OXFORD UNIVERSITY ANIME SOCIETY
Homeland Saga, Part I:
Landscapes of Desire.
Cici Zhang
9/04/24
Author’s note: this article cites quotations from Marijane Osborn and Gillian R. Overing's Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World, published by University of Minnesota Press, August 1994. A shorter, more concise version of this essay is published in Student Film Journal, Trinity 2023 zine.
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Trigger warnings: references to rape, slavery, and violence committed during colonization of land.
When I retrace the landscapes of Makoto Yukimura’s manga and its anime adaptation, Vinland Saga, my thoughts invariably turn towards home.
All of childhood is a migration. We spend our whole lives leaving places behind. I think of geography, territory, and borders. I think of journeys that are invariably a departure, a fragmentation of one’s identity. Through this, we constantly project our own emotions onto the physical landscapes around us. Imaginary landscapes call to mind familiarity, homeliness, and a stirring of personal desires—for nothing is more homely than the inner landscapes of our minds.
Although Vinland Saga’s characters are haunted by the ghosts of their saga predecessors, they make a new home for themselves in Yukimura’s refreshed narratives. Over and over again in Vinland Saga, Yukimura considers the meaning of home.
What is the meaning of homeland? Across cultures, across continents—how can these ancient texts help us navigate a contemporary world? Does it help us consider violence? Does it help us come to terms with the devastation of territorial conflicts? Does it help us reconcile our struggle with complex cultural identities?
Much of early medieval literature imbues literal landscapes with associations, imaginations, and manifestations of the mind. As Vinland Saga pays tribute to these ancient stories, a similar technique is accomplished. Yukimura provides a variety of ways in which we may consider these sites of cultural fragmentation and historical mutilations, as he captures the complex identities of those who navigate them.
Scars of History.
A quick dive into the wreck of early medieval Scandinavian sagas reveals that many of Vinland Saga’s characters are lifted directly from these historical analogues.
In Vinland Saga, we meet Leif Erickson as he huddles over a meager flame, his coarse face illuminated by firelight as he cajoles the children with bedtime stories of faraway lands. The real-life Leif Erickson, son of Erik the Red, was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to have set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. The Old Icelandic sagas remember him as the man who established a Norse settlement on the coast of Vinland—an elusive, unspecified land usually interpreted as coastal North America.
In Vinland Saga, we first hear rumors of the Jomsvikings from Thorfinn’s father, for he was once a splendid warrior among them. Historically, the Jomsvikings are a mythical legion of Viking mercenaries who adhere to a strict code of conduct that recalls military institutions. Their histories are debated, as each saga offers a different chronology for its formation. The group itself foreshadows the later religious and chivalric institutions of the Middle Ages.
In Vinland Saga, we meet Thorkell at the siege of London, where King Sweyn’s forces attempt to seize the city. Thorkell is a belligerent, cheerful giant who loves bloodshed beyond all things. Historical records of Thorkell the Tall commemorate him as the trailblazer of the Jomsvikings, commanding the legendary stronghold Jomsburg, and credit him for leading young Canute on military raids. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts depict him as a proud fighter and, above all, a noble commander.
Chronologically speaking, Vinland Saga traces a simple narrative. Yukimura’s version of Thorfinn grows up, obstinate and guileless, on the shores of Iceland. His father, Thors, is a renowned warrior who left conflict behind to build a village of harmony on Icelandic soil. But this fragile tranquility is frequently disturbed by the ghosts of his past. This is 1013 AD in England, where most of the land has been conquered by the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard in the wake of King Æthelred’s defeat. Sweyn’s sons, Harald and Canute, wait for succession. After witnessing the murder of his father at the hands of mercenary Askeladd, Thorfinn chases Askeladd on a sixteen-year-old pilgrimage across territories and temporalities in hopes of inflicting vengeance. Upon Askeladd’s assassination, Thorfinn is exiled and sold into slavery. Canute rises to the throne with the ghost of his father haunting his waking moments. As the landscape divides itself, Thorfinn undergoes an epiphany: he wants to purge his own life, and the world that surrounds him, of the violence that once held him captive.
Much of Yukimura’s narrative is reimagined: these stories are populated by fledgling characters, bearing little affiliation to the antique figures with whom they share names. But memory leaves a stain. The past is a treacherous place and, everywhere we tread, we find the scars of history.
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Exile.
The early medieval sagas and manuscripts are often defined by the power of place.
Exile is a constant theme in the Old English elegies. The speaker of The Wife’s Lament walks the wilderness, mourning the transiency of a lost world. The speaker of Wulf and Eadwacer is made vulnerable by the geographical barrier between herself and her loved one. In The Wanderer and The Seafarer, isolation allows the speakers to find epiphany and liberation. Exile traps the elegiac speakers in a state whereby they are stripped of comforts and familiar solaces; nonetheless, such a position also strips them of social inhibitions and other constraints, allowing their voices to be projected freely.
As Thorfinn leaves behind the barren, snow-patched lands and towards the yellowed fields where he is due to spend his years in slavery, his mindset undergoes a tremendous shift. His transformation mirrors that of Egil, from Egil’s Saga. Egil, the murderous Viking who started killing at the age of six, is liable to calm down when he returns home to Iceland. On his own turf, he is content to farm his land and leave those around him in peace. “Even the most violent of Icelanders are subdued, perhaps balanced,” Osborne writes, “by the exacting realities of his home.” The violence of Egil’s emotions and desires is balanced by the harshness of his landscapes, leaving an equilibrium so tranquil that it could almost be peace. Similarly, Thorfinn’s desire to pursue violence is culled by the time he spends in a landscape where his connection with nature overcomes and subdues the hostility of his own emotions.
Such is the power of place.
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Landscapes of Desire.
What is most striking about Vinland Saga—and this makes it similar to all the early medieval Scandinavian sagas—is its affinity with landscapes. Just as individuals are defined by the landscapes that surround them, whether they be peaceful or violent, they are able to inscribe them with emotions, desires, and individualities. Vinland Saga imagines, or reimagines, the old Scandinavian landscapes in all their wilderness and ruin.
In their memoir, Landscapes of Desire, Osborne and Overing describe their visit to Iceland in an attempt to trace the locations where the Icelandic sagas were written. The volcanic and glacial activities have left these panoramas ragged, stark, barren yet bountiful, full of ‘reassuringly familiar fertile valleys and unimagined extraterrestrial vistas spewing smoke and sulphur.’ The natural landscape, both literally and physically, consumes the life of man; neither king nor warrior could outlive its ruthlessness. It is a thriving embodiment of nature, swallowing human edifices and ultimately defining all human life.
As Overing and Osborne note, the landscapes of Old Icelandic sagas are primarily created by the imagination: ‘The terrain of place is substantially internal, the picture made within the frame of individual perception.’ Vinland Saga gives us landscapes so beautiful they could almost break our hearts. The details are meticulous, the ruins abhorrent.
Yukimura’s Vinland Saga traces King Canute’s rise into power by dedicating a profoundly moving moment to Canute’s maturity. The prince is introduced as a meek, flustered adolescent afraid of human interaction. He is crippled by his own self-consciousness. He has no ambition, no purpose. After the death of his ward, Ragnar, Canute comes to terms with his own grief by making contact with nature. He sits and holds a palmful of snow in his reddened fingers. He is changed by the sky, the sun, the mountains, and the horizon; he marvels at the infinitesimal worthlessness of human life in the face of nature. The landscape pulls him into its grasp and transforms him irreversibly. To exist in true peace is to be at one with one’s landscape: for the wolves to feed on your flesh, the mud to suck at your bones, the wind to scatter your ashes. No harmony is more powerful. Natural landscape is sacred, almost sublime—humanity’s violence is trivial and despicable in comparison. This realization allows Canute to embrace the royal blood that he had, for many years, denied. He is awoken by the desire to recreate the peace of Eden. Canute’s epiphany is inextricable from his literal surroundings. It is his landscapes, both literal and emotional, that shape the cruelty of his later actions but also the strength of his mind.
It is through landscapes that the WIT (later MAPPA) anime adaptation excels at transcribing Vinland Saga from page to screen. The anime builds upon illustrations of landscape in Yukimura’s manga with the illustrators’ master eye for detail. The landscapes depicted in Vinland Saga are phenomenal. They are rich in color, spanning across horizons and laid bare at our feet. The barren, snow-trodden turf where Askeladd slays Bjorn to save him from the pain of a slow death is bleak, shriveled as an old man’s memories. The forests licked up by flames withers before our very eyes. The small boat, tethered to a wooden post, bobs on the brink of a colossal, pitch-black sea as small flakes of snow swirl from the heavens. Crisp sunlight glitters on crushed ice and sparse, barren saplings, lost in a whirlpool of clouds as the fog slowly dissipates across the mountains. The vast, breathless skies—beneath which Thorfinn plows the fields and learns to heal—are faded, the color of old parchment; the meadows are rippling seas of gold, made iridescent by the haze of a dying sun. They are overwhelming, devastating. They are filled with a precarious power that leaves the characters at their mercy, swept up in the majesty of a ruthless ecosphere.
Landscape plays another major role in instigating violence. The violence in Vinland Saga is all about territoriality. The settlement and retention of land (whether by force or by marriage) is a symbol of power. Conflicts are driven by a desire to seize more land, a desire for ownership and dominance. The most brutal contests in Vinland Saga are fought over territory. Individuals are coerced into painful diplomatic marriages, and those who escape—like Gudrid—are merely one of the lucky few. Men in power, like Canute, are driven to make decisions beyond the scope of their emotional understanding. Territories are sketched and resketched. People’s lives are uprooted; settlements are burned, institutions divided.
We define the landscapes around us—yet landscapes also define who we are.