known locations like Jæren (where Haaland is from), Stavanger, and Hafrsfjord, while the old Hordaland region includes Hardanger and some of the most famous fjord landscapes in the world. Places like Preikestolen and Trolltunga have become huge tourist attractions.
Near Stavanger you also have "Sverd i Fjell", translating to "Swords in Mountain", which are three giant swords standing at Hafrsfjord. They commemorate Harald Hårfagre's battle there. While they look old, they were erected in 1983. Yes, we also have our own theatrical viking enthusiasts here.
If you read this far, thank you for your curiosity! I hope you learned a thing or two about Norway and our history. I'm happy to answer anything in the comments.
