Jan 17, 2009
What Is Northlanders?
This is the Vertigo “On The Ledge” column I wrote to announce the book to the world, and I realized that a link no longer exists on their website, so I’m reposting it here to give it a permanent home.
Vertigo On the Ledge: with Brian Wood
Pitch me a monthly series, my editor Will Dennis told me. But something different, break out of your box. And so I did. The first line of the NORTHLANDERS proposal was: “A nihilistic crime saga set in A.D. 870, when much of England was under Viking rule.”
I’ve always loved Vikings. As a kid, I thought they were these badasses in fur and horns, watched over by scary gods of thunder and death, lissome shieldmaidens at their sides, all stalking the frozen northlands. All pretty great stuff to a 12-year-old, but I knew I needed to do something more, that it needed the maturity and sophistication Vertigo is known for.
I began to read, dozens of books. I went to Iceland. I went back and looked at photo albums from my many trips to Scotland – Orkney especially, the setting for the first NORTHLANDERS story arc. I set aside the mythology and the fairy tales, focusing mostly on history and day-to-day life. What I found most interesting was how the world was at the start of the Viking Age, coming up on the first thousand years of European history. Why the Vikings had to do what they did, and how, in a relatively short (and incredibly violent) time, they pulled Europe out of its dark ages and changed the world, albeit by swordpoint.
We went through many drafts of that pitch. It’s more than just a gritty crime story now, and I changed the date to 980. It’s become a series about millennial fears, clash of cultures and the death of the pagan way of life and the relentless march of progress. About one man, a stubborn Norse warrior in massive denial about who he is, reconnecting with the remote lands he grew up in.
And, since this is a book about Vikings, there’s a lot of sex and a lot of death – desperate men locked in shield walls fighting for their land and their lives yard by blood-soaked yard.
I broke out of my box, sure enough. But I’m still writing about the ideas I always do: identity, location, politics, war, people in love and lives in flux. It’s just set a thousand years in the past and with a lot more swords. I think the 12-year-old me would approve.
—Brian Wood
Me in Iceland at Godafoss, where the Vikings chucked, literally, their pagan gods over in favor of Lord Baby Jesus.
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