I was watching Vikings Valhalla last night and there was a scene that genuinely bothered me. The Emir, who controlled the castle, agreed with the Emperor of Constantinople to settle things with a one on one fight. Harald Sigurdsson, one of the Emperor’s guards, won the fight, killed the Emir, and the deal was clear, the people would be left alone.
The Emperor held up his end. But after he left, the general took it upon himself to massacre everyone. He used one of Leif Eriksson’s fire weapons, lured the people out with the promise of food, and burned them all alive. When confronted he said “I did what the Emperor could not do. Those people would always come back and fight us.”
Leif Erikson was horrified. He built the weapons and told the general he was a murderer. The general’s response was essentially, you gave me the tools, I’m just the one who used them. Now Leif is carrying that guilt and looks like he’s about to go off on his own.
I get that this is a show. I also get that in warfare sometimes you feel like you have to eliminate a threat completely so it doesn’t come back. But we’re talking about women, children, elderly people. Civilians who had nothing to do with the political arrangement between their leader and the Emperor. It was brutal and the show didn’t flinch from showing you exactly how brutal it was.
The general’s logic is cold but it’s not new. That reasoning has been used to justify atrocities throughout actual history, not just in Viking age stories. And the question the show raises about Leif’s science is genuinely rough, if you build the weapon and someone uses it to massacre civilians, how clean are your hands? The general made sure to remind him they weren’t.
I’m not done with the season so I don’t know where it goes from here. But that scene is going to stick with me for a while.
Leave a Reply