Northlanders, Book Four

The Plague Widow
written by Brian Wood
art by Leandro Fernandez

With a brutal abruptness plague comes along the river just before an equally brutal winter begins, afflicting an isolated Viking settlement along the Russian Volga with a gruesome disease, fatal to all infected.  The Plague Widow breaks with many of the historical conventions in earlier Northlanders arcs, the dependence on datable events, battles and migrations, in favor of apocalyptic horror.

The world is ending.  The Volga, once a thriving vein of trade from the rich south to the wild north, now brings only death and decay and the threat of desperate, plague-ridden marauders.  Faced with an outbreak they do not understand, the settlement is torn between the thuggish bigot Gunborg and educated foreigner Boris with his mysterious theories about contagion and disease.  Boris' solution to the pandemic is radical, demanding strict adherence and complete commitment:  the settlement will be sealed for the winter and all currently infected will be banished to prevent further contagion, a de facto self-quaratine to thwart its spread.  It's a proposition that passes the assembly only by a single vote, that of newly widowed Hilda, wife of a wealthy plague-dead merchant, who then finds herself the target of Gunborg's savage intimidation and terrorizing.

Despite the success of Boris' plan, as the winter lengthens, fear and hostility in the settlement continue to grow.  Gunborg mobilizes his band of warrior thugs to pillage his neighbors already enduring meager rations to stir discontent against the settlement's leader, a clever but feeble man ailing under age and the harsh winter, and Boris his man.  His is the rise of a tyrant in the wake of others' fear and cowardice, the opportunist among the carnage, the social infection that undoes the river town.  "We sealed these doors to keep the death out.  In doing so, we shut ourselves in with what proved to be the greater danger" (The Plague Widow: 165 [Northlanders #27: 21]).

Hilda is not only the arc's central figure, she's its strongest.  Women are often the most vulnerable, and Hilda's beauty, wealth and prominence in the decision to close the settlement make her particularly so.  But, despite Gunborg's intimidation and his nephew Jens' lustful possessiveness, Hilda manages to be far more than a victim of their brutishness.  Her defiance in bearing their humiliation, her savvy in turning it against them, and ultimately her willingness to take her daughter and flee into the winter wild elevate her courage without compromising the injustice she's subjected to. 

Wood's horror fable is in many respects absent of the narrative subtlety characteristic of earlier arcs.  There is little mystery about the town's tragic trajectory, and what suspense it generates is less a question of whether death will come than it is how death will come.  It is the slow descent into hell with eyes wide open.  But Hilda's particular plight is more ambiguously nuanced.  When she is first approached by Jens while hauling her tithe to the great hall, her coarse refusal of his ostensibly well-intentioned help seems rude and unprovoked.  Though his later actions would seem to justify her decision, Jens—like so many of the settlement's residents—might also be a casualty of Gunborg's hate-mongering.  When Thorir first brings food to her door at night, the threat of rape is tangible, though had he lived Hilda might have returned his affection.

Leandro Fernandez illustrates The Plague Widow with gruesome, apocalyptic fervor.  The plague-infected, like so many walking dead, made mad and desperate by their affliction, lay siege on settlement.  The entire world seems to be in decay:  starving wolves feeding on human corpses littering the frigid landscape, timber shattering into frozen shrapnel, boats of dead and dying stagnating in the icy river, the only color from warm flowing blood and the occasional life-preserving fire.

Collects Northlanders #21-28:  "Seven Hundred on the Volga," "Heads of Household," "The Death Ships," "Exposure," "Lives of Crime," "The Descent," "Splinter and Bleed," and "Of Mothers & Daughters"

ISBN:  978-1401228507

Northlanders, Book Three

Blood in the Snow
written by Brian Wood
art by Dean Ormston (#9-10), Vasilis Lolos (#17), Danijel Zezelj (#18-19) and Davide Gianfelice (#20)

The third collection in Brian Wood's stellar series Northlanders assembles Wood's shorter and stand-alone episodes early in its run.  The first, "Lindesfarne," narrates the famous raid on the rich Saxon monastery in 793 A.D. by Norse pillagers from the perspective of a young boy Edwin, raised by a brutal and zealous father in the shadow of the rich monastery.  In his mind, factions of gods—his father's weak, distant, joyless Jehovah and his dead mother's wild, terrible Germanic pantheon—battle for followers and power.  Abused by his father, whose religious fervor cultivated by monks after the untimely death of his mother in childbirth he blames for that abuse, Edwin turns to Woden and his followers, the viking invaders, who he thinks have arrived to save him, an answer to his prayer to the mighty god.  Edwin directs the Norsemen to the oppressive monastery and, after the massacre which orphans him, wins a place among the invaders by wounding their leader in single combat to first blood.  But years later, leader of his own raiding parties and faithful to his heathen gods, he remains a Saxon outcast among his Norse peers, still a victim of the ruling and religious factions which wrecked his childhood.

In "The Shield Maidens," three women—Grettr, Thyra, and Lif—living in the ninth-century Danelaw flee from Saxon invaders seeking to reclaim land north of Humber River.  Having fled their villaige with Thyra's husband's hoard, they make their stand in an abandoned Roman fort near the tide plain against a siege of Saxon warriors.  The women's perspective is welcome here.  Though women had played key roles in earlier storyarcs, they were fundamentally about men.  The strength of the Norse women as well as their vulnerabilities remain foreign to the men.  The threat of rape and slavery as well as death is unknown to their abusers, and their ingenuity at escape is unexpected.  "They were in a full panic, and if this is what viking was like, I forgave my husband his long absences" (Blood in the Snow, "The Shield Maidens": 109 [19: 11]).  Its ending is also a welcome respite from violence.  Having weathered the onslaught and improbably escaped their Saxon attackers, the three women reconvene in triumph and grateful for the mercy of their fates.

"The Viking Art of Single Combat" is a one-shot that narrates a duel between champions Snorri the Black and Egil Sleggja, a practice abstracted from centuries of custom and distilled into a single narrative.  Though each fighter receives characterization—Snorri, the crude bastard son of the lord with only legitimate daughters, and Egil, second son to the lord, once a leader but now dim and brain-damaged from an arrow to the head—this episode's interested in the anthropology of the duel, the archaeology of its weaponry, and the psychology of a culture of violence.  It's refreshingly non-judgmental about any of it.  There's a bleakness and a futility to the feuding cycle, but there's a conscious recognition of its place in a hard world, an unfair one, one that favors Loki over Thor.  "Little consolation to the conquered, but the gods only made one Earth.  Probably to laugh their asses off while we fight over it.  So be it" (Blood in the Snow, "The Viking Art of Single Combat": 67 [17: 15]).  Quite honestly, "The Viking Art of Single Combat" may be one of Northlanders' quirkier issues, but it's also one of its finest.

Blood in the Snow's other one-shot, "Sven the Immortal," revisits characters from Northlanders' first story-arc Sven the Returned.  Sven, now an old man, an exile living with his wife Enna and their two children on Faroe, is the subject of famous songs sung about his return to Orkney, his vengeance against his abusive, usurping uncle, and his fight against the Saxons.  As such, he is a target for fame-mongers, foolish young men seeking to aggrandize their own reputations by killing a legend.  The men find him far fiercer than they anticipated.  They lose a "holmgang" and kidnap Enna to force his hand in the face of their humiliation.  But these men never return home; none survive.  It's a fine conclusion to a collection that gives a satisfying story to one of Northlanders' most charismatic figures.

Collects Northlanders #9-10, 17-20:  "Lindesfarne" Parts 1 and 2, "The Viking Art of Single Combat," "The Shield Maidens" Parts 1 and 2, and "Sven the Immortal"

ISBN:  978-1401226206

Northlanders, Book Two

The Cross + the Hammer
written by Brian Wood
art by Ryan Kelly

Set against the tumultuous beginning of the 11th century in Ireland, in the immediate approach to the Battle of Clontarf in April of 1014, The Cross + the Hammer recasts these tensions as the pursuit for a single Irishman Magnus Mag Rodain, a skilled killer and former Cistercian monk, and his young daughter Brigid by Viking mercenary and forensic specialist in the service of Sigtrygg Silkbeard, Ragnar Ragnarsson.  The "cross" and "hammer" respectively, these two men—metonymic substitutes for their races, cultures and religions—engage in a bloody game of cat-and-mouse, which leaves a trail of bodies, both indigenous Irish and occupying Vikings.  Despite Wood's meticulous research and inclusion of detail, the central story itself--mostly on account of the extreme anachronism of Ragnarsson's criminal profiling and forensic expertise--rings as more modern than historical.

Unlike Wood's first major Northlanders arc, Sven the Returned, which provides the reader with the necessary historical information relevant to his story, The Cross + the Hammer demands a fuller independent knowledge of events to follow and appreciate the parallels between the wider political conflicts and the singular chase of the fictional Magnus. In fact, Wood provides no narration for the Battle of Clontarf despite its tactical complexity, including the feigned flight and relocation of a number of the Viking forces via the River Liffey to the north of Dublin, so that it must be understood only through its visual depiction.  That the combined armies of Máel Mórda and Sigtrygg lost to the forces of Boru in a battle with extensive casualties on both sides, for all intents and purposes breaking Viking rule in Ireland and returning the island to its previous political status quo of small competing kingdoms and creating a number of significant power vacuums throughout, is indicated by little more than the laconic "The end of the occupation" (The Cross + the Hammer: 125 [16:3]).

Despite the ostensible victory of the Irish over the Scandinavian invaders and their Viking mercenaries, The Cross + the Hammer is a tragedy of Magnus, who even after the liberation of the island is forced to face is own deeds and losses immediately before his execution by his Viking pursuers.  Wood's twist is solid if not entirely original, and it does reshape earlier episodes, inviting the reader to revisit them with a new eye.  Though never without an ambiguous sense of morality, Magnus is, for most of the arc, the hero, a one-man insurgency against tyrannical occupying forces.  He targets only agents of Sigtrygg, once killing a Viking pedophile whom even his own people acknowledge "will not be missed" (46 [12: 17]).  However, his increasingly dark, arbitrary, and berserking behavior makes him a difficult hero to endorse, and one who by the end proves impossibly so.  Viking forces may have been overwhelmed, but the legacy of their settlement is inextricably rooted in the new Irish landscape, even in Magnus's own family.

Kelly's artwork—more characterized by heavy shadows and strong lines, thick bodies, and a boxier design—gives The Cross + the Hammer a look distinct from earlier Northlanders issues.  It's less elegant that Gianfelice's graceful portraits and stark landscapes, but it's well-suited to the visceral texture of the story.  Similarly, Brigid, the story's only female character, is soft, unlined, and delicate, standing sharply in contrast to the story's brutish male figures.  And, in contrast to Sven's Orkney, Ireland is lush, full of vegetation and wildlife.  Colorist McCaig, also responsible for Sven the Returned, gives this book a ruddier, richer, and warmer palate, equally beautiful if widely divergent in tone. 

Collects Northlanders #11-16:  "A Rising Tide of Falling Blood," "Slayings + Prosecutions," "Over the Broad Green Sea," "Heart of Oak," "The Red Road," "Brigid's War"

ISBN:  978-1401222963

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