We discovered the immersive Viking City of Rouen: our first impressions

We can’t miss it, visible from the right bank of the Seine, the Viking immersive city of hangar 105, in Rouen (Seine-Maritime), welcomes us at the foot of the William the Conqueror bridge – you can’t make this up – by a Viking village, which will remain present for the inaugural weekend this weekend of June 15 and 16, 2024. There we find, among other things, the longship built by the Cantilienne association Les Enfants de Rollon.

Past the jewelry, engraving and board game stands, more or less inspired by Scandinavian conquerors, we push open the hangar doors. A good hour and a half of immersion in the history of the founding of Normandy awaits us.

Immersion among the Vikings

Precisely, it is the evolution of the image of the Viking which will be told inside the five immersion rooms: from the barbaric and bloodthirsty invader to the subservient duchy to the standardized Frankish kingdom.

The first room, the Scriptorium, sets the tone. Plunged into darkness, Adele (from Normandy) and Guillaume (I of Normandy), two of Rollo’s children, open the intrigue of the future of the land of the northern men between pagan traditions and Christianity.

Having left the corridor of fear, we are in the room of Smoking Ruins where four characters await us, visible on screen, which are all witnesses of the Viking invasions. Via a system of headphones hung on the wall, we can listen to a peasant wanting to return to his land, a monk, Rollo the Younger and a mother superior. We listened to the church lady, we found her rather wise.

Invasions and pillaging establishing Scandinavian domination over what is not yet Normandy, it is in the Camp room that we enter into the intimacy of the invader. We find there three women, from three different generations, giving their perceptions of violence. We learn what was the place of women in Viking societies and how, little by little, Frankish customs were introduced among the men of the north.

Normandy is born

The desire for peace is then felt, materialized in the following room, eponymous, where the main stakeholders are gathered: the inevitable Rollo, Pope John X and the Archbishop of Rouen whose role was decisive, without forgetting the people symbolized by a peasant. Two major events in the integration of the Scandinavians are recounted: the Christian baptism of Rollo and his troops and the treaty of La Chapelle-sur-Epte. Normandy was born.

At the entrance to the fifth room, the peace seems not to satisfy everyone. In front of a reconstruction of a Viking throne, we are invited to the table by Adèle, Guillaume and their father for a serious discussion. It’s about choosing its destiny for Normandy.

As a conclusion, the last stage of our immersion is in the Dream Room. THE 360° video projections take us aboard a longship to discover the Viking heritage around the world. Starting from Scandinavia, the Norman spirit spread to England with the inevitable William the Conqueror, made an incursion into Sicily and took off… into space. If the allusion to Thomas Pesquet is visible, the taking of liberty is questionable.

In closing, it is the Bifröst which was imagined as a legendary bridge between the kingdom of the gods and the land of men (Asgard and Midgard respectively). If a passage to the other world never leaves one indifferent, this one clearly denotes the Viking aesthetic.

Through the Viking Immersive City, the ambition of its initiators Jean Vergès and Anthony Samama is for the Norman public to appropriate its history, or at least part of it. All this, thanks to an investment fund from a businessman, Pierre-Édouard Stérin, renowned close to the traditionalist Catholic sphereas raised by our colleagues from Octopus.

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