Following the worldwide premiere of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, details have started to trickle in about what we can expect when the game goes live towards the end of the year. One tidbit, in particular, is quite amusing and intriguing to say the least.

According to the official Valhalla entry in the Ubisoft Website, there’s a certain paragraph that caught our attention…

Sail across the icy North Sea to discover and conquer the broken kingdoms of England. Immerse yourself in activities like hunting, fishing, dice, and drinking games, or engage in traditional Norse competitions like flyting – or, as it’s better known, verbally devastating rivals through the art of the Viking rap battle.

Wait, a “Viking rap battle”? Flyting?

Flyting, by definition, is “a dispute or exchange of personal abuse in verse form”, highly similar to the modern day rap battles, or Fliptop as known locally. It is apparently an old english activity in league with dice, drinking, and fishing, much to everyone’s surprise.

Thierry Noël, a historian and inspirational content advisor for Valhalla, cited that “The gap between the reality of Norse society and the image we have of the reckless Viking was really interesting to me. They were a fascinating society in terms of culture and pretty fair in the way they treated women, who had important rights at the time. It was certainly contradictory to the common image we have of Vikings.”

Surprisingly, the Vikings are not as reckless as we think they are, as depicted by a lot of content that we’ve seen throughout the years and in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, you’ll get to witness (and play, to some extent) this first hand.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be placing emphasis on dialogue choices to shape the world and we can assume that flyting will be an activity that will highlight this feature.

Turns out, they’ve been doing rap battles before it was cool. Those hipsters.