Vinland Saga S2 – 01 – Living is Winning

After a thoroughly badass James Bond-style OP followed by a downright poetic sequence about carving “that warmth” into anything and everything, Vinland Saga’s second season settles in the idyllic home of Einar, who lives there with his little sister Lotta and their mother. He’s practicing hacking with an axe in case their home is attacked again (the last time claiming their father), but their mother tells her children that as long as they’re alive, they haven’t lost.

Things don’t go well for Einar’s family, as their home is burned and pillaged. When the three try to flee, the mother is felled by an arrow, and neither Einar nor Lotta are able to leave her behind and keep running. Instead they are paralyzed by the prospect of doing so. When Lotta is carried away she stabs her captor in the neck, and is killed for it. Einar is taken away to be sold as a slave.

After a passage from the Old Norse poem Hávamál equating one with no love in their life to a fir tree on a barren land, Einar is on a boat filled with other slaves, one of the women can’t stop coughing. Their captors determine she won’t survive, so they toss her overboard to drown. Einar protests, but his captors are as cruel and unreceptive to mercy as the brooding ocean waves that churn before him. Once ashore, he and the others are washed and fed and put on display in the market.

Einar tries to escape, fleeing to a farm and stealing some food, but is immediately re-caught and severely beaten as a message to the other slaves: There’s no escape. There’s no going home. In this world, it is better to be a slave and be fed for their work than a runaway beggar. The world is utterly uninterested in your welfare.

Our first familiar face appears at the market, when the slaver presents Einar to Leif. Leif isn’t interested, as he’s looking for his relative, Thorfinn. But before departing, he grabs Einar’s arm and apologizes. It’s the first time anyone has apologized to Einar since he lost his home and family. He envies the man Leif is looking for, since it means there’s someone in the world who still cares about him.

Eventually a farmer inspects Einar and agrees to buy him, and escorts him to his sprawling farm, which reminds Einar of the idyllic home that was destroyed and stolen from him—the home and the family he was trying to defend, but could not.

At this farm, Einar meets the “blonde, small” guy Leif was looking for: our boy Thorfinn, who is chopping trees at the border of the woods. He has the look of someone who is carrying on with the same determination Einar’s mother demanded: to survive, and live at any cost, is what it means to truly win.

It may not feel anything like winning to Thorfinn or Einar. Their wait has only just begun, and may end fruitlessly. But as long as their wait continues, and their hearts continue to pump blood, they still carry the potential to carve their mark into the world. Maybe they can help one another.

Vinland Saga – 03 – It’ll Pull You In

Askeladd immediately shows both Floki and us what kind of dudes we’re dealing with, as he manages to double the bounty for Thors’ head from five to ten pounds of gold. Floki is a very shrewd man with good instincts, but he also has a solid right-hand-man in Bjorn, who spears a Jomsviking who was hiding behind a tapestry and passes it off as an innocent accident.

As for Thors, he doesn’t leave at the break of dawn, but is seen off by the whole village. Before they leave, all five of the young men he’s bringing along have designs on asking Ylva for her hand in marriage upon their return and presenting her with spoils of war; all Ylva wants is a little more shuteye.

When a young lass who likes Ari (one of the guys who tried to propose to Ylva) is cruelly rebuffed, Leif assures her none of the five greenhorn lads will come to any harm; Thors will see to it they’re dumped off in Norway before they see any battle, and Leif promises he’ll ship them back to Iceland, disappointed, but with their organs still very much internal.

Seemingly the only member of the village not seeing them off is Thorfinn, who is nowhere to be found and presumed by both Thors and Ylva to still be off skulking, angry about being scolded. We get a little more comedy when the five guys line up on one side of the boat, while Thors is on the other side all on his own with one hell of a huge oar. Leif bangs out the pace on the drum, and the ships are off.

It isn’t until they’re already out in the open sea that Thorfinn reveals he stowed away. While peeing over the side (he really needed to pee) he suddenly notices where he is, and his smile is so wide and bright, Thors can’t help but smile back, despite the fact his son just ruined his plans to try to keep him safe.

He later paints Finn’s back door red for his insolence (pretty tame discipline from a viking in the 11th century), as the gears turn in Askeladd’s head. He chats with Bjorn about the bounty deal not seeming quite right; he’s quite sure Floki reached out to them independently and his superior didn’t order Thors’ execution.

Askeladd also believes Floki is afraid of incurring a great loss of his own men, and so hired someone else. This tells Askeladd that this Thors fellow shouldn’t be a pushover, even if Floki says he’s “not a warrior” anymore.

As night falls, Thors warns Ari not to stare at the moon in the sea, lest it “pull him in,” a common nautical hazard. As Thorfinn dozes contently in his lap, Thors tells Ari more about his first child, the woman Ari says he’s in love with.

It was a difficult birth for Helga, the daughter of the leader of the Jomsvikings, but Thors was about to head out on another mission, and was annoyed he got a daughter instead of a son. He’s about to leave when Helga asks him to name her.

He says he’s “busy”, but Helga insists—the first time he ever saw her truly angry. So he named her Ylva, after his mother. And that, he tells Ari, was the first time he started to feel afraid of battle…which makes sense, as dying in battle meant abandoning his newborn child and wife to an uncertain future.

The next day they arrive at the Faroe Islands—the usual rest stop between Iceland and Scandinavia. They row into a cove that leads to a trading village, but the high walls immediately spell foreboding, and Leif notes that there are fewer structures in the village itself.

By the time they start rowing out of the cove, it’s to late—Askeladd’s men start dumping huge piles of debris onto their ships, blocking their only exit. Then another drum can be heard: the drum of Askeladd’s two ships rowing towards them.

Ari and the other men bristle and claim to be ready for battle, but Thors knows better; the boys will be no match for these hardened foes. So he takes a deep, “I’m getting too old for this shit” breath, pulls out his sword, and hands his dagger to Thorfinn, warning him only to use it in time of absolute need.

Before Askeladd’s men know it, Thors has leapt onto one of their ships. He takes out the first man with one punch, two others with two more, and then three with three; six skilled men downed without even drawing his sword. It’s then that Bjorn and Askeladd know: they’re going to have to work their asses off to earn every ounce of that gold.

Each of the first three Vinland Sagas have been very different affairs—from an introduction to Thors and Thorfinn and live in Iceland, to the arrival of a new old threat, to the swashbuckling adventure that begins in this episode. But all three of kicked all kinds of ass in their own way.

Like Thors himself, it doesn’t glamorize violence or killing, and Ari and his four hotshot friends are presented as the naive fools they are. As for Thorfinn, he may not have pissed himself while hiding in that barrel, but yeah…he’s now somewhere that’s absolutely no place for a six-year-old. I just can’t see how this ends well for anyone…but nor dare I look away.