Assassin’s Creed has explored a myriad of different time periods and cultures since its inception. The different religions and cultural beliefs of the societies players encounter has increasingly come under the spotlight as the series has moved forward and explored its world’s backstory more, and this exploration has taken a new direction in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
In previous games in the series, players encountered figures known as the Isu, the members of an advanced but extinct species that predated and created humanity. These Isu had names like Jupiter, Minerva, and Juno, with the games implying that the gods of ancient cultures like Rome were interpretations of humanity’s cultural memories of the Isu. However, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla goes in a slightly more complicated direction with the leader of the Norse pantheon, Odin. MAJOR SPOILERS ARE AHEAD.
Odin is the All-Father in Norse mythology, the patriarch of the Norse gods, and appears in many Norse myths, often in disguise as a travelling old man. In this traveler’s disguise, he usually appears in a long robe and with a wide-brimmed hat. He also has one eye, having sacrificed the other to obtain wisdom from Mimir.
In the myth, Odin is destined to die in Ragnarok, consumed by Fenrir the wolf. Odin is also one of few male figures in Norse mythology – along with Loki – to have the power of magic. Magic, called seidr in both Norse myth and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, was generally associated with women. No matter which gender Eivor is in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, however, the character has a very interesting relationship with Odin.
Odin, like Juno and other characters named after gods in Assassin’s Creed, is an Isu in the game’s universe, which means means he was a member of the highly intelligent and technologically powerful race that predated humanity. The Isu and the First Civilization created humans to be a reliable but less intelligent workforce, while they also created Neanderthals to be soldiers.
After two humans, Adam and Eve, led a rebellion against the Isu, a war began between the First Civilization and the humans, and when a solar flare caused catastrophe across the planet, the Isu were caught off guard and left extinct. Throughout Assassin’s Creed, the Isu return as messages left behind by those who survived or predicted the disaster, but Odin’s appearance in Valhalla reveals that some Isu had plans to leave more than messages behind for the humans who would succeed them.
Like many of the main characters in Assassin’s Creed, Eivor is related to the Isu, but not as indirectly as those before. In previous games, this was used to justify a super-sense the Assassin characters had, called Eagle Vision. In Valhalla, Eagle Vision is renamed Odin’s Sight due to this connection.
Odin’s character model in-game resembles the male version of Eivor for good reason. It is eventually revealed that Eivor, Sigurd, and Basim are in fact reincarnations of the Isu named Havi/Odin, Tyr, and Loki respectively, thanks to an Isu plot to survive “Ragnarok,” referring to the Great Catastrophe which destroyed the First Civilization. Despite being revealed to be a reincarnated Isu themself, the way that Eivor reinterprets events in the Isu’s history using the lens of events in Norse myth like Ragnarok points to the strange nature of Odin’s role in Valhalla.
The Odin that appears in Eivor’s visions Valhalla is, in one sense, not a real person even in the game’s story. Just as players might assume that the threads being woven by the Nirn are not actually supposed to indicate that the Isu were adept weavers, the Odin of Eivor’s visions is an interpretation of information being passed to Eivor from a real Isu, but the version of Odin seen in-game is transformed through the cultural lens of Norse myth. Odin’s portrayal in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla marks a noticeable change in direction for the series, synthesizing some of the more magical aspects focused on since Assassin’s Creed Odyssey into the fictional history of Assassin’s Creed’s universe and also helping to finally bring the modern-day plotline back into the fold.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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