The Norse Soul in Vinland Saga

I love anime and believe in its transcendental storytelling potential, which merges beautifully drawn art, a motive emotive human force, and a love for the subject material that uniquely immerses me in that version of the author’s world. Few anime live up to or exceed that potential, but Vinland Saga stands with its peers as an unflinching, loving look into Viking culture, redemption, and religious assimilation. Few mediums broach death as a constant in the world—something that happens to good people for no reason. I will try to keep things spoiler-freeish, as I hope whoever reads this can experience the sublime that this show produced for me.

Vikings were the warrior class in Norse society, and their brutality reflected their overlap with the era of the Dark Ages, where human society as a whole began stagnating and gradually collapsing. Intellectual and cultural pursuits ceased or slowed, and as such, few records exist from that time, but Viking oral storytelling preserved a modicum of the spirit of that era’s horror. Vikings were multifaceted in that they retained a culture that asserted strength as a governing force for leadership. Vinland Saga starts out in a village where a world close to ours exists, a place of peace and community, but the intrusion of the outside world, through the escaped slave and later the arrival of the slave trader, displays the dichotomy between the village and the brutality of the outside world. Vinland Saga’s protagonist, Thorfinn, embodies the naivety that comes from living a life of peace and stability with loving family figures. That familiarity is something we bond with and connect to, making it all the more painful to watch Thorfinn’s father get killed in a Viking ambush.

The world that Thorfinn experiences is a sincere look at Viking society—the world of a warrior,

concerned only with killing and fighting enemies. The untold innocents that Thorfinn and the mercenary Viking band he follows to survive decimate is a thoroughly unique, evocative experience, as it is not glorified, dramatized, or exaggerated. The murder of the innocent is that world’s status quo. Death, suffering, terror, and cyclical hatred churning lives through a mill of death, with small pockets of hope, outline what makes Vinland Saga so unique. The show presents our collective past as it was lived—filled with death, suffering, hope, love, hopelessness, and a yearning for more.

The international political intrigue and the weaving of religious politics and theological assimilation within Vinland Saga’s characters express the hardness and callousness of elite mindsets within Viking society. Prince Canute’s personal growth with Thorfinn, the mercenary band, and Christian Friar Willibald’s religious guidance breeds a new ruler who falls into the Viking trappings of corruptive power struggles but with the uniting mindset that Christianity inspired within him.

Redemption churns in this anime as an undercurrent for characters, helping them accept and carry the burden of their monstrous sins against humanity. It is a slow healing process that generations before also went through, and through the various people the show focuses on, the audience can see the mindsets of those at the beginning of the show and the implied suffering they carry as well.