“Do you want to go through the Mists of Time?” he asked.

No, I said. I’m in a bit of hurry, and there’s somewhere else to be. How long is the big filmy thing?

“Twenty-eight minutes,” he said.

I’d better skip it, I said, darting into the next hall, which turned out to be a series of remarkably wide-ranging exhibits linking the Viking Age to the Silk Road, including a fragment of Tang-dynasty textile, found in a Swedish grave, and a cowrie shell, found in Denmark, that might have come from as far away as the Maldives. It ended in the café, and I realised that I had inadvertently refused to go through the main event at the Vikings The Immersive Experience.

Sheepishly, I sidled back to the guardian of the Mists of Time. It was half past nine on a Tuesday morning, and I was the only person there.

Okay, I said. I am ready.

It’s been thirty years since Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, but we still struggle to find the words to describe hybrid media events. Vikings: The Immersive Experience is not a museum exhibition, but several inter-linked multi-media happenings, separated by a holding area packed with replicas related to the world of the Vikings, some of them also interactive. It is not the sort of place for a hurried historian to dash through, snapping signage with his phone. It is intended to be the length of a movie, and so it should be.

The story derives from the Tale of Ragnar Lothbrok (most famously used as the inspiration for the History Channel’s Vikings series), and cleverly runs with the doubtful claim therein that Ragnar’s wife, Kraka, was really Anlaug, the last of the Volsungs, daughter of Sigurd and Brynhildr. This allows the Immersive Experience to begin with a VR event retelling ancient myths beneath a rune-hung World Tree. This first presentation ends with Anlaug/Kraka boarding Ragnar’s longship to sail off for her wedding.

Beyond, there is a scattering of displays and interactive booths, while “the Professor” on my audio guide made repeated offers to go deeper into any subject I liked the sound of. The Immersive Experience does everything it can to showcase the high points of the Viking age, and then waits for the visitor to ask to know more.

It’s Anlaug/Kraka’s wedding that begins the second and larger multi-media experience – a 360-degree movie which the audience is invited to watch from their very own longship. It offers dizzying bird’s-eye views of a Norse community, and then plunges the viewer into a prolonged sequence in which Kraka develops the power of prophecy, thereby allowing her to foretell the next 200 years of Viking history, her sons’ wide-ranging travels and conquests, and (in the only linguistic mis-step) landfall on a distant coast that she anachronistically refers to as “the Americas.”

The narrative is unrepentantly, exultantly the story the Vikings tell about themselves, without any of the coughs, cavils or asides of modern scholarship – apart from an opening speech recounting the destruction of Lindisfarne, the story is one of a bunch of sea-kings taking whatever they want, and reacting with fierce anger whenever anyone stands up to them. I actually found this lack of hand-wringing rather refreshing, and ideally suited to the implied viewer: a teenager ready to be thrilled by tales of derring-do by entitled thugs. As a popular historian, I concede that it is necessary to meet one’s audience halfway. Coming out of the Immersive Experience into the inevitable gift shop, one is invited to pillage fridge magnets and baseball caps, as well as a selection of introductions to the Vikings aimed largely at a young-adult readership. More detailed accounts of the Viking age can wait, but the Immersive Experience is sure to hook them in.

It finishes with another cunning link, suggesting that Anlaug/Kraka, might be the unidentified Viking queen buried in the Oseberg ship grave. This allows the experience to close with the sight of the archaeologist Gabriel Gustafson and his little dog, poking around an unassuming hillock in Norway, connecting a tall tale that begins in ancient myth with the first Victorian-era finds that would define our modern sense of the Viking age.

The guardian of the Mists of Time was waiting for me on the other side.

“Would you like to have your picture taken on the Viking throne?” he asked.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Vikings. Vikings: The Immersive Experience is currently running at Dock X, Canada Water, London.