Episode 1: Somewhere Not Here

The episode opens far in the past, in 987, with Thors coming to in a bright, grassy field where Helga waves to him from a distance, an infant Ylva in her arms. The vision curdles as he realizes he is standing among corpses, and his comrade Thorkell shouts him back to his senses. The two are in the thick of the Battle of Hjorungavagr, hacking down attackers who have swarmed their ship. Seeing his side too thinly spread to survive a second push, Thors lays out a plan and then breaks off alone, leaping to an enemy vessel and cutting through its defenders single-handed. An arrow catches his shoulder; disarmed and rushed, he drags himself and an opponent overboard, drowns the man after wrestling a blade from him underwater, and swims to shore. Spent, he walks away from the war for good without a backward glance.

Years later, in 1002 on Iceland, Thors's young son Thorfinn hauls water and tends the livestock, forever glancing toward the sea and the horizon beyond it. That evening Leif Ericson holds the village children rapt with tales of his voyages, above all his discovery of a mild, fertile land south of Markland that he named Vinland, where he traded peacefully with the people already living there and came away with a feathered headdress and a tobacco pipe. Thorfinn begs to sail at once, and when the children mock the legend of Jormungand swallowing ships bound west, Thors calls an end to the stories and sends the youngsters home. Outside, a man with a broken chain at his neck stumbles through the blizzard toward the village.

The next morning, while clearing snow from the roof, Ylva slips and uncovers the collapsed runaway in a drift. Thors carries him inside, sees the whip scars on his back, and works to revive him; the slave wakes only long enough to beg not to be returned to his master, Halfdan, and to weep that he has nowhere left to go. Word soon arrives that Halfdan and more than thirty men have landed at the dock demanding him, and at the shore the confrontation nearly erupts into a brawl over an old grazing-land grudge before Halfdan brutally disciplines one of his own to prove his devotion to law.

Inside the house, the fevered slave drifts into a dream of a flowering field, and Thors murmurs to him of Vinland, a warm land without slaves or war, asking whether he might live there one day; the man answers that the paradise he saw was that very place. When Halfdan and his men enter, Ylva admits she gave up the slave's location, and Thors haggles the price up to eight young ewes to buy the man's freedom. It comes to nothing: the slave dies soon after, and that night Thors digs a grave beneath the northern lights while Thorfinn presses him about whether their ancestors truly fled Norway. Out at sea, Floki and a band of Jomsvikings set a course for Iceland, and a chest holding Thors's old warrior's gear sits waiting in the house.

The flashback establishes Thors as a feared Jomsviking who fakes his death and deserts the Battle of Hjorungavagr, choosing to vanish rather than keep killing. On Iceland years on, Leif's storytelling introduces Vinland and lodges the dream of it in Thorfinn. The chained fugitive's arrival draws Thors back into contact with cruelty when Halfdan comes to reclaim him, and Thors spends eight ewes trying to save a man who dies anyway. The closing beats set the larger plot in motion: Thorfinn's questions about his people's past go half-answered, and Floki's Jomsvikings sail toward the island where Thors has hidden his history.

Titled "Somewhere Not Here," this is the debut installment of the Vinland Saga anime from WIT Studio and the first entry in the War Arc, aired on July 7, 2019. It draws its material from chapters two through four of the manga. Notably, the opening sequence showing Thors's last battle and his desertion from the Jomsvikings was created for the anime and does not appear in the original comic, which also pushes Thorkell's first appearance earlier than it happens on the page. Shuuhei Yabuta handled both direction and storyboard, with Hiroshi Seko writing the screenplay.