My Heart Is Glad To Have Read Vinland Saga
I have no enemies.
**NON-SPECIFIC, BUT IMPLIED SPOILERS FOR VINLAND SAGA**
I suppose there is no endorsement I can make for this series that will evoke greater attention than the following:
Vinland Saga has my new favorite redemption arc. I like it a lot.
I like it more than Zuko.
That’s a bold claim, considering Avatar the Last Airbender’s Zuko stands in our cultural pantheon of modern redemption narratives as one of its strongest—and a claim that I acknowledge may be colored by recency bias—but I like to think I have a solid understanding of how such predispositions affect me, and I do my best to consider their weight before planting outrageous flags on the blood-soaked hills of opinion.
But I stand by this. The story of Thorfinn, son of Thors, is the best redemption arc I’ve ever witnessed. I cannot stop thinking about it. I wept.
And the best part is how complicated all of that is.
As a story that’s been penned nonstop for almost 20 full years, trying to summarize the totality of what Vinland Saga is “about” is a fool’s errand. It is an ambitious epic, with hundreds of characters and complicated circumstances that bind them. It is outfitted in the frozen armaments of a tale that is at once tragic and timeless.
But if I must put my finger on just one thing that I think the story cares about most, it would be the relationship between violence and culture. How we think about it, what it does to us, how it becomes tradition, and the many, many different attitudes people can take towards it. How violence can change. How it can resist change. How it can change us. How some people love it, some people aspire towards it, and others can never stop thinking about it, even in their dreams.
This is a story set in the great viking age, and as far as historical fiction is concerned, it’s hard to ask for a more lovingly rendered understanding of a place and time in our world. You can tell with every page—every clothing design, house makeup, pastimes shown, agricultural consideration, economic perspective, religious opinion—how much this author wanted to do right by this era. To tell the stories of these people in the most authentic way possible, taking regular breaks from publishing to conduct research and refine expectations.
Vinland Saga follows the journey of a young man, Thorfinn, the son of Thors, a powerful viking warrior. We see the earnesty of his heart in childhood, the boundless love he had for his family, his innate curiosity about the world and the people who live in it.
And then we watch as it’s all taken away, starting with his father.
The ramifications of one man’s death echoes through the young Thorfinn’s life and tears up the soil of who he is, transforming him into a creature of vengeance and hate. From there…well, you read my claim at the front of this piece.
The lens by which we are allowed to see the world matures as Thorfinn matures. New perspectives are considered. Situations evaluated from learned angles. Pain informs healing, which informs emotional growth and modifies values.
It is a story that tonally transforms more than once, through different eras of Thorfinn’s life, as he suffers, struggles, loses hope, finds it again.
It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you this is a revenge story, if only at first. What it becomes after that is what Vinland Saga is truly about: violence, yes, but also the desperate efforts made to become a better person, in a world that doesn’t understand why you might even want to do that. Because redemption and transformation are not easy, least of all when you have many grave sins following at your heels. Mercy and hope give you no quarter.
I think about this series a lot, because I think about how one might try to write it as a book.
I don’t think it’s possible. It leverages the strengths of its medium so much that a novel would feel different. Certainly, you could make something similar, and good, but you could not make this feel the way it does in its current form. You could not write chapter 191 in a book. You could not write in such a way to give me the experience I had watching an entire dialogue play across someone’s face, as they were caught off guard by the most important words they didn’t know they needed to hear.
You could not make me weep more than I did, watching the fruit of kindness come to bear, and another man’s years of chains finally fall off.
Redemption arcs.
While there is an anime for this series, I personally read the manga. I feel like any other version of the story would lose some of the author’s personal touch that really gives this the life it needs, and I’ve heard the second season is storyboarded in such a way to make the pace of a drunk turtle.
Vinland Saga is not a short story, but it is a worthy one, and one that I wish I’d pursued years ago. Lord knows there were times in the last ten years where my soul needed it.
My heart is glad to have read Vinland Saga.
