Northlanders, Book One

Sven the Returned
written by Brian Wood
art by Davide Gianfelice

Twenty years after fleeing Orkney and his sadistic Uncle Gorm, Sven returns to his birthplace and native people to reclaim his inheritance when news of his father's death and his uncle's tyrannical succession reaches him in the Varangian Guard at Miklagard, as the rich Mediterranean city of Constantinople is called by the Northmen.  And unsurprisingly, Sven the Returned is a tale about coming home to confront, willing or not, one's past and heritage.

"A very long time ago...in the lands we call home...these things happened" (Sven the Returned: 7 [1: 1]).  From the beginning, Northlanders is at once rhetorically restrained and yet elegiac.  It recalls with stoic distance an emotionally immediate story.  And it is not until the final episode's final few pages that we discover to whom Sven's story is addressed, or that it is even his to tell.  But the "we" of its opening resonates in the story's initial few chapters, because even as its text block sits on the Mediterranean Sea, it does not, it seems, belong there.  For a man determined to return to his adopted city, Sven is powerfully drawn back to his settlement home in the far North, from which—though he doesn't know it yet—he will never fully leave nor, really, has ever fully left.

Life among the Northmen is brutal.  Harassed by his Uncle, once nearly thrown overboard to drown by his father, chastised as a child for his unwillingness to die for his honor by his mother, Sven's hostility toward his birthplace is well understood.  He is, as he thinks himself, a progressive man living in the center of the world, and Orkney is a backwater place filled with backward and stubbornly superstitious fools.  And, more than not, he is right.  Unlike most of his Norse peers, Sven is not bound to the old ways.  He does not worship their, or any, gods; he does not find honor in adhering to their heroic codes, though he often grants those who do the chance to live and die within them; and he shows little affection for the harshness of the North.  But, as it turns out, Sven the Returned is more a paean of home and family than it is a reproach of their latent cruelty.  However much he may resist, Sven belongs in the North.  However painful he finds his own, he is willing to defend the family he makes.  Though it may cost him his inheritance, his position and not a little of his pride, Sven, unlike his greedy uncle, acts on behalf of his people instead of exploiting them.

The dialogue is unflinchingly anachronistic, infusing this story rooted in tenth-century Viking Orkney with a modern flavor.  And it sometimes implicitly responds to or engages with current perceptions of death, family, power and love.  But Northlanders is otherwise meticulously researched, and the details of the period—including dress, settlement history and construction, social organization and cultural practice, and waves of invasion history—are fastidiously reproduced.

Gianfelice's art is not particularly innovative in design or layout, but gloriously epic in scope and lush in texture.  He especially excels in full-page land- or seascapes and full-body portraits.  His graceful treatment of hair and clothing and his statuesque depiction of the characters lend an otherworldly beauty to the harshness of the setting and the brutality of the story.  However, due credit must also be shared with colorist Dave McCaig, who sets the tone of the series as much with his impressionistic, water-color-esque coloring as Gianfelice with his pencil.  His differentiation of the warm, sun-drenched city of Constantinople and the icy, snow-barren wilderness of Orkney is nearly tangible. 


Collects Northlanders #1-8:  "As High Summer Passes," "Caledonia's Hardy Sons," "The Drovers Lads," "The Chill Eastern Wind," "The Land of the Leal," "I Mourn for the Highlands," "Is Brônac Mo Cineamiun (Sad Is My Fate)," "The Return of the Exiled"

ISBN:  978-1401219185