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 redefined.
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When I retrace the landscapes of Makoto Yukimura’s manga Vinland Saga (2005–2025) and its anime adaptation (2019–2025), my thoughts invariably turn toward home.
I remember that childhood is a migration. I remember how we spend our whole lives leaving places behind. I think of geography, territory, borders. I think of journeys that are invariably a departure, a fragmentation of one’s identity.
Much of the early medieval literature that inspired the anime Vinland Saga imbues literal landscapes with associations, images, and manifestations of the mind. In paying tribute to these ancient stories, Vinland Saga achieves a similar effect. The anime illustrates the ways in which we may consider these landscapes as sites of cultural fragmentation, just as it captures the complexity of the identities and emotions of those who navigate them.
Scars of History
Chronologically speaking, Vinland Saga traces a simple narrative. 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, though this fragile tranquility is frequently disturbed by the ghosts of his past. This is 1013 CE in England, where the land has mostly been conquered by the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard in the wake of King Æthelred’s defeat; Sweyn’s sons, Harald and Canute, lurk in the background, waiting for succession. After witnessing the murder of his father at the hand of mercenary Askeladd, Thorfinn chases Askeladd on a sixteen-year-old pilgrimage across territories and temporalities in hopes of inflicting vengeance. On 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.
In Vinland Saga, we meet Leif Erickson as he huddles over a meager flame, a 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: allegedly the first European to have set foot on continental America half a millennium before Christopher Colombus. 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, who was once a splendid warrior among them. Historically, the Jomsvikings are a mythical legion of Viking mercenaries who adhere to a code of conduct that recalls a military troop. Their histories are debated, as each saga offers a different chronology to their 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 credited for leading young Canute on military raids. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts depict him as a proud fighter and, above all, a noble commander.
Although the characters’ names are lifted from historical analogues, much of Vinland Saga is reimagined. The narrative is populated by fledgling characters who bear little affiliation to the ancient 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.
Landscapes of Desire
Early medieval sagas are often defined by the power of place. As Thorfinn leaves behind the barren, snow-patched lands of home and heads toward 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 calmed on his return home to Iceland. On his home turf, he is content to farm his land and live in peace. The violence of Egil’s emotions and desires is balanced by the harshness of his landscapes, producing an equilibrium so tranquil it could almost be peace. Similarly, Thorfinn’s desire to pursue violence is calmed by the time he spends in a rural landscape, where his connection with nature overcomes, and subdues, the hostility of his own emotions.
Landscapes play a major role in instigating violence. The settlement and retention of land, whether by force or by marriage, is a symbol for power. Conflicts are driven by a desire to seize more land, a desire for ownership and domination. 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 among the lucky few. Men in power, like King Canute, are driven to make decisions beyond the scope of their emotional understanding. Territories are sketched and re-sketched. People’s lives are uprooted, settlements are burned, and institutions are divided.
Vinland Saga traces King Canute’s rise to power. Canute is first introduced as a meek, flustered adolescent, afraid of human interaction. He is beholden to his own self-consciousness, lacking in ambition and purpose. After the death of his ward, Ragnar, Canute comes to terms with his grief and loss 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, 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 your landscape: for the wolves to feed on your flesh, the mud to suck at your bones, the wind to scatter your ashes. The 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, for many years, has denied. He is awoken by a desire to recreate the peace of Eden. Canute’s internal epiphany is inextricable from his external 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 the presentation of landscapes that WIT Studios’ (later MAPPA Co.’s) anime adaptation excels at transcribing Vinland Saga from page to screen. The anime builds on the illustrations of landscapes in Yukimura’s manga with the masterful eye of its illustrators. The landscapes depicted in the anime are phenomenal. They are rich in color, spanning across and beyond horizons, laid bare at our feet. The barren, snow-trodden turf, where Askeladd slays Björn 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 wither before our very eyes. The small boat, tethered to a wooden post, bobs on the brink of a colossal, pitch-black sea. Crisp sunlight falls, glittering, on crushed ice and barren saplings, lost in a whirlpool of clouds as the fog dissipates across the foothills. The vast, breathless skies – beneath which Thorfinn ploughs 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. These landscapes 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.
We define the landscapes around us, but landscapes also define who we are.
Borderwalker
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”: someone who walks alongside, or on, borders. This 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, aging face. 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 serve not only to highlight the diversity of landscapes but also to emphasize 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 thinking of Askeladd, I recall the image of a boy standing on the beach. He is 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, white-caps foaming at his feet. Standing on the brink between land and water, Askeladd 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 within 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 reread or rewatch 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 descendant 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; he also walks a thin line between valor and treachery, between honesty and deceit, between malice and vulnerability. In every sense of the word, Askeladd is a mearcstapa.
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.
Characters are constantly taken from their homes. Einar and Arnheid are sold into slavery after their hometowns are pillaged by Vikings. The narrative 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 seas beyond the horizon. Companionship is meaningful for these characters: their interactions are a clash of cultures, a coalescence of foreign understandings occasioned by the terrain they share.
Vinland Saga is, more than anything, about the ability to make a home. Thorfinn leaves his homeland behind to chase a landscape that encourages his violence, but the twelve years he spends in vengeance cements his place in Askeladd’s army. He realizes, eventually, 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 Björn – his Danish second-in-command – he finds an intimate comrade. Their ironclad codependence makes them wordlessly compatible with one another. Askeladd is an internal outcast, a man separated from his homeland, but through his friendship with Björn, 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.
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 center, whose overriding motifs are exile, mixture, loss – and survival” (Hiatt, p. 40). Such a description is similarly evocative of Vinland Saga. It demonstrates 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 shared ‘ancestral homelands’ of the Danes and the Early English” (Miyashiro, p. 388). The landscape – marked, maimed by nature and humans alike – is a physical testament of human conflict. It is a homeland that survives ruthlessly, relentlessly.
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 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 recognize. 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, that makes firelight to illuminate the darkness, bearing the absence of things we’ve lost and 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 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 redefined.
Kneeling on the bare, wooden floors of his household, Thors promises us that beyond the seas, there is a territory called Vinland. To touch on even the faintest recollection of its glory is to make the land ours. Its peace, its splendor, 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. These 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 memory 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.
References
Alfred Hiatt. 2009. “Beowulf off the map.” Anglo-Saxon England 38: 11-40.
Adam Miyashiro. 2020. “Homeland insecurity: Biopolitics and sovereign violence in Beowulf.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 11(4): 384–395.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
