#THERE ARE NO MORE ENEMIES FREE#
It’s about breaking free of this legacy, and about recovery, and about trying to do better in a brutal and murderous world. Not the tale of how a boy avenges his father or even the tale of honorable Viking warriors, but a tale of how a shattered, traumatized boy must live with the legacy of violence that has been perpetuated on him, and which he himself has perpetuated. Now a shell of himself, he has constant nightmares and hallucinates mountains of corpses, people he killed and people who’ve died on him. Thorfinn is enslaved and sent to work on a farm (relatively more comfortable life than other slaves, but still a slave). The fifty-fourth chapter is called ‘End of the Prologue’, where Askeladd sacrifices himself for a political plot, and Thorfinn loses the one purpose for which he’s been living.
Nothing else can resist it, and nothing else is a useful counter to it but more and more of it. So he grows up to inflict violence and pain and suffering for money.įor 53 chapters, it appears everyone is right and Thors was wrong. Even Askeladd is a product of such, having grown up the son of a slave woman, uselessly dreaming that one day his ancestor – Artorious – will come and rescue him and his mother from a life of dehumanization and terror.
#THERE ARE NO MORE ENEMIES CODE#
Everyone is a product of violence, the toxic and corrosive warrior’s code that demands blood and beheadings. The only way to survive is to treat everyone as your enemies, answer brutality with even greater brutality.
Thors has asked a question of the world, and the world has answered: there is no place for peace or pacifism, there is no place for compassion or mercy. He enlists in the mercenary band led by his father’s killer, Askeladd, with the premise that this way he will have an opportunity to fight Askeladd and avenge his father. Seeing this, Thorfinn embarks on a quest for vengeance. The desire to no longer kill – to no longer be ‘Thors the Troll’, terror of the battlefield – gets him, very simply, dead. There is no one you need to hurt.’ Here’s the result of his philosophy. Instead, he tells his son: ‘You have no enemies. On discovering this, Thors doesn’t react like most Nordic fathers. He finds Thors’ old battle gear and seizes on a knife. Like all boys raised in Nordic culture, his son Thorfinn longs for the glory of battle. Old comrades turn up and drag him back into war. Thors used to be an elite warrior who ran away from the battlefield to make a life as a farmer, raising his family with his wife. Honor in combat! Glory in war! Final destination Valhalla!īut Vinland Saga is about something else entirely, and it lets you know very early on, even though – at that point in time – what it is really about seems to be one character’s mistake. Panel after panel, the characters take their heroic code with deathly – and deadly – seriousness. It is designed to make fanboys slobber all over themselves because woo, awesome. It is page after page of Viking dudes killing each other bloodily while screaming about Valhalla, because of course. It features a lot of over-the-top ultraviolence, like men punching horses. It’s a loosely historical manga that’s all about Viking warriors and glory in battle, and how the protagonist Thorfinn Karlsefni seeks retribution on his father’s killer. At surface, Vinland Saga doesn’t seem very interesting.
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