Coming Home In The Dark Ages

A soldier returns home to tend to affairs after the death of his father. Sound familiar?

It did to me, too, but in Northlanders: Sven the Returned it's a good thing.

Set in the Orkney Islands and Constantinople in 980 CE, Sven the Returned (Vertigo, 2008) is part of writer Brian Wood's continuing series about the people usually called vikings, their lands and occupied territories and the people fighting them between roughly 700 and 1100 CE, aka, Europe's Dark Ages. Northlanders was conceived as a series of alternating eight- and two-issue storylines. Wood collaborates with a different artist each story.Set in the Orkney Islands and Constantinople in 980 CE. Davide Gianfelice illustrates Sven the Returned and returns himself for the 2009 one-shot, “Sven the Immortal” (#20). Dave McCaig colors every issue, gorgeously.

Breaking with Viking comic tradition, Wood uses modern language in Northlanders. No matter how many die, no grief-stricken character says anything like Thor does here:

“Hear me, you elements! Hear me, storms! Rise up in your wrath! A warrior hath died this day and you shall carry him to his destiny! No longer Eilif the Lost, but Eilif the Dragonslayer! Strike now! And fire this holy mound!”

I'm not criticizing Thor's speech. After all, awesome is beyond good and bad. His kind of language helps readers lose themselves in a stylized, heightened past—or epic now—and marks the long, long ago. But the modern English works.

Wood also uses genres often used in Twentieth and Twenty-First century settings: homecomings, heists, homicide investigations. In fact, Sven the Returned reminds me of the kind of story where a successful goateed urban hipster returns to his small town home, disdaining small town life but then rediscovering his roots and finding himself along the way, or so the cheesy trailer might say. Heartwarming. It could be any number of holiday movies. It could even star John Cusack.

But the short story arcs remind me of old war anthology comics, which told individual stories from different times all united by a common theme: war. And Sven the Returned does have some resonance with stories of a soldier coming home and fighting for what's his, like say, First Blood. Except while Sven is a vet, he is not just trying to go home. He is not pushed too far, or at least, he does some of the pushing himself. And his deerhunting is very different than The Deerhunter.

Sven is a cosmopolitan Norseman returning to Orkney after living in Constantinople for many years. He likes the city. He has a life there. He's a soldier in the Emperor's elite Varangian Guard. He likes his goatee. He likes his modern open relationship with his modern, wealthy Byzantine girlfriend. He even says so:

“She had other men. I had other women. These were modern times in a modern city. Should not relationships be modern, too?” (#5)

Sven's an atheist who believes in making his own fate, disdaining the desire to die sword in hand in order to enter Valhalla but using the fear of dying swordless against his enemies. Sven is complicated and not very likeable, but he's engaging because he is an asshole and an asshole I recognize. He is embarrassed by his roots and his podunk home town, well, settlement. He does not like Orkney or its people. He plans to come home just long enough to take his father's gold, not to avenge his father or to help the people by killing his shifty, usurping uncle, Gorm. But Sven's plan goes wrong, as they usually do, mostly because he thinks he can waltz in and take the money. And Sven ends up caring about his people despite himself, as anti-heroes usually do. It's just that he finds himself through fighting, loss and blood and not the singing of all the Who's down in Whoville. It is a Viking story after all, with Norsemen, Saxons and one lone Scot and Constantinople and a helluva lot of beautifully inked and colored blood.

So yes, my idea for Sven the Returned as a holiday story is crazy, but I think that many of the seemingly anachronistic elements Wood uses, whether characters that say, “Can we talk?” or homecoming/heist plotlines, give the story immediacy. Sure, anachronisms can get ugly, but Sven the Returned isn't. The characters feel authentic and comprehensible, while the setting is historically accurate. Sometimes in historical recreations, the characters are presented as less intelligent or sophisticated than people now. It's easy to patronize the past. It's hard to get a sense of past people's humanity, a sense of both their similarity and difference, across time and space and culture. Northlanders does, even when it's just an asshole hipster from the big city coming home.

~~~

Carol Borden will see you in Valhalla.

Tags: 2000s , 900s , barbarians , blood , Brian Wood , Constantinople , Dave McCaig , Davide Gianfelice , historicals , John Cusack , medieval , Thor , UK , Viking , war