Description:
Adrenaline in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is a mechanic represented in the game's HUD as a refillable meter (separated into slots) near the player's health and stamina. Adrenaline is a resource needed to use combat skills (LINK), powerful abilities that deal high damage or provide other utility. The adrenaline meter is filled by landing consecutive attacks without being hit or by eating certain mushrooms (Blackish Purple Russula) present in the game environment, and adrenaline slots are depleted by using a skill in combat.
The adrenaline mechanic is present in this database because, along with combat skills, it taps into an old and outdated theory on the source of the berserkers' frenzy (berserksgangr, literally "berserker-movement" or "berserk-walk"; a sense of movement is somehow key, likely indicating entering and exiting the state of frenzy found in the sagas and now on screens). This theory holds that there was a psychoactive substance at play in the creation of the state of mind described as berserksgangr, and that this was likely amanita muscaria, the toxic red and white mushroom also known as Fly Agaric (LINK/S). This theory was originally posited in the 18th century by Swedish historian Samuel Öddman, and was followed by other suggestions, such as black henbane, but all such theories are purely conjecture and there is no evidence for the use of these substances in Iron Age Scandinavia. This is alongside the lack of hard evidence for the actual existence of berserkir outside of the sagas, which are literature (though there was no modern division between history and fiction as such in the Middle Ages).
Nevertheless, this theory became quite popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, and still holds weight in public discourse surrounding berserkers, in addition to remaining present in various popular entertainment forms, such as this instance in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, where it provides a simple, item-based solution to powering combat skills, which themselves are also berserkr-coded (see entry).
No links to Medieval Citations yet.