Abstract
Due to unprecedented opportunities of global and cultural exchanges in the past decades, fragments of our past go beyond borders, nationalities and cultural differences. Contemporary popular culture is an important vector to convey them, even on the other side of the Earth, where European’s past can become the future inspiration for foreign writers and artists. And Japan is no exception. It has started to be filled with European images from the past, whether it is in the medieval-fantasy backgrounds of video games or in highly praised literary works. Japanese popular literature participates in this movement, assimilating and reorganizing European cultural elements, before sending back to us those same fragments, deformed and/or revitalised. Amidst the various motifs extracted from our History and used by Japanese authors, one has caught our attention: the Vikings and their expedition to Vinland, in Yukimura Makoto’s manga Vinland Saga. Far from presenting stereotyped images of simple-minded and brutal Norse warriors, this historical work offers a new and foreign approach of Thorfinn Karselfni’ story and the two Sagas of the Icelanders mentioning him, the Grœnlendinga saga and Eiriks saga rauða. In this article, I study how Yukimura Makoto reconstructs the Icelandic’s Sagas and develops its historical context, in order to create his own rewriting of this famous Norse cultural element. By doing so, I argue that he provides the Japanese readers – and by ricochet European ones – with a transcultural and revitalised Old Norse Literature and History in the 21st century.
Highlights
Undoubtedly, the Vínland Sagas have been subject to a great number of rewritings, “function[ing] as a stage setting for a wide range of contemporary concerns for over a hundred and fifty years: politics, race, religion, and gender” (Arnold 2013, 199-201)
Despite only offering a glimpse of Vínland itself, and it might be too bold to suggest that it is a metaphor for American society, the manga does share the “hallmark” of this post-war approach: an “implicit social critique, partly prompted by wartime disillusionment” (Arnold 2013, 201)
Whether it is the leitmotiv of “what is a true warrior?”, the way the author rejects the notion of “honour above all” or embraces the question of slavery, or even his early depiction of the Skraelings which is relatively free of the discourse of eurocentrism, all of these anachronistic ideas are post-war postures
Summary
Mutual Images is a semiannual, double-blind peer-reviewed and transcultural research journal established in 2016 by the scholarly, non-profit and independent Mutual Images Research Association, officially registered under French law (Loi 1901). Mutual Images is registered under the ISSN 2496-1868. Mutual Images uses English as a lingua franca and strives for multi-, inter- and/or trans-disciplinary perspectives. As an Open Access Journal, Mutual Images provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
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