Chapter 37: The Definition of Love

Having finished off Askeladd's old band, Thorkell's men amuse themselves, using Ear's severed head for archery practice and stripping the corpses and carts for anything of worth. Some grumble that their foes barely fought and that such easy kills will never earn anyone a place in Valhalla. Drawn by the ongoing cheers, they find Thorfinn still standing, sweat-soaked but unhurt, having even opened cuts on Thorkell's arms. Thorkell praises him, saying only a handful of men could match him, and tears away his ruined coat to reveal the same chain mail from London. Recognizing that a straight strike at the vitals failed him there, Thorfinn resolves to sever a tendon and cripple the giant before finishing him.

Thorkell calls Thorfinn a fine fighter yet judges his swordwork ordinary, asking whether he has ever felt he lacks something that would complete him as a warrior. Thorfinn laughs and turns the question back on a man who simply flattens weaker opponents, but Thorkell, turning serious, admits he too is missing something and had hoped to learn what from the son of Thors. He asks Thorfinn what makes a true warrior, and the words drag Thorfinn back to his father's final moments. Suspecting a trick meant to break his focus, he shakes it off, and Thorkell notes with certainty that the boy does not know the answer. Furious, Thorfinn charges, slashing the giant's arms but finding the cuts too shallow to disable an elbow or knee. Thorkell flings snow up with a swing of his axes, kicks the blinded Thorfinn, and launches him high into the air. Thorfinn cushions the blow by springing off the kick but is still hurled into a treetop, tumbling down through breaking branches.

Still speaking with Willibald, Canute asks whether the friar means that Ragnar did not love him, and Willibald confirms it. Asked who then embodies real love, Willibald points to a nearby corpse and says the dead man does, more beautiful than any living soul, for he will never hate, kill, or steal, will not complain as his body feeds the insects and scatters on the wind. Death, he says, is what completes a man. Canute asks whether love's essence is therefore death, and Willibald agrees. Pressed on what a parent feels for a child, a spouse for a spouse, or Ragnar for the prince, Willibald names it discrimination, little different from bowing to a king or whipping a slave, since Ragnar valued Canute's life above his own yet let sixty-two innocents die for his sake.

At last understanding, Canute declares that the snow is love, and so are the sky, the sun, the wind, the trees, and the mountains. Willibald tells him he has it right. Weeping, Canute asks how a divine creation so full of love can be filled with men whose hearts hold none, and Willibald answers that the church teaches humanity fell into wretchedness, exiled from paradise, when the ancestors sinned and turned from God. Nearby, as the warriors keep shooting arrows into the dead and looting, a groaning Thorfinn begins pulling himself out of the snow, buried in broken branches.

Thorkell reveals his chain mail and asks Thorfinn what makes a true warrior, unknowingly touching the memory of Thors's death. Thorfinn's shallow cuts fail to cripple the giant, who kicks him high into a tree. Willibald guides Canute to the belief that death completes a man and that love, in the living, is really discrimination. Canute concludes that the whole natural world overflows with love while human hearts hold none. A battered Thorfinn survives the fall and begins to rise.

Collected in Volume 6 and adapted within Episode 18, this chapter carries the Japanese title Ai no Teigi. Its Willibald dialogue delivers one of the series' bleakest meditations, redefining love as death and equating human affection with self-interested discrimination. The exchange crystallizes the spiritual crisis that drives Canute toward the ruthless resolve he displays in the chapters that follow.