By Roderick Dale and Markus Mindrebø (University of Stavanger)
In The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, the Skellige Isles draw on post-medieval research to create a viking-inspired setting that satisfies players’ “viking” expectations. This paper considers one aspect of this: the berserkr. The berserkr is the epitome of the hyperviolent warrior stereotype that gives the game’s presentation of “vikings” some of the “selective authenticity” required.
The berserkir of The Witcher 3
As part of the Skellige questline, the player encounters a group of bears who murder the guests at an aristocratic feast. The player’s investigation reveals that these are actually vildkaarls (a reference to Old Norse words for “wild men”), human warriors transformed into bears through a blood ritual.
While investigating the murders, the player learns that the vildkaarls are the last remnant of a cult to the ancient deity Svalblod centred in the village of Fornhala, another Norse-ism alluding to halls of past glory. In Fornhala, the player confronts the remaining members of this group, and fights them directly after watching one transform into a bear.
The minigame gwent, an in-universe card game depicting figures from the narrative and wider lore of the Witcher world, offers more information.
The Skellige gwent deck adds cards representing the vildkaarls, called Berserker and Young Berserker respectively. Both can transform into ‘Transformed Vildkaarl’ and ‘Transformed Young Vildkaarl’ cards, with images of bears, when the ‘Mardroeme’ mushroom card is played.
Unlike the game narrative itself, the gwent cards link the transformation from human warrior into raging bear to the consumption of poisonous mushrooms, and the ‘Mardroeme’ card description presents the ominous threat seen below:
The real berserkir
Berserkir existed, but not in the form most imagine. Early research treated Old Norse sagas as history and interpreted berserkir in them on that basis. Subsequent research adjusted that theory without revisiting the primary sources in detail. This created the concept of the shapeshifting berserk warrior possessed by madness that became embedded in the popular consciousness, and that vildkaarls are built on. The devs for Witcher 3 could have drawn on many different theories about their powers, from possession by demons to hangovers to PTSD, but they chose the perennially popular mushroom theory.
A holistic, medial reading of Old Norse literature shows that the medieval audience perceived berserkir as bodyguards and champions. This role fits with the presence of Christ’s berserkir in some sagas, and their existence in 14th-century historical documents recorded in Diplomatarium Norvegicum. The analysis suggests that pre-Christian berserkir were connected to certain rituals related to Odin, but were not shamans, as accords with pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia, where relationships with the gods were personal and did not need to be mediated through others.
Conclusion
The probable historical reality of berserkir was that they were upstanding members of society and of the social elite, and were not merely stereotypical villains or out-of-control, drug-taking madmen.
The game draws on older forms of medievalism emphasising extremity and madness. CD Projekt Red’s berserkers are, like much of the game, not based on medieval material, but on selective framing and reiteration of medievalist stereotypes.
While in many ways a masterpiece of medievalism rather than of medieval representation, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt thus becomes part of a long heritage of misrepresentation of berserkir, while the vildkaarls become a fun addition to the game’s Viking package.
Further Reading
Dale, Roderick, The Myths and Realities of the Viking berserkr (Routledge, 2022)
Salvati, Andrew J., and Jonathan M. Bullinger. “Selective Authenticity and the Playable Past.” Playing with the Past: Digital games and the simulation of history (153-68). Ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Thanks so much for this great paper Roderick and Markus! I love the cheeky D&D reference in your paper title – I was wondering if I could use this question to prompt you to expand a little on what ways you see this specific version of the stereotype in TW3 as drawing on other previous RPGs, including tabletop games like D&D? How entrenched do you think the stereotype about the medieval raging wild warrior is in fantasy games and can you see that maybe changing in future games at all?
Great question; thanks, Tess. It’s interesting how, to me at least, the Norse-specific stereotype taken to this extreme is rather unique to TW3. You could make an argument that the medieval raging wild warrior trope is a much broader and flexible concept going back to D&D’s various iterations of the Barbarian class, which is not exclusively based on Norse (or even medieval) material but more closely on Conan and a variety of similar earlier characters and tropes. D&D 5e does have the Path of the Berserker for Barbarian characters (with Mindless Rage and all), but it does not to my knowledge involve any of the stereotypical mushrooms or animal transformations and whatnot.
In video games it exists in many different versions (we were considering talking more about Skyrim’s Companions as well, as a subversion of the trope – more calm and composed honourable warriors who do turn into beasts, but werewolves rather than bears). So in a sense, while there is a long (and as you say, deeply entrenched) history of raging brutal warriors based on various forms of earlier fantasy barbarians, TW3 interestingly goes very deep into the Norse stereotype in ways that many other games do not.
Thank you for this paper, Roderick and Markus—you raise excellent points!
Many stereotypes indeed have roots in post-medieval research, and I believe our understanding of the past is inevitably shaped by contemporary perspectives.
Given that mainstream developers often base their choices on perceived audience preferences, I was wondering if you could elaborate on how the production of Viking imaginaries intersects with contemporary forms of masculine performativity?
Apologies—I just noticed I replied in the wrong comment section. I meant to post my question as a separate comment.
Hi Emilienne. There is a strong intersection between the two. Looking at the online commentary on Eggers’ ‘The Northman’ clearly shows this, as men focused strongly on the violence and spectacle of the warriors, and missed Eggers’ point that he wanted to show the futility of this warrior aesthetic. A Youtube video made about my research into berserkir also attracted much similar commentary. We see this in some of the more extreme websites that market Viking and Spartan macho aesthetics too. There is a clear appeal to a certain type of masculinity here, in the same way as some Youtubers market a form of masculinity that is focused on dominance of other men as a means to get whatever you want, rather than on the communal lifestyle that was necessary to survive in the Viking Age.
I have noticed that, since the advent of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, much viking-themed pop culture has reinterpreted the vikings as libertarian, individualistic heroes whose only rule is that might makes right, a clearly political interpretation whose only goal is to justify modern attitudes. This reflects the same attitudes as the Youtubers, and you can clearly see it in movies like ‘Northmen: A Viking Saga’ where the main character kills his best friend over a disagreement about what action to take. In modern viking, macho culture, all discussion is solved by butting heads until someone dies or backs down. With this perspective being mainstream now, any viking-themed output that fails to embrace it is likely to lose a large chunk of its audience because it is ‘not authentic’ and will be rejected. Therefore, it is with relief that I see that ‘The Thirteenth Warrior’ and the ‘Vinland Saga’ manga exist and challenge these ideas.
Thank you for the question, Tess. To expand a bit on what Markus has written, I would say that the trope is thoroughly entrenched in many areas of modern pop culture to the extent that many struggle to even consider that it might not tally with the medieval source material. Most TTRPGs do not reference mushrooms, unlike Witcher 3, but the frenzied barbarian untrammelled by civilised convention is clearly there from as early as White Dwarf 19 (June/July 1980), while the berserker is named in the 1974 edition of D&D where they are described as not wearing much armour and able to undergo ‘battle lust’, a type of temporary insanity that resulted in them attacking their enemies without a thought for their own safety. Lee Gold’s version for Rolemaster is even more extreme: ‘Berserks drank blood and ate meat raw; to give themselves courage, berserks ate the hearts of large animals and monsters they had slain. They went into a frenzy at the prospect of a fight’.
The raging berserker is also a staple of tabletop miniatures games and viking-themed boardgames. Most do not address the issue of how these warriors went berserk, and some, like De Bellis Antiquitatis state that there were only really a few berserkers but there were a lot of copycats/wannabes, but we do see Tom Hinshelwood stating that they used intoxicants, like Bog Myrtle, in his miniatures game “Age of Blood”. The use of drugs to go berserk is really much more the preserve of fiction.
These are only a few examples, but it is a theme that runs all the way through gaming, even though in most cases no attempt is made to explain the frenzy, unlike TW3.
This is very tangential to the paper, but reading your analysis made me think on how The Witcher’s portrayal of Norse folklore and material culture “vampirizes” Celtic, and particular Irish elements.
‘Skellig’ is an actual place in Ireland, and some of the region’s toponyms seem to follow Irish conventions (e.g. Ard Skellige. “Ard” meaning ‘high’, or a high place specifically).
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice does the same thing. There’s a mix-and-match of unrelated references to different Celtic-speaking legends stitched together and ‘overwritten’ by a mostly Nordic-inspired plot.
Markus mentioned Conan as a possible early reference, and that makes me wonder if the trend isn’t older than games – Conan, after all, is *also* an Irish name (Conán, properly spelled), that was stripped of his Irishness and became something else.
Absolutely. Quick and improvised reply here as I’m travelling (Roderick may be able to expand) but you’re absolutely right that even just in TW3, the game is arguably pushing the Norse framing to the forefront of what in the original material is a Norse-Celtic (arguably Celtic-dominant) blend. The game added in a lot more Norse/Scandinavian names, place names, and cultural details and accentuated the existing ones to the extent where the game version of Skellige is certainly a Norse-inspired space subjugating Celtic elements. This could absolutely be read as a wider trend as well, due to the pop cultural popularity of vikings – surviving Celtic elements often just get lumped in with the Norse.
Always happy to go off on a tangent! Yes, the placenames are Irish, and the conflation of Irish and Norse culture has a fairly long history in scholarship too. It feels like people have always thought that both cultures were similar, warrior cultures and thus have used the one to analyse the other and vice versa.
To bring this slightly back to the paper’s topic, one clear example is the use of Ol ríastrad and its analysis to inform analysis of ON berserksgangr and the reverse. Ralph O’Connor problematised and discussed the problematisation of ríastrad in his essay in “Kings and Warriors in Early North-West Europe”, ed. Jan Erik Rekdal and Charles Doherty (Dublin: Four Courts, 2016), but he seemed to be taking berserksgangr to mean “go berserk” (etymologically, it does not, but that is a whole other discussion). It is also interesting to note that Hermann Güntert in 1912, suggested the fían were actually Norsemen in Ireland and that Cú Chulainn’s battle rage was an actual example of berserksgangr, so this crossover is not a recent phenomenon. This scholarly focus on comparing two different cultures has transferred into the pop-culture world such that their boundaries are so fuzzy as not to exist.
Fascinating! I didn’t know the scholarly analogies went so far back in time!
It goes to show how many inherited layers of meaning we got to deal with in modern pop culture.