TSA writes: In my recent interview with Thierry Noel, historian and inspirational content advisor of the Editorial Research Unit on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, he explained to me that the way the development team were able to fill in the gaps of Viking history to create a believable game world was to consult with experts. That’s all very well and good, I said to myself – garnering odd looks from my family around the dinner table – but how do even those experts fill the historical gaps? If we have very few historical records about the interactions between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons in 9th Century England, then surely that’s it, right? We know what we know, how do we think we know something that happened without even knowing for sure it happened? Things were getting uncomfortably philosophical in my brain, so I decided to have a chat with Ryan Lavelle – Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester and consultant on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – to find out how you research a historical era when there’s precious little record to research.
