A dead warrior is carried by a Valkyrie into a strange world, a raven called Hugin explains the basics, and the first enemy is a stag with enormous antlers. Anyone who knows the Edda pricks up their ears at “Valheim”. The survival game from the Swedish studio Iron Gate draws deeply on Norse names, but mixes them with folklore from much later centuries and with inventions that sound Viking without coming from the Viking Age. This article goes through the bosses, creatures, landscapes, houses and ships one by one and sorts them into three boxes: attested in the Edda and sagas, borrowed from later folklore, or made up for the game.
“Valheim” is a survival and building game for one to ten players. It was developed by Iron Gate, a small studio based in Skövde, Sweden, and is published by Coffee Stain Publishing, part of the Embracer group. The game launched in Early Access on Steam on 2 February 2021, meaning a playable but unfinished version that was expanded over several years. According to English Wikipedia, work began in 2017 under the working title “Fejd” (feud).
Success came fast. About a month after launch Iron Gate reported more than five million copies sold, and in April 2022 the studio announced in a press release that it had passed ten million. In September 2023 Embracer cited more than twelve million at its annual general meeting; that figure therefore comes from the publisher’s parent company, not from the studio itself. I am not aware of more recent official sales figures. The Xbox versions followed in March 2023, and version 1.0 arrived on 9 September 2026, together with versions for PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2.
Over the years large regions were added: the Mistlands in December 2022, the Ashlands in May 2024 and, with version 1.0, the Deep North, which Iron Gate calls the final biome. Each biome, a landscape zone with its own creatures and resources, has a boss whose loot unlocks the next tier of gear.
The Steam page describes the game as “inspired by Norse mythology”. That is an honest phrase: Iron Gate built its own world that borrows Norse names and images, and the developers cite adventure games such as “The Elder Scrolls” or “Zelda” as models.
The core of the setting is a claim found in no source: that Valheim is the tenth world. Norse tradition works with the number nine. In Völuspá, the opening poem of the Poetic Edda, the seeress says she remembers nine worlds (níu heima). No medieval text lists all nine; the familiar list is a modern compilation from scattered passages. More on this in the article on the nine worlds.
Iron Gate fills that gap with a story of its own. According to the lore that fan wikis piece together from runestones and in-game texts, Valheim was once joined to the world tree. Odin cut off the branches leading to it and banished his enemies there. The exiles, “the Forsaken”, have since grown strong. Version 1.0 ends with the tenth world growing back onto the world tree.
None of this has a model. The Edda knows no severed branch of Yggdrasil, no tenth world and no prison realm for Odin’s foes. It does know an Odin who gathers fallen warriors in Valhalla to fight at his side at Ragnarök. The game reverses this: the fallen must first earn a place in Valhalla.
The name is game design too. “Valheim” is not an Old Norse word. It is clearly built from “val” (the slain on the battlefield, as in Valhöll, Valhalla) and “heim” (home, world, as in Jötunheim or Niflheim). As “world of the slain” it is well made, but it is not attested.
The game opens with a Valkyrie dropping the player character at a ring of sacrificial stones, where the trophies of defeated bosses will later hang. In the sources, Valkyries are Odin’s servants who decide on the battlefield who falls and escort the chosen to Valhalla. Valheim keeps the image of the escort of the dead but sends the dead the other way: not into the hall but onto a world of trials. The evidence is laid out in the article on Valkyries. The Ashlands added “Fallen Valkyries” as enemies, which have no model in the sources.
Odin himself stays in the background. He is the patron, the Allfather to whom the player must prove himself, and he hardly appears in person. That suits an Odin who in the Edda likes to stay hidden, as in Grímnismál, where he sits unrecognised as “Grímnir”, the masked one.
The helper comes most directly from mythology. A raven called Hugin turns up at key moments with hints, for example about the workbench or traders. Munin, the second raven, is in the game as well and received new lines with version 1.0. In the Edda, Odin’s ravens are Huginn (“thought”) and Muninn (“memory”). Grímnismál says they fly over the earth every day and that Odin fears they may not return; in Snorri’s Gylfaginning they sit on his shoulders and tell him what they have seen. A raven as Odin’s adviser is therefore close to the sources; the building tutorial is game mechanics. More on the pair under Hugin and Munin.
The first boss is a great stag whose antlers shoot lightning. His name is Eikthyr, a barely veiled allusion. The Edda has a stag called Eikþyrnir, usually written Eikthyrnir in English. He appears in Grímnismál, a didactic poem in which Odin describes the world of the gods:
Eikthyrnir is the hart who stands by Heerfather’s hall
And the branches of Lærath he bites;
From his horns a stream into Hvergelmir drops,
Thence all the rivers run.Grímnismál, stanza 26, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (The Poetic Edda, 1923)
“Heerfather” (Herjafǫðr, father of hosts) is a name of Odin, and the hall is Valhalla. Bellows says “by” the hall; the Old Norse text says the stag stands “on the hall”, and that is how Snorri tells it in Gylfaginning too: Eikþyrnir stands on Valhalla and feeds on the branches of a tree called Lærad. So much drips from his antlers that it runs into the spring Hvergelmir and feeds all the rivers of the world. The full story is in the article on Eikthyrnir.
The game keeps the name and the antlers; from his loot, the hard antler, you craft the first pickaxe, a neat echo of antlers from which everything flows. The lightning comes from no source. The Edda’s stag does not fight and is no enemy of the gods but a calm, almost cosmic animal on the roof of their hall. Making him one of the Forsaken is a free reinterpretation. I know of no explicit statement by the developers about the model, but the link is obvious.
After Eikthyr, in order of biomes, come the Elder in the Black Forest, Bonemass in the Swamp, Moder in the Mountains, Yagluth in the Plains, the Queen in the Mistlands, Fader in the Ashlands and, with version 1.0, Kall Fimbulbringer in the Deep North. Most of them lack any model in the Edda.
The Elder is a huge walking tree guardian summoned with ancient seeds; animated trees belong to modern fantasy, and I know of no model in the Edda or sagas. Bonemass, a poisonous ooze of bone and mud, is as much an invention as Yagluth, a giant undead ruler of the Fulings of whom only skull and hand still fight. I have found no Old Norse derivation for the name Yagluth. The Queen of the Mistlands rules the Seekers, an insect-like people with no counterpart in the Viking Age.
Two names have a little more background. Moder is a frost dragon summoned with dragon eggs, and “moder” means “mother” in Swedish and Danish (formal or old-fashioned). A mother dragon fits the eggs, but I have not found that reading confirmed. Dragons do exist in Norse tradition, such as Fáfnir in the Sigurd legend or Níðhöggr at the roots of the world tree. An ice dragon on mountain peaks does not. More on this in The dragon in the North.
The last boss has the most Norse name. According to the patch notes, Kall Fimbulbringer is a Jotun, a frost giant. “Fimbul” recalls the Fimbulwinter (fimbulvetr), the great winter that precedes Ragnarök in Vafþrúðnismál and Gylfaginning. “Kall” is Swedish for “cold”. Read freely, then, “the cold one who brings the great winter”; that is my reading, not a statement by the developers. Giants as foes of the gods are genuine Edda material, see Giants and Jötunheim. That they invade a tenth world is, again, game story.
In the Swamp you meet draugr, rotting undead with axes and bows who emerge from sunken crypts. Here the name matches a well-attested belief. The Old Norse word draugr means a revenant, a dead person who lives on in the body and haunts the living. The best-known examples come from Icelandic sagas of the 13th and 14th centuries, such as Glámr in Grettis saga, who haunts a farm after his death and is overcome by Grettir in a wrestling match.
The sagas draw him differently: usually a single figure bound to a farm or mound, swollen, immensely strong and hard to kill. Armed undead hordes in swamps come from fantasy novels and games. Sources and pop culture are separated in the article on the draugr.
The trolls of the Black Forest are huge blue-skinned figures with bulbous noses who tear up trees and use them as clubs. They match the troll of Scandinavian fairy-tale books, and that image is younger than the Viking Age.
The word tröll does occur in Old Norse texts, but it is vague there. It can mean giants, sorcerers or uncanny beings in general; in the sagas even a human who does uncanny things is occasionally called a troll. A fixed figure with a potato nose, a tail and a dim mind does not exist there. The big, clumsy, often simple troll who lives in forests and mountains and turns to stone in sunlight belongs to early modern and modern folk belief. Its present look owes much to 19th- and early 20th-century illustrators such as Theodor Kittelsen in Norway and John Bauer in Sweden.
Here Valheim draws on the fairy-tale tradition, not on the Edda. Version 1.0 added a frozen variant, the Gammeltroll, “old troll”, a name once more from modern Swedish or Norwegian. For the difference between the saga tröll and the fairy-tale troll, see Troll.
The creatures you meet most often are Greydwarfs, small beings of wood, stone and moss that attack in the Black Forest and on the edges of the Meadows. The name plays on the dwarf, the dvergr of the Edda, but they have nothing in common with the dwarves of the sources. Those are skilled smiths who make wondrous objects for the gods, among them Thor’s hammer and Odin’s spear, not wild forest critters.
Closer to the sources are the Dvergr of the Mistlands, a dwarf people with lanterns, tools and outposts of their own. The game takes over the Old Norse word and the idea of the skilled craftsman; hoods and glowing staffs are game design. Background in the article on dwarves.
The Fulings of the Plains are goblins, small warriors with villages of their own. Goblins come from English and French folklore and modern fantasy, not from Norse mythology. Whether “Fuling” is meant to echo Old Norse fúll (“foul, rotten”) cannot be proven; it would be a fitting but unconfirmed derivation.
In the Mountains, Fenrings hunt at night, wolf-like creatures on two legs. The name recalls Fenrir, the wolf who swallows Odin at Ragnarök. The creature itself is closer to a werewolf of European folklore than to an Edda being. The Lox, shaggy riding beasts of the Plains, are invented as well.
The game’s landscapes follow game logic, not cosmology. Meadows, Black Forest, Swamp, Mountains and Plains are types of terrain found in Scandinavia and central Europe; they do not represent Norse worlds.
The Mistlands hold more mythology. Among the fog and rock spires lie the remains of gigantic figures, and you gather material there that the game explicitly calls Yggdrasil wood, along with sap and “Jotun puffs”. This ties the region to the lore of the severed world, not to any Edda passage.
For the Ashlands, a volcanic region with a boiling sea, lava and charred undead (the “Charred”), the comparison with Muspelheim suggests itself. In Snorri’s Gylfaginning, Muspelheim is the world of fire in the south, hot and bright, impassable for anyone not native to it; at its border sits the giant Surtr with a flaming sword. I have found no evidence that Iron Gate explicitly designed the Ashlands as Muspelheim, so the link is a plausible interpretation, not a stated intention.
The same goes for the Deep North. Ice, frost giants and a boss whose name contains “Fimbul” recall Niflheim and the Fimbulwinter. As far as I can see, though, the game does not equate the region with any specific one of the nine worlds.
Building is one of the game’s strengths, and here Valheim gets the Viking Age right surprisingly often. The building pieces are designed around posts, beams, wattle and steep roofs, and structural integrity matters: a beam carries only so far before it breaks. That roughly matches Viking Age post construction, in which the roof rested on rows of internal posts, with walls of timber, wattle and daub or turf; the article on the Viking longhouse covers plans and finds.
One detail looks as if it came straight from archaeology. In the game a fire indoors produces smoke that gathers under the roof and harms the character if there is no vent, and an open fire also needs shelter from rain. Viking Age longhouses had a long central hearth, and the smoke escaped through openings in the roof; a chimney in the modern sense was unknown. Simplified, but true to life: warmth and smoke went together. Stone castles and glass windows of later tiers are less historical.
Mead has its place too. In the game it matures in a fermenter into potions that heal or restore stamina. Mead from honey and water is well attested in the North, and in the Edda the einherjar drink it in Valhalla; as a healing potion it is game mechanics.
At sea the game offers four vessels: a raft, the karve, the longship and, since the Ashlands, the drakkar. Karve is a historically sound term. Old Norse karfi denotes a smaller, versatile ship that could be rowed and sailed; scholars often assign the Gokstad ship from Norway to this type.
The longship matches what most people picture as a Viking ship: long, narrow, with a square sail and room for rowers. The drakkar is the largest ship. The word, however, is recent. It was formed in the 19th century from the Scandinavian plural of “dragon” and is mainly used in French. In the sagas large warships are called dreki, “dragon”; the Vikings themselves did not know the term “drakkar”. Construction and types are explained in the article on longships.
On the open sea lurks the Serpent, a sea serpent that attacks boats in storms. In mythology the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr is a single cosmic being that encircles the world of humans and fights Thor at Ragnarök; more under Serpents in the world tree. Valheim’s serpent, by contrast, is an animal species: you meet several and cook their meat. It resembles the sea monsters that Olaus Magnus drew off the Norwegian coast on his 1539 map of the North, the Carta Marina. That is 16th-century seafaring lore, not Edda. The Leviathan, a vast turtle-like creature you mine for ore, even bears a biblical name.
Some items carry names with a history of their own. The glowing stones that point the way to a boss are called Vegvisir. The Vegvísir (“way-shower”) is indeed an Icelandic magical sign, but not a Viking Age one. It is attested only in 19th-century manuscripts, above all the so-called Huld manuscript. The article on Vegvísir and Ægishjálmur explains the tradition.
Runestones stand all over the game world and tell fragments of the lore. Real late Viking Age runestones are almost always memorials to the dead, not chronicles. On script and stones: Runes.
From the trader Haldor you can buy a belt called Megingjord that raises carrying capacity. That is an apt allusion: in Snorri’s Edda, Megingjörð is Thor’s belt of strength, which doubles his might. Using it to haul ore and timber is a wry translation of divine power into chores. More on the god: Thor.
Valheim’s allusions are mostly well chosen and placed where they make sense: the first boss belongs to Valhalla, the place the player wants to reach; the raven carries knowledge as in the Edda; the belt of strength makes you strong. The Forsaken, most monsters, the lore of the severed world and the ending with the reunion are the developers’ own work. By comparison, “God of War” takes far greater liberties with figures like Thor or Freya, while “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” tries harder to recreate the daily life and politics of the 9th century. Valheim sits in between: mythology as a store of names and mood, Viking Age daily life as game mechanics.
At Glanz & Gravur we engrave Norse motifs such as ravens and stags, and the same question always comes up there too: where does this image really come from?
Is Valheim historically accurate? No, and it does not try to be. It is a fantasy game that uses Norse names and images. Longhouses, hearth fires, mead and ship types are close to history; world and enemies are largely invented.
Where does the name Eikthyr come from? It is modelled on the stag Eikþyrnir from the Edda, who stands on Valhalla according to Grímnismál 26 and Snorri’s Gylfaginning. I know of no explicit statement by the developers, but the link is obvious.
Are Hugin and Munin really in the mythology? Yes. Huginn and Muninn are Odin’s ravens; Grímnismál describes their daily flights over the world, and Snorri says they whisper news into Odin’s ear. In the game they give the player hints.
How many copies has Valheim sold? The latest official figure I found comes from Embracer: more than twelve million in September 2023. I am not aware of more recent figures.
Eikþyrnir – the Stag on Valhalla's Roof · The nine worlds · The Draugr – the walking dead · The Trolls · God of War fact-check.
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