Valhalla Does Not Await: The Abrahamic Misfit as Hero

The Viking has become an object of aesthetic fetishization and a space for rehearsing the primordial ethical and metaphysical truths of Western (Christian) civilization. But how did this happen?

The question is not whether the Norse have, a millennium after Hastings and Stamford Bridge, conquered the Anglo-Saxons; the question is how, and for how long. One not-totally arbitrary inflection point for the Nordic Revenge might be 2009. In the decade and a half since, we have watched the raven flag fly high across the cultural landscape—in film (Valhalla Rising, Thor, The Northman), in animation (How to Train Your Dragon), in television (Vikings, The Last Kingdom, Norsemen), and in gaming (Skyrim, The Banner Saga, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, God of War Ragnarök, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice). Now, of course, this is but a fraction of the Anglosphere’s gluttonous cultural output, and the monsters of the Norse—goblins, werewolves, elves—have long marauded about in everything from Harry Potter to World of Warcraft. What makes this moment unusual is the outsized and consistent popularity of works about Vikings rather than ones merely featuring them. Why does the specter of the Norse haunt Anglo-America, and why now?

The answer is as old as it is new. It lies behind the contemporary pagan revival,¹ most visible in the corners of WitchTok and in Asatru; behind the preceding decade of unprecedented secularization of American faith; behind J.R.R Tolkien immortalizing Norse motifs in Western popular culture via his “fundamentally religious and Catholic work”—we remember it as Lord of the Rings—a few decades after his fellow English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton was penning The Ballad of the White Horse, eulogizing the Saxon king Alfred the Great for his victory over the Danish Vikings; behind the nineteenth-century European Romantic revival (and in many ways creation) of “Viking” culture; behind Nietzsche’s bitter fallout with Richard Wagner, neopagan composer turned traitor kneeling before the Cross; and behind the online alt-right, one of the loudest contemporary claimants to Nietzsche’s mantle, and behind what is possibly its greatest achievement: Jacob Chansley, pigmentation star-spangled, head encircled in fur and topped with a bison-horned helmet, six-foot spear in hand, howling on the Senate floor as Trump protestors overran the Capitol building. A man journeyed from Arizona dressed as a Norse shaman to support Donald Trump’s delegitimization of the American democratic process and, having unexpectedly found himself occupying the imperial hegemon’s seat of power, marked his “conquest” of America by waving the American flag.

Evidently, the man perceived no contradiction in his semiotic choices. Most of his peers on the New Right do not. Many of them are happy to articulate their authentic American patriotism in the idiom of ancestral Norse identity; their rugged American individualism lies in their self-consciously audacious identification with a collective “white” tribe. That this imagined identity claims genealogical descent from pagans, and so violates the diet Christianity that passes for the “civil religion” of the United States, matters not a whit—and why should it? The “Western civilization” of which America has declared itself the historical apex, as the Second Coming of Rome, claiming Athens as much as it does Jerusalem, is as pagan as it is monotheist. This is the story that “the West” has decided to tell itself, and it is why Christ, the God-Man, makes such aesthetic sense, consecrating a communion of two worlds that is as elegant as it is necessary—but a stable union this is not, and if Orpheus and Odysseus qualify for the Western canon, why not Beowulf and Bjorn?

And here we come to my contention: that the “West,” especially in its Anglo-Saxon register, has been captivated by the Norseman for the same reason it has been captivated by the Musulman: he is the most other of its Others, for he is the nearest of them. The Musulman and the Norseman together destabilize the two bases of the West’s imagined Hellenistic-Christian identity. The Musulman destabilizes the Christian by daring an alternative reading of his sources; the Norseman, likewise, destabilizes the Greco-Roman by his strange familiarity, his pagan kinship. The inverse is also true—the Musulman challenges Rome both by his monotheism and by his claim to its intellectual heritage, just as the Norseman’s sacrificial paganism scandalizes yet recalls Christ, speared and hung in the manner of Odin.² This is a challenge both intellectual and spatial: the Norseman marks the northern frontier of Christian Europe, the Musulman the southern. Their invasion is always imminent. For good reason did that most self-resenting of Christians, Nietzsche, find his redemptive Other in the Nordic warrior and Moorish savage.³

Insofar as the secular liberalism ascendant in the Anglosphere is a translation of (Protestant) Christianity, the Vikings remain its great Other. As the Western world grapples with what appears to be an intertwined crisis of faith and identity, medieval Scandinavian culture has been and is being rehabilitated as one alternative to Hellenized Christianity. The Viking era has at once emerged as a bipartisan object of aesthetic fetishization and a space for rehearsing the primordial ethical and metaphysical truths of Western (Christian) civilization. After all, in their great historical showdown, the Christians won. The Vikings are long gone, and it is their vanquishers who tell their stories—and so, perhaps, it is not quite accurate to say that the Vikings are taking their revenge.

We can discern the inner workings of this process through a comparative analysis of three especially notable works from the past 15 years or so: the auteur film The Northman, the animanga series Vinland Saga, and the DreamWorks animated film trilogy How to Train Your Dragon. My choice of works is contrived, certainly, but it is coherent. What I want to show is that to understand how the figure of the Viking has come to serve an ideologically recuperative function in Anglo-American culture is also to understand that the archetypal protagonist of Western narrative is the misfit. That is what we are doing here: using the Anglo-Christian projection of the Viking to develop a theory of the Western protagonist as what I will call, for reasons soon to become clear, the “Abrahamic misfit.”

I. The Northman

We can perhaps say of The Northman what the German philologist Eric Auerbach once wrote of Homer: “[He] can be analyzed, but he cannot be interpreted.” Perhaps this accounts for the coolness of the film’s reception in an age hot for all things Vikings. A gross of $69 million dollars isn’t a sum to which any director should feel entitled, but it becomes rather less impressive when the film in question a) has a budget somewhere between $70-90 million, b) comes from the hand of Robert Eggers, a rising directorial star whose first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, turned a significant profit despite being substantially weirder than this underperforming third, and c) is a remake of possibly the most popular story in the Western literary canon, the most popular adaptation of which is today known as The Lion King.⁴

Yes, The Northman is a remake of Hamlet—though it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet is a remake of The Northman, or rather of the legend that The Northman is retelling. When, somewhere between 1599 and 1602, William Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, he based the Danish prince in question directly on the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth, first recorded (as far as we know) in a 13^th-century Latin chronicle by one Saxo Grammaticus. Shakespeare’s adaptation, however, introduced major changes, the most important of which is a much more psychologically dynamic portrait of a man tortured by his sins. The Northman, in bypassing Shakespeare and returning to his source, in effect attempts to excavate the pre-Christian Hamlet. It is this attempted excavation, I think, that gives The Northman its uniquely alien, and alienating, quality. To revisit the legend of Amleth in 2022 is to revisit one of the ruptures through which modern Western civilization imagines itself.

“To be or not to be—that is the question.” But the Amleth of The Northman asks none of these questions. He shares none of his cousin Hamlet’s notorious self-doubt and lacks his dramatic propensity for self-pitying monologue, and yet he sheds more blood than he spares. It is this almost obstinate indifference to psychology and morality, as conventionally understood, that announces The Northman’s hostility to the audience for whom it was made.⁵ Contemporary audiences (modern, secular, culturally Christian) have been trained to expect that a story about a vengeful man driven to blood-soaked rampage would center on his tortured depths, on his descent from sympathetic hero to depraved demon, a descent by which difficult moral and spiritual questions would be broached. Not Amleth. He inhabits a class of savagery to which Hamlet could only aspire, never mind Tony Soprano or Walter White, yet he lacks the faintest glimmer of their inner turmoil. By the time Amleth beheads his uncle in the stomach of an erupting volcano, he has dismembered dozens of his uncle’s men, murdered his two sons, and set ablaze the farm on which he had rebuilt a peaceful life for more than a decade, to say nothing of the countless villages Amleth raided as a Berserker before setting on his vengeful path. Amleth, at one point, admits that the bloodbath that is his life has tired him; but neither before nor after this fleeting moment does he seem to regret or reflect on the bloody carnage that he unleashes on family and stranger alike. His lover, Olga, is hardly perturbed either; in fact, she draws on her witchcraft to assist him every step of the way.

Amleth’s lack of introspection is made all the more startling by the film’s pointed invalidation of his quest for vengeance. In perhaps the only moment that The Northman decisively complicates its otherwise archetypal plot, Amleth discovers that his mother, Gudrun, whom he has come to save from the tyrannical clutches of his uncle, is not just his uncle’s willing bride, but his co-conspirator—it was she who asked him to kill Amleth’s father, King Aurvandill “War-Raven,” as revenge for raping her when she was a slave, and to kill the son conceived from that assault: Amleth.⁶ One would expect such a seismic revelation to stop Amleth in his tracks, but it does not; his initial horror spills over into a blind rage relieved only by plunging his sword through the sleeping body of his uncle’s elder son (whom he now knows is his half-brother). The psychological layering and thematic nuancing invited by the betrayal of Amleth’s mother is duly set aside.

Amleth only ever considers halting his revenge once: when Olga, freed from her bondage, returns to save Amleth following his capture and pending execution. Olga convinces Amleth to run away with her and soon reveals that she is pregnant with twins; this revelation, rather than solidifying Amleth’s resolve to abandon his pointless quest for revenge, immediately vitiates it by providing the perfect pretext for consummating his revenge: protecting his future family from his uncle’s vengeance. Amleth promptly abandons his wife and unborn twins and swims back to his uncle’s farm. This fateful decision results in Amleth killing his mother and child half-brother, and shortly after his uncle, whose final act of life is sticking a blade in Amleth’s chest, which of course kills him in turn. Olga, now a widow, is the film’s only survivor.

Hamlet is a tragedy, and the above summary would give the impression that The Northman is too. It is not, however instinctively our hermeneutical training demands that we impose such a reading on the text, if only to domesticate its formal and moral transgressions. But to the very end, The Northman remains committed to its experiment in interpretative illegibility: telling a story about Vikings in a manner recognizable to them, not us.⁷ From the viewpoint of a Viking, The Northman has an unambiguously happy ending—Amleth ensures the continuation of his bloodline and enters Valhalla. Far from a punishment for his obstinate pursuit of revenge, Amleth’s death is his ultimate reward. There will be no justice for the people he slaughtered, and indeed they may well reunite in Asgard, in Odin’s wine-drenched Hall of Heroes, celebrating their glorious end in combat.

Which brings us back to Auerbach’s cryptic assessment: “Homer can be analyzed, but he cannot be interpreted.” Auerbach wrote these words in “Odysseus’ Scar,” the seminal opening chapter of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, widely regarded as one of the great works of Western literary criticism. Auerbach contrasts what he takes to be two equally ancient and equally foundational “Western” literary texts, the Odyssey and the Bible, and more specifically the scenes in which Odysseus returns home after two decades, and Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac. This comparison reveals what he deems the two prevailing but opposing styles of “literary representation of reality in European culture.” We can label them the “Homeric style” and the “Biblical style.” The Homeric style consists of fully externalized description of character, action, time, and place, such that events are “connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense.” In contrast, the Biblical style gives us “externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches.”

Put differently, the Homeric style says far less because it says far more; it is pure foreground, its illumination panoramic, devoid of semiotic shadows; it lacks the suggestive lacunae of the Biblical style, which beg for interpretation. The Homeric style captures the imagination by leaving nothing to it, while the Biblical style does the reverse. Auerbach suggests that this difference follows not from the abstract, formal Judaic conception of God, but rather is its precondition. Unlike the fully present and fully ocular gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, the God of the Torah can only ever partially appear; He is a hidden God, and so is His world; from God on down to humanity, the Bible is always incomplete in its presentation; it suggests rather than expresses; for every meaning there is a second. Biblical subtext contrasts with Homeric text. The rest of Mimesis devotes itself to demonstrating how the Biblical representational style fully superseded the Homeric in the subsequent development of Western literature, eventually eclipsing itself in the form of a more secular humanism.⁸

Using Auerbach’s frame, The Northman is Homeric in style; it is a Homeric epic rendered cinematic. The film is exquisitely detailed, “hyperrealistic” the way a Homeric epic is, and indeed this fastidious attention to historical fidelity, this fetishization of detail, was one of the film’s major selling points. The Northman overwhelms with a visual decadence inversely proportional to its subtext, its shadows; everything is foreground, everything is but a succession of events and emotions. As in Homer, “the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession an alternation of emotions”—Amleth is happy when his father returns from battle; terrified when he is murdered; grievous when he runs away; determined when he finds his uncle’s farm; horrified when he discovers his mother’s betrayal; grateful when he fulfills his revenge. Scenes rarely operate in more than one emotional register, which for Auerbach was the great achievement of the “Jewish writers,” their ability “to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.”⁹ The comparative “flatness” of The Northman is disconcerting for a modern audience accustomed to the turmoil of interiority, to two-sidedness—that is, for a Christian audience, even a secularized Christian one. The Northman is an epic; Hamlet is a tragedy. Amleth is Norse; Hamlet is Abrahamic.

This is another way of saying that Hamlet is an individual. The individual originates with Abraham, or with the Biblical representational style—this is the implication of Auerbach’s argument. As compared to the Homeric heroes, the Bible’s characters “are so much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own biographical past, so much more distinct as individuals,” because they are touched by time. Change is their essence, such that experience “produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating.” In contrast, Achilles and Odysseus have their “life-histories … clearly set forth once and for all.”¹⁰ Psychological and historical depth are one, and their possibility only emerges from the silences we find in Biblical narration. From this lack of closure emerges the individual—as opposed to the character, the type, the legend.

Let us push this basic insight a bit further. Individuality marks not just the differentiation of self from other, but of self from context. The contextual abundance that deepens individuality—the visceral experience of being-in-time, of being-as-history—also potentially alienates the self from that context. In other words, the individual paves the way to the misfit. The misfit is the individual’s shadow, and the individual is no more able to sever this shadow than is Peter Pan; no matter how fast the individual runs or how high he jumps, his shadow follows in his wake.The individual is not the misfit; however, the individual is the condition of the misfit. The misfit, in turn, is, if not the precondition of Western narrative, at least one of its pillars; and in modernity, he may very well be its only pillar.

Let us be clear with our terms. The misfit is not merely an individual at odds with his context. On such a definition the misfit has always existed, insofar as “mifittedness” in this narrow sense is practically a condition of dramatic narrative and a common occurrence in life. How many stories can be told if the protagonist is not, in some way, in conflict with his context—in other words, a misfit? But this is not the misfit with which we are concerned. Amleth is a prince and preternaturally gifted warrior at war with his family, but he is not a misfit. Amleth inhabits an exceptional place in his story, but he is not exceptional relative to the Norse. He kills many people, but no more than any other Norseman. He is visited by prophesying witches and gods, but such visits were expected in tenth-century Denmark. He dies and is taken to Valhalla, but then this is to be the fate of every Viking.

Abraham is the misfit that Amleth is not. Abraham attacks his community’s values and savages their way of life, verbally and materially, for which he is rewarded with a death sentence. Abraham exists in a state of perpetual rebellion, blazing a trail of discontent through a pagan world upon whose destruction he is intent, against which he gnaws and thrashes. Abraham is a misfit because he is not merely at odds with his context; he is at war with it, questioning its very right to exist and demanding that it be remade in his image. He is locked in a total struggle with his father, his tribe, his society, his world.

In the Bible and Qur’an alike, prophets are always misfits. They are unfailingly sent to worlds out of joint and out to kill them, so existential is the threat they pose to the very order of things. This prophetology of the misfit is arguably even more realized in the Islamic tradition. Even more than Abraham, Ibrahim is not just a misfit, but the paradigmatic misfit; the most misfitted of all misfits. Ibrahim is no less than an “ummah unto himself.”¹¹ He is a one-man nation. He is literally against the world and so must become his own world to survive. The task of his descendants is to make his world the world.

Abraham is precisely what Amleth is not. The misfit is he whose oddness is ontological. His disagreement with others does not concern power, property, wealth, honor, or anything else two men inhabiting a shared cosmology might still fight over. His disagreement is about the very nature of things; it is that his world-picture is irreconcilable with that of his peers. Amleth is not a misfit because nothing he believes or does fundamentally contradicts the order into which he was born. At no point does he truly break with the moral, social, and religious norms of his society. His story is about honoring his promise to his father, no matter how pointless subsequent developments render this promise, because this is what a Norseman must do. That this quest estranges him from his family and his people does not make him a misfit, because he ultimately shares their world.¹² The gods had prophesied that he must choose between “kindness for his kin” and “hatred for his enemies,” and Amleth’s final realization, his scarred hands on the belly of his pregnant wife, is that he must choose both; he cannot reject the fate inscribed by his visions; he has already been told he will avenge his father, he has already seen his corpse on the lap of the Valkyrie—all that is left to play the part. His subsequent ascension to Valhalla validates his decision to terminate his uncle’s bloodline, widow his wife, and orphan his children. Amleth did nothing wrong, because he did nothing different.

The advent of first Abraham, then Ibrahim, on the world stage meant the renunciation of blood, lineage, kin, family, tribe, and community in the name of an abstract and otherworldly ideal. Here lies the genesis of the individual, as recognized by us moderns—here, in the ecumenical hand of the Good Samaritan,¹³ in the Pauline embrace of the Gentile,¹⁴ in the nontribal testimony of the honest witness.¹⁵ Where there is the individual, the misfit is close behind. Insofar as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic prophets have served as the primary models for character and characterization in Western narrative, it is not far-fetched to theorize the paradigmatic Western protagonist as the “Abrahamic misfit.”¹⁶

But note that Abraham denounced this world in the name of a Divinely mandated other. He rebelled against all people and all orders, but only in the name of God. The radicalism of Abraham’s rejection is matched only by that of his obedience. His extremism is bidirectional. Hence the great Abrahamic juxtaposition: at once the son who took an axe to his father’s idol, and the father who rested the blade against the neck of his son. What happens when Abraham throws away not just the axe, but the blade as well? What happens when Abraham says no to God?

II. Vinland Saga

When Nietzsche’s madman cried that “God is dead!” he meant only that God had been resurrected as Man—Christ had died again, this time on the cross of modernity, and returned as the Over-Man: he who comes after anno domini is over (and therefore, as it turns out, he who comes after anno humanis, too, is over; the Over-Man overcomes God by overcoming Man).

Vinland Saga is the story of an Over-Man. It comes from the pen of a Japanese man but fully partakes of the secularized Christian discourse that is Western modernity. As of this writing, the manga, which debuted in 2005, has entered its final chapters. Its recent anime adaptation has enjoyed a rapacious reception in the Anglosphere, and not a few of its viewers (and readers) have experienced it as life-changing. Vinland Saga is a fictionalized retelling of the real-life Thorfinn Karlsefni’s attempt, at the advent of the 11th century, to establish a colony in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, thought by some to be the first “European” settlement in the Americas. Whatever the real-life Thorfinn’s motivations were, Makoto Yukimura’s Thorfinn is driven by the dream of building a pacifist utopia free from the horrors of war and slavery. Thorfinn walked the Viking path of indiscriminate slaughter and plunder from childhood to young adulthood, following the murder of his father, and Vinland is the dream by which he intends to redeem his sins.

Thorfinn is a prophet. More precisely, he is Abrahamic. His story is that of man attempting to become an “umma onto himself,” so radical is his call and so implausible is the nation of pacifists he wishes to will into being. Thorfinn is also a Christian, insofar as any secular humanist is. He does not explicitly accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior, but he does inhabit a world where the tides of history have already begun turning and the end of the Viking lifeworld is nigh. He eavesdrops on readings of the Bible and is fascinated by the more pacifistic verses of the Gospels, and he builds an inner circle populated by believers—his wife bears the cross on her chest, his mentor Leif celebrates the Nativity of Jesus, and his close friend Hild hails from a Christian family murdered by Vikings.¹⁷

If we were to map a spectrum of Viking protagonists in terms of misfittedness, its poles would be Thorfinn and Amleth, and so would their respective works. Vinland Saga is the diametric opposite of The Norseman and is therefore much more representative of how we moderns, especially in the Anglosphere, tend to narrate the Viking age. The dramatization of the clash between Norse paganism and Christianity is a recurring and even central feature of the subgenre of Viking narrative, and perhaps no work stages this conflict more thoughtfully than Vinland Saga. Most modern works are also about as one-sided as Vinland Saga, insofar as the Vikings, in their bloodletting and brutality, offer the perfect backdrop against which to rehearse the superiority and necessity of Christian values, at least in their secularized form. Put differently, the modern genre of Viking narrative is primarily that of victors reaffirming their victory. In an age when that victory seems less certain—when the self-evident values of liberalism, humanism, and pluralism no longer seem so certain—it is no wonder that we would ever more energetically relive our conquest of the Vikings by remaking them in our image and thereby confirming their entombment in the graveyard of history.¹⁸

This is why we began with The Northman—it is the misfit that clarifies the cultural and narrative rule. Perhaps nothing establishes the contrast between The Northman and Vinland Saga as sharply as the treatment of the Norse mythos. In The Northman, Norse mythology is true. Amleth encounters seers, witches, and undead draugs, and at one point is rescued from bondage by ravens evidently sent by Odin. Everything our characters experience seems to confirm the reality of the gods. Vinland Saga, meanwhile, devotes an entire chapter to the internal monologue of a single anonymous Viking, lying and dying in a pool of his own blood on a battlefield, as he realizes with growing horror that no Valkyries are forthcoming, and no Valhalla awaits. This confirmation of Valhalla’s nonexistence in the universe of Vinland Saga legitimates Thorfinn’s later attempts to talk a band of defeated Vikings out of willing execution by exposing Valhalla as a lie concocted by fraudulent soothsayers.¹⁹ Since no Ragnarök approaches, Thorfinn suggests, the future is open, its horizon undetermined, and these men alone are responsible for deciding its shape.

This is Thorfinn’s critique of his world. Valhalla, as a mythological complex, is ontologically groundless and morally empty because it deindividualizes—it pretends the living are born dead, life and afterlife so alike that their chronological order is arbitrary, a quirk of time. The Viking is always already a corpse: unable to act or affect, without extension or distinction, his greatest achievement the multiplication of corpses culminating in his own. The mirror of this gospel of death is to be found in the Christianity of the priest Willibald (another instance, perhaps, of the uncanny kinship of Christianity and its great Others). For Willibald, true transcendence, true agape, can only be found in death, where one is indiscriminately accepting because one has no will—the ultimate Schopenhauerian denial as acceptance, the final cessation of desire and pain; “death alone realizes the person.” But Thorfinn isn’t interested in death; he wants life; he wants to create a world that makes life an axiomatic good and the only option, where no one can ask what Arnheid does: “Why do we have to live?” This is Thorfinn’s gambit, and his blasphemy: that one can realize agape among the living, not the dead. He insists on Christ on Earth, not in Heaven; he must realize Christ’s unconditional love as a living man—not dead on the cross, not resurrected in Galilee, not returned in the End Times. This is Thorfinn’s individualism, in the final sense. This is his misfitedness.

For all that Thorfinn’s willingness to sacrifice his body for his ideals would seem to confirm him as a Christ analogue—as when he endures 100 punches without striking back—what is missing, and has to be missing, is the death and resurrection. It has to be missing because Thorfinn’s Christianity is ethical and this-worldly rather than doctrinal and other-worldly, as befits the post-Christian West, and because Thorfinn is an Over-Man. He himself must claim divinity, not merely reflect it. As King Canute tells him: “To build a Paradise on Earth is to defy His logic.”²⁰ Thorfinn’s utopian pacifism is a rebellion—not merely against society and its norms, but against God and his cosmos.²¹ The Over-Man cannot legislate Below any being or any place; whether by levers and pulleys or rope or hook, Heaven must be dragged down to Earth. The Over-Man is not truly over all until he feels the grass of the Garden between his toes.

Thorfinn is not just an Abrahamic misfit; he is post-Abrahamic. Abraham rebelled against all, but he did it in the name of God; Thorfinn rebels against all because he rebels against God. The Abrahamic misfit, once secularized, becomes the Over-Man. The Over-Man, contra Mary Shelley and the Romantics, is not the modern Prometheus. His alienation is more complete, more total, because he must not steal the fire from the gods but create the fire himself. The misguided retaliation of the gods would at least provide the Over-Man with a heroic sense of himself as righteous rebel against the stuffy and backwards establishment; the Over-Man has no such satisfaction, because he himself is his only reference point for meaning; he has no Other by which to achieve self-definition, because he is Over all others and burdened with giving their world meaning through his legislation of new values.

Thorfinn the Over-Man is the telos of the modern Western protagonist. A century of literary scholars have defined the novel, by consensus the paradigmatic literary form of modernity, by its inherent lack of a metanarrative, theological or otherwise. The novel, typically via its protagonist, is said to manifest a critical attitude informed by personal experience rather than inherited tradition. It is a formless form, knowing only the Bakhtinian carnivelesque, polyvocal and heteroglossic, without the meaning-resolving finality of transcendence. It is this ostensible absence of a transcendent orientation that epitomizes the philosophical realism that Ian Watt and his successors have identified as the bedrock of the novel’s default literary strategy of “formal realism”—and the source of its inherent secularity.²² The novel comes after metaphysics. The alienation of its protagonist is cosmic; estranged from his peers, his society, his God. The modern protagonist is not Satan, who could rebel against God; the modern protagonist is Kafka and Camus, rebelling against the big nothing. Every novel, per Georg Lukács, tells the story of “a world forsaken by God.”²³

But Thorfinn is even more realized a misfit than the most existential existentialist. He does not merely denounce a world that cannot accommodate him; he demands that it change to accommodate him. Where Abraham did this in the name of God, Thorfinn does it in his own name. He condenses his blasphemy in a mantra that has become the viral gospel of his fans worldwide: “I have no enemies.” It is a wonderful audacity, and it is no wonder that Thorfinn exerts such a hold over so many devotees in and beyond the pages of his manga. Only a charismatic man indeed can utter such a declaration, for it is the declaration to end all declarations. It decrees, with intoxicating alacrity, the End of History. It announces Thorfinn as the prophet of the liberal international order, his slogan that of Pax Americana, his dream its dream: the death of politics. “I have no enemies”—a denial, unequivocally, of the distinction between friend and enemy that Carl Schmidt identified as the beginning of the political. “I have no enemies”—a beautiful statement, and, I think, the one that lays bare the ultimate despotism of the misfit. The nature of this despotism will appear clearer, perhaps, once we turn to someone who would know: the Thorfinn who failed.

III. How to Train Your Dragon

The most critically acclaimed trilogy of films in the history of Dreamworks Studio is even more a cultural misfit than The Northmanbecause its target audience is children. The most reliable index of a society’s values are the stories it tells its youth, after all, and a survey of our own seems to show that some variation of Star Wars, if not the only story we have, is certainly the main one. Luke and the Empire, Katniss and Panem, Harry and Voldemort, Neo and the Matrix, Progress and Fascism. We Western folks are revolting, literally and always. When our heroes are not actively overthrowing somebody or something, they aren’t doing anything as traitorous as fitting in. Either they’re different and proud of it, or they’re learning that they’re not crazy, everyone else is. They’re chosen ones or soon-to-be-chosen-ones or self-chosen-ones. The kingpins of children’s animation, Disney and Pixar, assume the alienation of their audience and tell stories aimed at assuaging that alienation. The shape of a story will be conditioned by its hero’s brand of alienation, but that the hero will be alienated is not in question. The hero is alienated from family, from friends, from community, from society, from themselves. The misfit, at any level of intensity, is our paradigmatic hero.

Even a cursory survey of Pixar’s filmography will suffice to make the point. In A Bug’s Life, a misfit ant saves his colony through his once-rejected ideas; in Monsters, Inc., a duo of monsters attempt to overturn the anti-children lie on which the entire structure of their company is built; in The Incredibles, our superheroes deal with a world that outlaws “supers;” in Ratatouille, a rat transgresses the norms of both his and the human world by cooking at a five-star restaurant, eventually proving old prejudices wrong and bringing the two worlds together; in Coco, a lover of music teaches his family and town to love music again; in Inside Out, Joy learns the worth of her ontological opposite Sadness, a realization that saves their world (i.e. Riley, the prepubescent girl that the emotions “pilot”). Again and again, our heroes are misfits whose particular type of misfittedness implicates the fundamental value structures of their world, and the resolution of their story typically comes about by their reformation of the world, which learns to overcome its illiberal prejudices against the Other (embodied by or associated with the protagonist). So standard is this model, so unthinking a default, that it would be redundant to present a more comprehensive list of demonstrative examples; we would be better served by noting the exceptions—the cultural misfits, like How to Train Your Dragon.

The trilogy’s first and most beloved film tells a story that, predictably, invited positive comparisons to Pixar. Hiccup, the son of the formidable chieftain of the village of Berk, Stoic the Vast, is unable to cultivate the ferocity and dragon-fighting capacity expected of a Viking, never mind the warrior chieftain’s son. His diminutive frame, timid attitude, and intellectual interests make Hiccup something of an outcast. When one day, through sheer luck, he captures one of the rarest and most dangerous dragons alive, a Night Fury, he cuts the creature loose instead of killing him. This marks the beginning of a deep friendship between Hiccup and the dragon Toothless, through which Hiccup grasps the possibility of Viking-dragon coexistence. Though Stoic initially disowns Hiccup for his radical call to interspecies harmony and tolerance, he and the rest of Berk eventually see reason, and the film concludes with Berk transformed into a human-dragon utopia.

The first installment of How to Train Your Dragon ends with Hiccup achieving in Berk what Thorfinn hopes to achieve in Vinland: a land without enemies. It’s a beautiful story well told, but it is also an eminently safe one, dutifully intoning the ideological pieties of our day. Had the film made only modest box office returns, that likely would have been the end of it. But it did not, and DreamWorks quickly greenlit two sequels, which proceeded, in atypical and frankly shocking fashion, to systematically deconstruct the beloved film that had launched the franchise in the first place.

The second film begins with a familiar setup: Hiccup, having enjoyed the freedom of dragon-flying youth, is expected to soon succeed his father as chief. Hiccup, ever the misfit, has no interest in such a responsibility and does not see how he could ever measure up to it. At this point, the savvy viewer will see a few obvious narrative possibilities: either Hiccup will persuade his father to set him free to chart his own course in life, or Hiccup will inherit his father’s role and remake it such that it does not strangle his free spirit. What happens, instead, is that Hiccup’s father is killed by none other than Toothless. A madman named Drago had manipulated him via the brainwashing powers of an Alpha Dragon. This is a tragic twist, obviously, but what twists the knife is that Stoic was killed because Hiccup had tried to negotiate with a man that Stoic warned him could not be negotiated with. Hiccup, drunk on his success in converting Berk to a human-dragon utopia, is convinced that he can preach the good word to the rest of the world, which will surely, with time, follow him in accepting dragons as friends rather than enemies. The price that Hiccup pays for this messianism is his father. Now, his father’s figurative crown on his head, Hiccup resolves to honor his advice: “A chief protects his own.”

In the context of the first film’s liberal utopianism, this is a remarkably subversive thematic turn. It is not that Hiccup gives up on coexisting with dragons—his mother assures him that only he has the “heart of a chief” and “the soul of a dragon,” and so only he can bring their worlds together—but rather that he gives up on the idea that he can convert everyone to his gospel. In other words, Hiccup stops believing that he “has no enemies.” After all, “a chief protects his own,” and to do so the chief must know who falls within the circle of “his own” and who does not. There is an undeniable conservatism to this realization, so jarring after the open-armed ethos of the old Hiccup, but there is also an honest reckoning with the intractability of the Schmidtian friend-enemy distinction. Hiccup’s gospel of coexistence merely shifted rather than abolished the line between friend and foe; it reconfigured Hiccup’s world such that he had new friends (those who tolerate dragons) and new enemies (those who don’t). Is this not always the dilemma, not just of liberalism, but of any political order? To accept the line between friend and enemy is to accept the existence of deep difference—a difference that brings with it the possibility of violence, certainly, but also the possibility of history, of pluralism, of the human.

It is precisely Hiccup’s reckoning with deep difference that Thorfinn refuses. “I have no enemies” is the direct and uncompromising negation of “a chief protects his own.” It is this absolutism that marks Thorfinn as post-Abrahamic, for Abraham certainly had enemies. Every prophet must. The Christian, never mind the Muslim or the Jew, can never declare, “I have no enemies.” Each believes himself in possession of a universal truth that demands application, yet each must contend with the dissidents who do not and will not accept God’s truth, even though they bear God’s fingerprints. They are not godly, but they are God’s creation, and so their otherness is finite. It is limited. Accordingly, there are certain heights of misfittedness that the Abrahamic misfit can never reach, simply because he too is God’s creation. Overness is unavailable to him.

This limitation does not apply to the post-Abrahamic misfit, whose alienation can know infinity. Infinity is a dangerous thing, because it is definitionally inhuman. “I have no enemies.” Put differently, “no one human is my enemy.” It is a small step from such absolute acceptance to absolute denial—“if you are my enemy, then you must not be human.” This is not really a hypothetical, for its demonstration is Palestine and Kashmir and the world in between. It is why Thorfinn’s gospel of life must be death by another name, not far removed from the similarly morbid gospels held by his enemies. The peace which Thorfinn wishes to bring about demands the recognition of enmity rather than its denial, for only then can it be addressed, managed, tolerated. Any other tolerance is false, premised on a false universality and the suppression of true difference.

The post-Abrahamic misfit is central to contemporary Anglo-American narrative because he bespeaks its imperial imaginary. The misfit is an Over-Man, but more importantly he is an American. He is not merely God’s chosen one, but the one chosen to be God. He preaches the American exception: alone enlightened and tasked with enlightening all. This is the imperialist dialectic of the post-Abrahamic misfit. He is the most different because he denies difference itself. Rather than fit in, he demands that all fit into him. All is one—the misfit—and one is all. The misfit becomes the universal medium of translation, such that he can speak all languages, and such that all languages must speak him. Thorfinn is the final misfit; he announces the end of misfittedness, and in so doing lays bare the latent despotism of the post-Abrahamic misfit.²⁴

How to Train Your Dragon is such an interesting franchise, ultimately, because it registers a loss of faith in the messianic powers of the post-Abrahamic misfit, understood as the American imperialist. The first and most optimistic film was released in 2010, in the diminishing but still present glow of the Obama era and the post-racial Pax Americana it beckoned. The sequel was released in 2014, in Obama’s bloodied second term, to a less naïve audience. The final installment hit theaters in 2019, deep into the Trump era, and doubles down on the return of history with its conclusion: Hiccup, drained by the relentless attacks of Berk’s enemies, disbands his utopia. He and Toothless part ways, each resolving to live in seclusion with their own kind until the rest of humanity is “ready” for coexistence. This is less an acceptance of the political, of difference, than a despairing surrender to it—a loss of will to either defend or impose Anglo-American liberalism. This is the raven flag made white. It is exhaustion.

DreamWorks recently released the first teaser trailer for its live-action remake of the first How to Train Your Dragon film, set for release later this year, the first year of Trump’s second term. The film will again declare, via its puppetry of the vanquished Vikings, the name of the West: Anglo, Christian, secular, liberal. It will again celebrate the misfit, even as its immediate audience increasingly sense that they have become misfits of a different kind: not the successors and usurpers of Abraham, entitled to make the world their mirror, but rather misfits of a humbler kind—hands up against, rather than on the reins of, the charge of history.

---

Notes

1. “Paganism,” as always, is a term to be used carefully. As a concept, it exists only in relation to the “Abrahamic” faiths; Christianity invented paganism as much as secularism invented religion.

2. Some historians have argued for a Christian origin of the Odin crucifixion myth. For an argument as to the various ways Christianity appropriated rather than erased various Nordic motifs, see G. Ronald Murphy, Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North (Oxford University Press, 2013).

3. As Ian Almond writes, “The fact that Islam traditionally occupied the peculiar place of historical opposition to both European Christianity and modernity means that Nietzsche’s positive remarks concerning Islam usually fall into four related categories: Islam’s ‘unenlightened’ condition vis-à-vis women and social equality, its perceived ‘manliness’, its non-judgementalism and its affirmative character—one which says ‘Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite moments of Moorish life!’ In all these remarks, a certain comparative tone is forever present, as if Islam was a kind of mirror in which the decadent, short-sighted European might finally glimpse the true condition of his decay.” In other words, Nietzsche was an inverted Orientalist—he shared the same stereotypes about Islam as his contemporaries (masculine, sexist, primitive, fanatical, hierarchical) but simply celebrated rather than rejected them. See Almond, History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2010), 153–155. In Nietzsche we see the roots of the strange Islamophilia evident in certain corners of the online alt-right (admiration for the “patriarchal-warrior Taliban;” the “inherently misogynist Muslim man;” etc.). As with their German Orientalist successors, their admiration for Islam is primarily aesthetic; once real political stakes implicating Muslims are involved, they fall in line and become good imperial subjects.

4. Eggers’ most recent film, Nosferatu (2024), has returned him to his box-office grossing ways. It continues Eggers’ quest to honor the Other, this time by a retelling of Dracula.

5. Such dramas are ubiquitous in American popular culture, which in its current state of arrested adolescence is perpetually titillated by the antihero.

6. It is worth noting that some interpreters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet have argued for his mother Gertrude’s complicity in his father’s death. However, the question of her innocence or guilt is ultimately left open-ended; The Northman, in characteristic fashion, converts potential subtext to explicit text.

7. It is not quite accurate, however, to say that The Northman is a film made entirely for the culture it depicts. The Northman can only alienate its modern audience to the extent that it is made for them. The film goes out of its way to frame the events it depicts as horrific; its gaze, in other words, is still unrepentantly modern. The Northman is so effectively alienating because its makers inhabit the same moral paradigm as their audience and know which sensibilities to offend. The story of The Northman, if told by a contemporary Northman, would have different emphases, would linger in different places. The offense of The Northman is calculated; the distribution of its visual weight is precisely calibrated to maximize horror. The film’s trick is that it does not connect its normative framing to the protagonist himself; the moral tone is intended for the audience only, and so severed entirely from its protagonist. The film also keeps Amleth from committing certain crimes on screen—while he participates in a brutal berserker assault on a village and slaughters plenty of men, he never (intentionally) lays a finger on children, does not join his fellow berserkers in parting them from the mothers that will be rounded up and burned alive, and never expresses glee at cutting down innocents. He does sit by and allow all of the above to transpire, but this is as far as Eggers is willing to let him off his leash; any further, and he may lose his audience completely. This sort of precise emotional calculus, reducing a viewer’s empathy for an immoral protagonist but not so much that the viewer stops rooting for them entirely, is a technique perfected in contemporary television dramas, as with Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire, Homelander in The Boys, and, of course, the aforementioned Tony Soprano and Walter White.

8. In the view of Edward Said, Auerbach identifies two critical inflection points in the history of Western literature: the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The former broke with the representational style of classical antiquity, while the latter, in turn, perfected the Biblical representational style and, thereby, eclipsed it. Dante stands on the boundary between the delicate vertical-horizontal balance of figura and its collapse into pure humanism.

9. Mimesis, 13.

10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 17–18.

11. Qur’an 16:120.

12. Amleth’s lover Olga does not dissuade him from his duty-to-revenge by appealing to any higher social critique or competing moral system. She appeals to the “earth gods,” with whom she is in special communication as a witch, and their supposed affirmation that she must take Amleth with her wherever she goes. She also appeals to the same patriarchal values that drive his vengeance—that rather than avenge his father, he should serve as a father for his unborn children. This backfires on her, since she provides Amleth the pretext by which to reconcile his new purpose in life (his wife and children) with his old (his vengeance).

13. Luke 10:10–37.

14. Galatians 3:28.

15. Qur’an 4:135.

16. I have opted for “Abrahamic,” and not “Judeo-Christian,” to reenact the destabilization of Western identity that the latter ideological term is designed to preempt via its expulsion of the West’s Islamic heritage. This is not to say that “Abrahamic” is a purely unproblematic term.

17. The real-life Thorfinn and his wife Gudrid were also Christians, and his son, born in Vinland, would play an important role in Christianizing Europe. Thorfinn’s pacifist teachings resemble those of the real-life contemporaneous peace movement known as the Peace and Truce of God.

18. Two factors make the Vikings available for this purpose in a way that Muslims are not: their race (comfortingly white, in the modern Anglo-American imaginary) and their absence (Islam is still a live agent in history, even if currently passing through a period of profound political impotence).

19. Vinland Saga, Chapter 190.

20. Vinland Saga, Chapter 97.

21. The medieval Christian understood the Kingdom of Earth as a reflection of the Kingdom of Heaven: its laws and hierarchies are right and immutable, because they are but the shadows cast by their eternal forms in Heaven. One glimpses God’s greater order through its instantiation in human society on Earth. When the great Catholic saint Thomas More effectively invented the term “utopia” with his book of the same name in 1516, he presented his ideal society only as a diagnostic by which to reveal the ills of his present society, not as a blueprint to some future one. The critical-diagnostic function of his utopic imaginings implied no revolutionary action whatsoever, as evidenced by More’s laborious attention to his utopia’s structure but indifference to its history. For More, as for the classical utopians that emulated his model, utopia is nowhere. It is a non-place in a non-time. It has never existed and never will. But Thorfinn, this reformed Viking, is a post-Enlightenment man, and he follows Marx and countless other moderns in relocating utopia in history, such that its realization becomes horizon and expectation.

22. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1957).

23. There is a tragedy to the misfit insofar as he refuses to accept the world into which he is born, one which has been sacralized in the name of order, tradition, law, God and thereby deemed not only unchangeable, but necessary and good.

24. I am not accusing the ardently pacifist Thorfinn of imperialism; I am noting a formal homology. I am observing that Thorfinn aspires to Matthew 5:9 (“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me”) without confronting Matthew 10:34 (“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”). These are not contradictory verses; they are the necessary parts of one whole.