Thorfinn

THE Main character of Vinland Saga Seasons 1 and 2

Once again, watch this show. Enough said. This will not be spoiler-free because it is a character analysis and I must talk about everything to get my point across (especially with this character). Same as the others, I will run Thorfinn through the Character Pipeline that I have created and use to both build and analyze characters. I will then discuss the unique aspects of Thorfinn's character that I think make him stand out among the infinite array of characters that exist. Lastly, I will discuss anything I think may be relevant about his character arcs that I haven't already touched on (I will probably have said everything by then) as well as the themes or messages that are born out of it. This one will look slightly different because starting at decision making I will go all the way through the Pipeline for only Season 1 and then I will come back and reevaluate for Season 2.

Without further ado, let us discuss THE Thorfinn.

The first step in the Character Pipeline is the backstory which we see most of for Thorfinn which is different than the other two major characters I have discussed already. The show starts when he is around the age of 5 or 6 and we follow him all the way until he is around 20 at the end of Season 2. The events before the story begins that relate to Thorfinn are quite slim and pretty standard for a normal human being. He lives with his parents in a (mostly) peaceful village in Iceland where he plays with the other children and wishes to become a warrior one day. I will cover a bit more even though it is technically part of the story, simply because I think it is the catalyst event for everything that Thorfinn does from then on.

The first few episodes depict Thors, Thorfinn's dad, and his past as well as the family and community dynamic that they live in. This is all done to build Thors up as an amazing person (which he is) and potentially as a main character because of the screentime share that he had at the time. Shortly after seeing how nice he is, we learn that he abandoned the Jomsvikings to raise his daughter and escape the war. For this, he is now being hunted by Askeladd on Floki's dime. Thors is told that King Sweyn, via Floki, is calling him back to war in England. He gathers his village's best men (literal children) to fight with him. He purposefully leaves Thorfinn behind but Thorfinn stows away on the ship anyway. This adventure takes them to the Faroe Islands where they are going to stop for food and other supplies but they are blocked in by Askeladd's ships who are there to kill him. Thors fights through every single man without killing a single one and challenges Askeladd to a duel and wins. Despite this, Askeladd had archers on the cliffs surrounding the entrance to the island and he calls down a volley of arrows, killing Thors right in front of Thorfinn's eyes. This is the end of Thorfinn's backstory and it is where we get into the meat and potatoes of him as a character as we follow him on his path to revenge for his father.

Out of this comes the flaws, limitations, and handicaps of the character.

Starting with handicaps because they are the easiest. Thorfinn exhibits no handicaps either mental or physical. He proves very quickly that he is physically capable and even through bad decision making in many cases (at least in Season 1) I will not venture so far as to say that he is mentally handicapped.

His limitations at the beginning of his story consist of his age and lack of experience in the area of life he is now plummeting towards. At the moment he decides to stow away on Askeladd's ship, he is six years old (perfect for exacting revenge). Due to both his age and the peaceful nature of his people, he also has not been exposed to combat and therefore will struggle to exact revenge if he doesn't work to remedy that quickly.

Seeing as he is six years old I can't fault him for thinking the way he does but nonetheless, we must note his flaws down so we can see how they transform (or don't) going forward. The most notable flaw is his immediate desire for vengeance as soon as his father dies, especially because his father told him that a true warrior has no enemies. You could also include his desire to fight in wars despite his peaceful life and the pushback from his father. Thors didn't tell Thorfinn that he used to be a warrior so Thorfinn had no frame of reference for what his father's words truly meant because of Thors' experience. Thors does tell him eventually but only mere days before his death.

These three things build the initial (or perpetual) motivations that the character will use to make decisions going forward. There is truly only one motivation to discuss here (for now). This motivation is so strong that it governs exactly what Thorfinn does every step of the way, even when he recognizes what he did was evil. This one motivation is vengeance. He makes it very clear, even to the person who he wants to kill, that that is all that he desires. One thing to note, however, that runs contrary to this idea of pure vengeance is that he wants to do it honorably through a duel. This, I suppose, is Thorfinn's way of acknowledging his father's lesson about being honorable and having no enemies which he comes to find out was a massive misconstruing of it. His motivations will make a 180 later but we're only discussing the initial state for now.

His one motivation is what drives his decision-making until the end of Season 1. His sole motivation makes his decision-making rather boring in terms of character development but it does make for an entertaining character at least. Every single one of his decisions up until the end of Season 1 are done in an effort to get even a chance at killing Askeladd. He bends over backwards for Askeladd at even a notion of getting a chance at a duel. So again, boring in terms of character development.

There are two decisions that stand out, but not for the fact that they signify change coming in Thorfinn but that they double down and then subsequently triple down on his motivation in scenarios that the audience may find shocking. The first comes when he is sent to scout an English village that Askeladd and his crew are hoping to pillage. Askeladd tells him to light a big fire on the coast once he gets there to signal it is safe to make a landing on the village's beach. On his way to the village, he gets hurt and gets knocked out in the forest where he is then found by one of the villagers and taken care of until he wakes up. Once he wakes up he is extremely hesitant to receive their help but his emotions are very difficult to read at this moment. Over the course of the day, he is fed and his wounds are further tended to. The woman and her daughter (or granddaughter I'm not sure) find out that he is a Norseman. The daughter/granddaughter insists that they turn him in but the woman insists that they hide him and take care of him because he is only a child. Again, we don't see much emotion out of Thorfinn in this moment so it is difficult to tell what he is thinking. Despite the care and protection he was given, that night, he leaves the house and lights one of the wooden storage structures by the beach on fire to make a signal for Askeladd. As the villagers come rushing out to put out the fire, Askeladd's men attack and Thorfinn sees the woman who helped him get cut down. This is the first instance where the audience sees the extent to which Thorfinn is willing to go outside of putting himself in harm's way.

The second of these decisions comes when the party of Askeladd, Thorfinn, Canute, and Thorkell reach Gainsborough near the end of Season 1. During the group's plot to put in a body double for Canute and then kill the assassin who was trying to kill Canute, Thorfinn comes across Leif Ericson at the port of Gainsborough. Thorfinn barely recognizes him and then gets arrested by authorities for the killing of the assassin even though he didn't do it. Leif comes to visit him in his jail cell and attempts to convince Thorfinn to come back to Iceland with him. Thorfinn is calmer in this scenario and listens to him, answering reasonably (in his mind) that he must continue until Askeladd is dead and he gets his revenge. This decision is another shocker to the audience as we have seen Leif struggle to find Thorfinn for a long time and we see Thorfinn as lost and misguided. To Thorfinn, this was likely an extremely easy decision to make given his goals.

Out of these decisions, we get memories and experiences which I have already discussed at length simply because of the nature of the connection between the previous step and this one. I would like to mention that memories and experiences play a larger role in Thorfinn's character than the other two especially when he sees him looking back on them in Season 2.

Through these experiences and memories, we can find Thorfinn's morals and ideals. He is quite bankrupt of morals at this point in his life as we saw in his desertion of the Englishwoman who cared for him. Time and again he proves himself to be truly blinded by vengeance and that that is his main goal or ideal. His ideal world is one without Askeladd in it, a goal that he throws everything out the window to achieve.

The identity is crafted from all of the things that have come before this paragraph and this is quite an easy one. He's angry, he's misguided, and he really wants Askeladd dead, no matter the cost.

It is at this point that we reach the end of Season 1 where we see everything crumble for Thorfinn. His entire purpose for the previous ~10 years is taken away from him when Canute kills Askeladd instead of Thorfinn getting to do it. Up to this point we've seen mounting anger and an uncontrollable desire to see Askeladd dead by his hand. All of these emotions, desires, and goals mean nothing anymore as his target is now dead and he wasn't even the one to kill him. In a fit of rage, he lashes out at Canute and slashes him across the face which prompts Canute to sell Thorfinn into slavery soon after.

The slavery arc almost requires its own character analysis but I much prefer combining them for continuity's sake. It is also easier to observe the changes from start to finish (until Season 3) than it would be otherwise because, as you likely know, there are changes aplenty.

Thorfinn's first appearance in Season 2 comes after some other characters' appearances and we see him first when he meets Einar on Ketil's farm. Thorfinn at this point practically looks and acts as if he's dead. This is a year or so after he was first sold into slavery by Canute but it is unclear exactly how long Thorfinn has been with Ketil. For the first few months of living together, Thorfinn is extremely quiet and doesn't interact much with Einar despite Einar trying.

This sets the stage for a reset in his flaws, limitations, and handicaps and furthermore his motivations. None of these are given to us right away, possibly because Thorfinn himself doesn't know them either. After some progression between Einar and Thorfinn (as well as events outside of their relationship which I will get to), we start to see that Thorfinn now despises violence and is searching for somewhere where he can build a paradise (the paradise theme returns) away from violence. He has overcome both of his flaws of being blinded by revenge and seeking violence but has now run himself into another one: putting himself in harm's way for another even when death is very much on the table. He also now refuses to hurt anyone. He does say fight initially but that is stretched a bit in certain scenarios. With that in place, we can start to look at his decisions.

Going back towards the beginning of Season 2 we can find multitudes of decisions that build the motivations that I just discussed and break our preconceived notions about his character. Right from the start, especially once the farmhands came into play, I expected Thorfinn to reach a breaking point and become a victim of his own actions when he was younger. I was happily surprised (as a Thorfinn fan, not as a writer) to find that that never happened. He continued to surprise me with every new decision that he made.

The first notable decision is when he steps up for Einar when Fox and Badger are trying to get Olmar to kill him. Seeing as this is three episodes in and I was not familiar with the new Thorfinn, I fully expected him to fight back and at least kill Olmar. He instead lets himself get cut multiple times without resistance, stating that he is not afraid of death for nothing good has ever happened to him in his life. He is subsequently saved by Snake who interrupts them in the middle of cutting Thorfinn. Just after this (in the next episode though), Snake tests Thorfinn's will to live. He draws his blade and makes a lightning-fast slash at Thorfinn that would have killed him but Thorfinn instinctually fights back, seeing Askleadd in Snake's eyes. All in this moment we see Thorfinn both want to die and want to live, indicating that he doesn't know what he wants or that he is lying to himself.

The next decision comes soon after when he decides to open up to Einar about his past. Knowing that Einar's life had been ruined by war, this is clearly not something Einar would love to hear. Nevertheless, Thorfinn tells Einar about who he used to be and asks him if he hates him now. Einar doesn't respond to any of it. Later that night, Einar decides to try to kill Thorfinn, he walks over to where Thorfinn is sleeping and starts choking him. It is here that we get Thorfinn's first nightmare scene which sees him cutting people down as he used to and ends with him killing the old lady from the English village that helped him. He begins to yell in his sleep because of it and Einar stops trying to kill him, recognizing that Thorfinn hated all of it and that there was not a chance that Thorfinn was the one that killed his family. The old Thorfinn, that we saw a flash of just earlier, would have retaliated and killed Einar but that's not what happens here, meaning Thorfinn is constantly making the conscious decision to not retaliate and not act in anger.

The duo gets the forest to a point where they can plant their first field and then continue clearing when they're done and they do so. At this point, they have met Sverkel, Ketil's father, and he starts helping them by letting them borrow equipment and talking to them about life. Sverkel overhears Thorfinn telling Einar about Askeladd and how he now feels empty and purposeless. Later Sverkel brings it up and tells Thorfinn that he is the perfect place to be reborn because he has nothing inside him, triggering a spark of life in Thorfinn that gets kindled further and further as the season goes on. Coming back to their small field, they see all of the plants uprooted and Einar is immediately furious, pointing (correctly) his rage at the retainers/farmhands. Thorfinn talks him off the ledge and tells him that if he wants to see them dead then Thorfinn deserves to die by his hand 100 times over. They resort to getting Pater instead of seeking out the farmhands. Later, they come across the farmhands on the walk back to their hay shack who start instigating a fight. Einar goes to swing at the main farmhand but instead, Thorfinn does it for him, protecting Einar from the effects of violence and breaking his no-fighting vow in the process. He soon gets knocked out with a blow to the back of the head and enters another nightmare sequence that is more lucid than the previous one.

Inside this lucid dream, he enters a hellscape where all of the people who have died and didn't enter Valhalla exist. Askeladd appears to him and tells him to be a true warrior and that he should have no enemies, echoing the words that Thors told Thorfinn back when Askeladd had him killed. All of the people in that space who died by Thorfinn's hand start climbing up to him on the ledge that he is grasping onto. They get to him and hang on while he climbs out of the hole that he fell through to get there. He says that he will deliver them from this hell, redeeming their death by saving more people and not killing anyone else.

The next example would be deciding to help Gardar and Arnheid escape. In the act of doing so, he must fight Snake who saw through their plan and is now trying to kill Gardar who also killed many of Snake's men. We see Thorfinn once again break his oath of not fighting others in order to save someone from dying, echoing the vow he made in the hellscape nightmare. In the end, Snake is successful despite the fact that Gardar woke up and almost killed Snake himself. This is symbolic of Thorfinn's method not always working and that it will be a difficult path to walk if he wishes to succeed. Going further with Arnheid's story it is also symbolic of the fact that sometimes people would rather die with their loved ones than live without them, which is something Thorfinn struggles to understand since his whole ideal is to reduce death as much as possible.

His decisions in the final few episodes go hand in hand in proving the same point. They bury Arnheid who died from wounds inflicted by Ketil who was furious at her for trying to escape even though she was carrying his child. Einar is devastated over this but it leads to him and Thorfinn coming to an agreement over never seeking violence ever again. Leif had returned with Ketil and was trying to take them back to Iceland but Thorfinn had one more thing to do and Einar thought it best to join him once Leif told him that he wasn't coming back yet. Once Einar arrived at the beach where Canute and his men were camped, he saw Thorfinn in the midst of taking 100 punches without passing out or dying from one of Canute's strongest men. This was all in an effort to get an audience with Canute who refused to see him at his first attempt. In this fight, Thorfinn didn't fight back and successfully took all 100 punches within the conditions stated. He meets with Canute and tells him how he has changed and that he should leave this farm alone because violence only begets violence. They each have the same dream of building a paradise free of violence and Thorfinn believes that Canute is doing it all wrong (because he is).

From all of these decisions, memories, and experiences we can draw his new morals and ideals out. Thorfinn's morals have flipped on their head from his previous self in Season 1, now haunted by his actions. He sees himself as the one who must make up for all of the killings he did by saving more people and never taking a life again. He makes this abundantly clear through how he helps Einar not retaliate in anger over the many things that made him angry. His new ideal is now set on the idea of Vinland being a place where people can live in peace with no war or slavery.

A new reconstruction of his identity has been formed and is much more stable than the previous one. He is now defined by his anti-violent ways and his idealistic nature and view of the world, being the exact opposite of who he was both in Season 1 and at the beginning of Season 2. His identity has never been complicated, it has always been about the action with Thorfinn.

With all 3500 of those words, we can see Thorfinn in a zoomed-out view and assess how he fits within the framework that all other characters do, seeing what makes him tick in a traditional sense. I believe he is the most simple character of the three that I have discussed when viewed in this way (despite the word count required to get here). His motivations are simple and he is purely a man/boy of action for 3/4 of the story so far. He is not hard to read but there are still some unique things about him that help him in his role as the main character.

The first unique thing that I've noticed about his character is that he fits into the avenger and revenger character archetypes and transforms from one to the other over time. He starts as an avenger as he is on a quest to kill the man who killed his father. Looking to kill someone who killed or harmed someone who is not yourself is the definition of an avenger. As the story continues, he starts doing it for himself and losing sight of the original idea. Seeing as this is all occurring in his formative years as a child, it makes sense that his whole identity and purpose form around the fixation on avenging his father. Once it fully becomes who he is somewhere in the middle of Season 1 he turns into a revenger. He starts letting the emotions get to him more often, he cares less and less about the innocent people he affects and narrows his focus on Askeladd. One note is that he never tries to kill Askeladd outside of a duel which tells me that he never lost sight of the honorable killing that he vowed to at the beginning. However, I think this was just his way of making himself feel like he was better than Askeladd at a certain point. If this truly wasn't his purpose by the end of Season 1, if not before, then I can't explain why he was so empty after that, as he said himself in Season 2.

Another unique aspect of Thorfinn is less about his character and more about his story but it says something about his (and other) character. I cannot remember an example of someone seeking vengeance joining the group of the person they wish to kill and not kill them outright. Of course, at first, he is incapable of killing him outright but in the future, he is very much capable of killing Askeladd in his sleep. I think this is an extremely unique story element that definitely builds an amazing dynamic between two of the main characters and diversifies Thorfinn's story immensely. Doing this, however, says a lot about both Thorfinn and Askeladd. I talked about this briefly in the Askeladd character analysis so I will forego his part of it here. When it comes to Thorfinn, his, what's not necessarily willingness, but his ability to travel around with Askeladd and do as he is told to earn an opportunity at killing him shows his dedication at least at first. As I said before I think it becomes so ingrained in his identity that it becomes almost instinct to do it that way at a certain point. Either way, the character dynamics and unique scenes that are created by this aspect of the story are great and contribute so much to the story and both of their developments.

With all of that being said let us discuss some of the themes that I can draw from all of it. I didn't get a chance earlier to mention themes because of how much I had to say so this section will be a bit longer than it was for the other characters.

I think there is something to be said about the transformation that he undergoes between Season 1 and Season 2. That something is that defining yourself on the premise of one singular thing is a dangerous thing to do. Once it's gone so are you. We see this in the emptiness that Thorfinn says resulted from his one focus and purpose being ripped away from him without him achieving it. I would venture to say that even if he did achieve it he still would've ended up relatively the same but the way it did end up is more tragic and derailing for him.

Another theme is that violence begets violence. Starting all the way back at Thors when he was with the Jomsvikings, we can say this. Floki wanted to hunt him down because he was a deserter but that desertion only meant something because he was good at killing people and an asset to the Jomsvikings. This is eventually what leads to Thors' death and subsequently Thorfinn's Season 1 journey. On that Season 1 journey, we see him kill countless innocent people. He is also quite possibly the most violent character on the battlefield, one because he has to be because of his size, and two because he is so fast he just becomes a killing machine in a battle.

My third proposition for a theme is one of hope. Although there is much more to see from this new Thorfinn, I think it is important to note the absolute 180 that he took. Season 2 is about introspection, peace, hope, and a nonviolent approach to conflict. All of these things are propelled forward by Thorfinn and also Einar at times. The only character that speaks of peace and nonviolence that plays a major role in Season 2 is the one who was so violent just 1 short year before. The effort that he puts into his redemption should also be noted because what he has done is not easy and it shouldn't be portrayed as such. He gives his whole being to redemption and firmly believes that he will never be redeemed for his actions and can only work towards it until he dies. The redemption of a character who has committed such unredeemable acts is most certainly an important takeaway from his character. Not only that, though, he is a beacon of hope for those around him. We first see the effects of his actions on Einar and then Canute (the jury is still out here) and Olmar.

There is one more that I would like to discuss that carries over across all three of the characters I have discussed. Thorfinn, too, wishes to create a paradise free of violence that in and of itself is quite idealistic yet the most hopeful of the three proposals made. His pacifism speaks deeply to his ideals and morals which are in stark contrast to those of Canute and Askeladd both. Thorfinn's path is the only one that doesn't lead down a path of violence and destruction in pursuit of the exact opposite, an idea I talked about with Canute. This adds to the beacon of hope concept I discussed in the previous paragraph.

At the end of the day, Thorfinn tells the story of a lost boy who defines his young self on an evil premise that he lets get out of hand in pursuit of his crooked goal. When that is ripped out from under him he becomes even more lost than he was to begin with. After extensive introspection, loneliness, pain, and depression Thorfinn finds a light that he turns externally to become the beacon of hope that he now is for those around him.