OXFORD UNIVERSITY ANIME SOCIETY
Homeland Saga, Part II:
Borderwalker
Cici Zhang
31/05/24
Author’s note: this article cites quotations from Alfred Hiatt’s “Beowulf Off the Map”, published in Anglo-Saxon England, and Adam Miyashiro’s “Homeland insecurity: Biopolitics and sovereign violence in Beowulf”. A shorter, more concise version of this essay is published in Student Film Journal, Trinity 2023 zine.
Trigger warnings: references to rape, slavery, and violence committed during colonization of land.
There is an Old English term from the poem Beowulf that haunts me: mearcstapa. Mearc means a limit or a boundary, whilst stapa is associated with the verb ‘to step’. Literally, the phrase roughly translates to ‘border-stepper’, or someone who walks alongside or upon borders. The phrase reminds me of Vinland Saga’s solitary antihero: Askeladd.
Askeladd kills Thorfinn’s father for profit. We hate him, for he is openly cruel. We are beguiled by him, for he is openly beguiling. His tongue is coarse. The skills of his swordsmanship are eclipsed only by his vulgar charisma. A grin, bordering on feral, twists his perfidious, ageing face. It is fitting that Askeladd is the only character who bears no historical resemblance to any of the characters or narratives found in the original Icelandic sagas. He stands alone on the edge of a haunted land. He is adrift, devoid of belonging.
Borders are fragile in Vinland Saga. The lack of a clearly defined border between land and sea provides a setting for conflict or contact between separate lands. Depictions of such territories not only highlight the diversity of landscapes but emphasise the undefined edges between the borderlands and the chaos of the water. Thors dies on a boat trapped between towering cliffs, in a narrow fjord. Thorfinn and Canute’s ultimate confrontation over Ketil’s farm takes place on the beach. The shores are borderlines where separate worlds meet, and where conflicts have ruinous consequences.
When I think of Askeladd, I recall the image of a boy standing on the beach, carrying his mother on his back. The ships that bore them to land burn along the horizon behind his shoulder. His head is bowed low, his throat raw, forming only a few nuggets of broken Welsh, whitecaps foaming at his feet. Standing on the brink between land and water, he is perpetually a ghost, a man trapped along the border between lands: a mearcstapa.
Born illegitimately to a Welsh mother who was raped by a Viking warrior during an invasion, Askeladd grows up in the stables as his mother falls sick whilst toiling on Danish soil. He spends years immersing himself in a community of Vikings in the hopes of avenging his mother by slaughtering his father—a goal that he eventually achieves. Separated from his ancestral homeland, Askeladd is content never to return to Wales on the guarantee that he can protect it. The memory of Wales is the only part of him that remains untainted: the homeland symbolic of the mother he deeply loved. And every time I re-read or re-watch Vinland Saga, it breaks some part of my heart to remember that, for Askeladd, Wales is the only thing about himself that is still worth protecting.
During his journey across northern Mercia, Askeladd secures the safe passage of his men across the Severn River and the Morgannwg Kingdom thanks to the remnants of his familial relations with the Welsh commanders. He saves the Danish men from an ambush on Brycheiniog soil by speaking Welsh with the attackers and revealing himself as a descendent of Artorius, the greatest leader of the Roman Celts, through his mother’s bloodline. Askeladd’s ability to move between worlds is both his greatest vulnerability and his greatest strength. He not only walks along cultural and geographical borders, but also walks a thin line between valour and treachery, between honesty and deceit, between malice and vulnerability. In every sense of the word, Askeladd is a mearcstapa.
Blood of the Rabbit.
When King Sweyn threatens Wales with a Danish invasion, Askeladd strives to change his mind. An attempt to conquer Wales would be unwise, he says. It would be, he says, like whipping tired horses to chase a rabbit.
The rabbit as a metaphor for Wales is particularly fascinating because it calls to mind a similar technique frequently used in Old English poetry. Take this example from Beowulf, where King Hrothgar describes the dangers of the mere: Ðeah þe hæðstapa hundum geswenced / heorot hornum trum holtwudu sece / feorran geflymed, ær he feorh seleð / aldor on ofre, ær he in wille / hafelan beorgan (“Though the heath-stepper beset by dogs, the strong-horned hart might seek the forest, pursued from afar, he would sooner give up his life on the shore than save his head and go in the lake”, l.1368–1372). Hrothgar equivocates his men with a hart in this metonymy between human and animal. The metaphorical heorot (l.1369), or hart, serves as an allegory for the human inhabitants of Heorot.
Rabbit. Scrabbling, defenseless. Prey at the predator’s mercy. We are reminded that Thorfinn’s first kill is a rabbit, which he slays and eats in order to survive. The loss of innocence is affiliated with the spilling of a rabbit’s blood. The rabbit recalls not only with vulnerability but with innocence. After all, there are only a few innocent things in Askeladd’s life that he can still protect: Wales, Canute, and—perhaps—Thorfinn.
When the appeal fails, Askeladd stages his mad ruse: he assassinates Sweyn, feigning insanity, so that Canute may kill him and succeed the throne. Only when Thorfinn rips through the circle of frenzied warriors does Askeladd’s mask slip in a final moment of clarity.
Thorfinn, stay back.
We remember that Thors said the same thing when Thorfinn tried to interrupt Thors’s conflict with Askeladd. Thorfinn, stay back. Thors tried to protect him then. Askeladd tries to protect him now.
The moment leaves a reverberating ache. The wheel has come full circle. The man who has killed his father has become a man whose primal instinct is to protect him as a father would—and Thorfinn is left standing on the edge between hatred and absolution, a rabbit splattered in someone else’s blood.
Haunted Homelands.
In this myriad of landscapes — of infrastructures, wildernesses, and ruins — Vinland Saga is a story about home: about leaving homes, finding homes, and making homes. The narrative itself begins because Thorfinn stows himself away on his father’s boat in order to sail away from Iceland. This childhood landscape is so peaceful, so Edenic, that Thorfinn cannot wait to leave it behind. Seduced by promises of heroism and bloodshed, he envies the life of a warrior, even as a child. His pilgrimage takes him on a sixteen-year journey, during which he learns to kill as indiscriminately and viciously as a wounded animal. Gudrid longs to leave a stifling hometown behind and sail the seas beyond the horizon. Characters are constantly taken from their homes: Einar and Arnheid are sold into slavery after their hometowns are pillaged by Vikings. Companionship is meaningful for these characters: their interactions are a clash of cultures, a melding together of foreign understandings, occasioned by the terrain they share.
When discussing early medieval homelands, Alfred Hiatt argues that Beowulf is not a geographic text. It is instead “a poem that describes not a single adventure but several; not a single place, but several; relations between not two peoples but between many.” In doing so, “the space Beowulf writes is regional, a periphery without a centre, whose overriding motifs are exile, mixture, loss – and survival.” Such a description is similarly evocative of Vinland Saga. It is a world that is both politically and emotionally fragile.
When considering Beowulf, Adam Miyashiro writes that the multiplex yet fragmented depictions of landscape “crystallize cultural, political, and literary tensions present in the later culture of early medieval England, vacillating between the fixity and permanence that characterizes the shared ‘ancestral homelands’ of the Danes and the Early English.” The landscape, marked, maimed by nature and humans alike, is a physical testament to human conflict. It is a homeland that survives ruthlessly, relentlessly.
This homeland, this hám gefrægn, this eþel, is not merely territorial but emotional. And of course in Beowulf there is not merely one homeland, but many: the land of the Swedes, the Finns, the Scyldings, the hall that Hrothgar must defend from monstrous adversaries, the Land of the Geats that Beowulf must leave behind in order to become a hero. The Finn episode in Beowulf explores the desolation of being separated from one’s homeland: eard gemunde / þéah þe ne meahte / on mere drífan (“He dreamt of home, though on the frozen seas he could not steer”, l.1129-1130). Grendel’s “motherland” is the wilderness that borne him, ruled by none other than the woman who birthed him. The maternal intimacy takes on implications of cultural and familial belonging.
More than anything, Vinland Saga is about the ability to make a home. Thorfinn leaves his homeland behind to chase a landscape that encourages and forms the backdrop for his violence, but the twelve years he spends attempting to avenge his father cement his place in Askeladd’s army, as he finds that he has made a home amongst the very men that he hates. Such an experience mirrors Askeladd’s complex position within the Danish community that he leads. He claims to hate the Danish, but, in Bjorn, his Danish second-in-command, he finds an intimate comrade. Their iron-clad co-dependence makes them wordlessly compatible with one another; their mutual trust defines the troupe’s success. Askeladd is an internal outcast, a man separated from his homeland, but, through his friendship with Bjorn, he forms some sense of belonging. Both Thorfinn and Askeladd, whether or not they wish to admit it, manage to make homes for themselves in landscapes that they hate.
Vinland Saga, like its antecedent, Beowulf, is a story about home. It is about the steadiness, the fæste-ness (firmness), the comforts of the homes we build from the ground up, and the consequences of sustaining the boundaries that we draw in an attempt to protect them. Home is Hrothgar’s hall, betlíc ond bánfág (“bone-adorned”, Beowulf, l.780), as if built from the skeletons of our ancestors, as if fashioned out of our own blood and tendons: a literal “bone-house”. It is the home we build with our bare hands and lay down our lives to defend. It is the homeland ravaged by invaders, snatched out of sight as we are cuffed to the deck of a slave-trader’s ship. It is the home we leave behind to pursue heroism and fame. It is the home we leave behind to follow the men our fathers told us to marry. It is the home we leave behind to fight wars on behalf of men whose faces we do not even recognise. It is the home we leave behind to seek revenge against those who killed our families. It is our fatherland, our motherland, bound to us by the very ties of ancestry and blood. It is the ruins that we turn into refuge. It is the home that absorbs our pain into soundlessness, our loss into acceptance; the home that makes firelight to illuminate the darkness, bearing the absence of things we’ve lost, bearing witness to the scars of our survival. And what is home, if not a landscape inscribed and over-inscribed with what makes us essentially ourselves?
We wish to escape and to confront. We wish to injure and to heal. We wish to protect and to kill. We wish for a world with peace and impartiality, yet we want to be loved, for we are always so selfish. How can we possibly reconcile these fragmented parts of ourselves—when we do not even know which homeland we belong to?
We are, each of us, mearcstapas, navigating the borders between lands. Home, in Vinland Saga, extends beyond geopolitics and ancestry. Whenever geographical territories are breached, cultural and personal identities are also re-defined.
Epilogue.
But then, what is Vinland?
It is a place without slavery, without conquest. It is a land where we can walk with our hearts whole, unshattered. It is a place we can call home without feeling the loss.
Kneeling on the bare, wooden floors of his household, Thors promises us that, beyond the seas, there is a territory called Vinland. To touch upon even the faintest recollection of its glory is to make the land ours. Its peace, its splendour, is ours to claim. Only years later, as we witness Thorfinn’s epiphany, do we finally see that Thors was right: it is only by healing our landscapes that we can heal ourselves. Home is the sky above our heads, tainted yellow by a bleeding sunset. Home is the raw dirt beneath our feet, made fertile by undying hopes. These are our mountains to scale, our fields to plough, and our seas to sail. Thorfinn’s Vinland is Askeladd’s Avalon, Canute’s Eden. Regardless of which culture we belong to, the motif is a waking dream that comes back to haunt us: we dream of a homeland made sacred by what’s left of our humanity. This is a home that we never had and will never reach — but it will not stop us from trying.
Vinland Saga, like the Old Danish, Old Icelandic, and Old Norse literature it emulates, is a story filled with fragmented landscapes. A misshapen kaleidoscope of cultures, languages, and belongings, it is a narrative defined by memory and warring desires. Its landscapes reflect the fragility of human edifices and political structures, as well as the beauty of destruction. They reflect the exiled, the indigenous, the native, and the foreign. They are embodiments of familiarity and homesickness, of searching for belongings that cannot be found. They are tainted with sickly memories and immeasurable yearnings, inscribed over and over again with cultural identities, monstrous affiliations, and historical disfigurements.
Vinland Saga brings to us a myriad of landscapes, and we must walk them. Through Thorfinn’s journey, we walk alongside this crew of broken people to remind ourselves that the world is full of homes to find and homes to build. Without our imaginations and the inscriptions of memory, both our literal and mental landscapes would be impossible to navigate. It is our memories that create maps in order to chart them.