I’ll admit, looking at the color cover of Vinland Saga’s first volume did not inspire much confidence. The character art’s thick black lines, largely realistic proportions, and very stiff posing all brought to mind some kind of western comic anthology, or perhaps one of those “bringing history to life” educational comics designed to Make Learning Fun. The digital shading was just plain hideous, and there’s what, an actual lens flair pasted onto the subject’s dagger? All in all, the cover included enough misguided visual decisions that I was deeply uncertain whether I’d get much out of this volume at all.
Fortunately, as it turns out, Vinland Saga is actually quite beautiful. The regular stiffness of its character art never really goes away, but the human beings here aren’t Vinland Saga’s own favorite character. Instead, it’s the forbidding forests and shores of northern Europe that offer the greatest appeal here, sprawling into the distance or erupting in foamy ocean sprays. As is appropriate for a manga about vikings, the sea itself feels like a living organism, a temperamental beast that hides its secrets in darkness until it rises in jagged peaks, disrupting surf and waging war with man and sinking to linger in cold eddies once again.
It’s clear enough that Vinland Saga’s author Makoto Yukimura is genuinely, deeply fascinated with viking history, and European history more generally. This fascination is made clear through Vinland’s copious maps and charts and historical asides, but on a more fundamental level, it’s very satisfying to see a narrative led by a practical obsession with how life would actually play out for a given people. Stories tend to begin character or narrative-first, with the worldbuilding sort of filling in around the narrative’s thrust, but Yukimura seems more interested in how our lives are shaped by our worlds, not the other way around. And given his own history, that makes perfect sense to me.
Yukimura’s manga career began with the esteemed Planetes, a work of speculative science fiction that at first glance seems to have nothing in common with Vinland Saga’s historically grounded action drama. But Planetes was ultimately just as grounded in its own way; imagining the infinite possibilities of space flight, Yukimura’s central concern were things like “how would this society handle garbage disposal?” and “how would space travel interact with our existing hierarchies of power?” Yukimura’s fundamental understanding that we are products of our societies, and that our stories are ultimately also the stories of the worlds we must inhabit, imbues both Planetes and Vinland Saga with a fire and perspective that elevates them far above fantastical escapism. In fact, Vinland Saga’s heroes seem achingly aware of their own limitations, and its overarching narrative is obsessed with the hope of a true escape.
It takes a while to loop around to that focus, though. We open with a bloody and dramatic siege, an early introduction to Vinland Saga’s remarkable scale, detail, and depth of brutality. What Vinland Saga’s art at times lacks in beauty, it makes up for in ambition, offering a vision of battle that simultaneously conveys the messiness of moment-to-moment war and the clarity of larger tactical movements. The sturdiness and detail of Vinland Saga’s battle scenes impressed me again and again through this volume, managing a difficult balance of maintaining excitement without turning war into anything glamorous.
As the manga begins, we’re introduced to the raider Askeladd and his sullen ward Thorfinn, a young man who has “heroic destiny” written all over him. The volume’s early chapters are clearly intended as an action-packed hook, turning the siege of a mid-sized fort into something like a heist narrative. I was almost disappointed to learn that iconic, meme-friendly image of vikings carting boats across a dang field actually had a coherent tactical purpose: no, they aren’t just that loyal to their boats, they’re flanking a town in order to attack from its port side. And so the mega-sized first chapter continues, offering a clever rogue in Askeladd, a badass young assassin in Thorfinn, and a quest that ends with our heroes buried in treasure while a potato-headed lord fumes in the distance.
That first chapter essentially presents the raiding life as a series of glamorous adventures, a framing that all this volume’s subsequent chapters will work to tear apart. We won’t get another major fight scene until the end; instead, the interim chapters find far more satisfaction in exploring the pace and nature of daily life at the turn of the eleventh century. Though Vinland Saga lacks A Bride’s Tale’s staggering beauty, its vision seems to stem from the same priorities; prizing a clarity of visual intent, and favoring great technical detail over anything interpretative. Few manga can turn “it looks like a textbook illustration” into a strength, but that seems close enough to Vinland Saga’s own goals as to be appreciated here.
That said, while I might be damning Vinland Saga’s larger stylistic choices with faint praise, I’m actually quite in love with its expression work. There’s a unique sense of depth and solidity to Vinland Saga’s character designs that make its characters feel that much more alive, and Yukimura’s pen feels far more loose and natural when carving out relatable human expressions. Askeladd’s mixture of bawdy roguishness and deadly seriousness comes through clearly in his variant expressions, while Thorfinn’s anger smolders, apparent in his every look. And when the story does embrace stylistic embellishments, they stand out that much more clearly – like the urgent splashes of snow here, accompanying us up into Thorfinn’s thoughts for his flashback home.
Askeladd offers our thematic introduction to Thorfinn’s childhood, when he grimly remarks on how “every living human being is a slave to something.” Ten years before that moment, Thorfinn and his family seem unhappily destined to embody that truth. When Thorfinn’s sister Ylva complains that they don’t have any slaves like their neighbors, their father Thors simply responds that it’s “not their way.” And when conflict first comes to Thorfinn’s village, it is in the form of another slave, escaped from over the mountains, desperate to escape his cruel owner. Thors bargains generously for this slave’s freedom, but in the end, the slave dies anyway. Even though he ran from his past, his past caught him in the end – voicing a concern wiser than he knows, it’s Thorfinn who articulates the tragedy of this life, asking “if someone wants to escape from here, where do they go?”
Thorfinn spends what childhood we witness continuously failing to recognize the pain his father carries, and the antipathy he feels towards a warrior’s life. Outside of brief moments of clarity like that moment at his father’s side, he fails to understand the futility of violence, and the impossibility of escaping life’s chains. Thorfinn’s people in general journeyed north to escape an invading army, and Thors himself fled to this inhospitable island to escape further violence. But divorced from any larger context, Thorfinn sees violence as heroic play, as Yukimura’s deliberate sequencing contrasts the chaotic, pointless reality with children’s lighthearted games.
Vinland Saga’s first volume is as obsessed with these contradictory framings of battle as it is with the impossibility of freedom, often undercutting its characters’ belief in the glory of battle with reflections on war’s pointlessness and ultimate injustice. Though Thorfinn delights in learning about his father’s great deeds, his father was actually a deserter, a “coward.” The contrast between Thors and his new village’s reactions to the specter of war could well sum up this whole volume, leading into yet another reflection on the impossibility of escape. Young boys head to battle bickering about who they’ll marry, while old soldiers see battle as a horrible inevitability, the chains they must eventually submit to once again.
These contradictions come to a head in the volume’s finale, where “the legendary warrior Thors” finally gets his moment to shine. Thorfinn’s father fights heroically, defeating an entire ship’s worth of pirates before turning to their captain. Thors fights with strength and integrity and skill, and he wins like a champion, proving without killing anyone that he’s “not a bad guy like you!”
It doesn’t matter. He’s killed anyway, shot through a dozen times, murdered to facilitate the personal ambitions of one of his former allies. For all the villagers’ lofty boasts of their heroic futures to come, they are ultimately spared only by the arbitrary sacrifice of the one man among them who could actually fight. Thors hoped to escape his chains, but they caught up to him in the end. And tragically, even his death fails to convince his son of the truly meaningless nature of war. Crouched in a stolen boat and staring straight at his father’s killer, the pirates remark on the fire in his eyes, an anger they see as a kind of personal strength. But I can only see that anger as its own form of imprisonment; as the chains of revenge he himself has chosen, dragging him onwards to a blood-splattered future.
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