Manga Thoughts: Vinland Saga 14
Jul. 13th, 2025 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt took me a while to start reading the fourteenth double-length volume of Vinland Saga after I had a copy of it. This wasn’t altogether a matter of “the thirteenth collection of Makoto Yukimura’s Viking manga ended with a moment of such emotional catharsis that it led to immediate thoughts of ‘it’s all downhill from there’ to the inevitable conclusion imposed by history.” Still, that old thought was in my mind as I began reading after getting back from vacation.
The first sign of trouble arrived from an unexpected direction. On the way south to Vinland, a few people had been dropped off in “Markland”; now, though, their outpost is found abandoned and bristling with arrows. In explaining this to his fellow Vikings in Vinland, Thorfinn insists the distance between settlements is such that the “Lnu” they’ve come to know couldn’t have been involved and have to have their friendliness kept in mind. Some people agree with him. Some don’t, even if I was inclined to consider the visual aspect of this story making those opponents “look peculiar.”
The Lnu (the Mi’kmaq word for “person”) have disagreements of their own. (I did notice that between the previous volume and this one they began “speaking in all caps,” although it’s still not the slightly more elaborate lettering of Viking dialogue.) Miskwekepu’j, who had gone on a vision quest and emerged from it with his hair turned white, is beginning to seem a fanatic on the subject of expelling “the Nods,” and he’s also less than pleased that Plmk has begun wearing foreign clothing (“But I look dashing, don’t I?”) I have to admit to pondering certain recent insistences that some Colonial Americans are on the record complaining their fellows were far more likely to “go native” and stay that way than the Indians near them were to adopt “civilization,” and then there’s the whole matter of scoffing at the endless toil of growing crops as opposed to gathering (and possibly hunting). At a certain point, I did wonder about this story being a “third-party opinion,” even if there’s also something of genuine interest to that.
Varied plots begin to play out and bounce against each other through the first half of this volume (which would have been a stand-alone collection over in Japan), and then the matter of Markland returns. This invokes something I don’t recall showing up very much in the original texts (I bought a thin Penguin Classics collection of them at the L’Anse aux Meadows visitor centre, but suspect it got packed away into a storage box since then) and yet has become an important part of certain narratives since then, namely that the Vikings, too, in having more domesticated animals than anyone in the Americas are bringing over diseases...
The story drops in on King Canute, dealing with pestilence in a way that had me wondering just when that chapter had been drawn, and then leaps the ocean again. In a certain way I did wonder about disease being a way to get to the inevitable conclusion while avoiding the most pessimistic judgement on human nature, and yet that’s also welcome in a certain way. There was a brighter moment among gathering chaos and a cliffhanger ending. Right around when I was getting to this volume I was seeing reports of the manga coming to an end in Japan; whether we’ll get one more double-length volume over here or just something of “regular” size is a remaining question.
The first sign of trouble arrived from an unexpected direction. On the way south to Vinland, a few people had been dropped off in “Markland”; now, though, their outpost is found abandoned and bristling with arrows. In explaining this to his fellow Vikings in Vinland, Thorfinn insists the distance between settlements is such that the “Lnu” they’ve come to know couldn’t have been involved and have to have their friendliness kept in mind. Some people agree with him. Some don’t, even if I was inclined to consider the visual aspect of this story making those opponents “look peculiar.”
The Lnu (the Mi’kmaq word for “person”) have disagreements of their own. (I did notice that between the previous volume and this one they began “speaking in all caps,” although it’s still not the slightly more elaborate lettering of Viking dialogue.) Miskwekepu’j, who had gone on a vision quest and emerged from it with his hair turned white, is beginning to seem a fanatic on the subject of expelling “the Nods,” and he’s also less than pleased that Plmk has begun wearing foreign clothing (“But I look dashing, don’t I?”) I have to admit to pondering certain recent insistences that some Colonial Americans are on the record complaining their fellows were far more likely to “go native” and stay that way than the Indians near them were to adopt “civilization,” and then there’s the whole matter of scoffing at the endless toil of growing crops as opposed to gathering (and possibly hunting). At a certain point, I did wonder about this story being a “third-party opinion,” even if there’s also something of genuine interest to that.
Varied plots begin to play out and bounce against each other through the first half of this volume (which would have been a stand-alone collection over in Japan), and then the matter of Markland returns. This invokes something I don’t recall showing up very much in the original texts (I bought a thin Penguin Classics collection of them at the L’Anse aux Meadows visitor centre, but suspect it got packed away into a storage box since then) and yet has become an important part of certain narratives since then, namely that the Vikings, too, in having more domesticated animals than anyone in the Americas are bringing over diseases...
The story drops in on King Canute, dealing with pestilence in a way that had me wondering just when that chapter had been drawn, and then leaps the ocean again. In a certain way I did wonder about disease being a way to get to the inevitable conclusion while avoiding the most pessimistic judgement on human nature, and yet that’s also welcome in a certain way. There was a brighter moment among gathering chaos and a cliffhanger ending. Right around when I was getting to this volume I was seeing reports of the manga coming to an end in Japan; whether we’ll get one more double-length volume over here or just something of “regular” size is a remaining question.