Askeladd (Lucius Artorius Castus): The mercenary who signed all his own permits

Askeladd, the mercenary who dominates the first season of Vinland Saga, is too intelligent to be a mere villain. He sacks villages, slits the throats of sleeping men, betrays the kings who hire him and manipulates everyone around him —and yet he never behaves like someone who has renounced all morality—. He has a code, he has selective tenderness, he has a secret goal he considers noble. That contradiction, of the lucid criminal who keeps his self-image intact, is exactly the phenomenon explained by the theory of neutralization of Gresham Sykes and David Matza. Their thesis: most of those who offend share our morality and, in order to break it, need to sign themselves a permit first. Askeladd is that permit made character —a man who has learned to switch off guilt for just long enough and to switch it back on afterward, without his conscience ever breaking—.

// The theoryFive formulas to silence the conscience

In 1957, Gresham Sykes and David Matza published «Techniques of Neutralization» as a reply to the subcultural theories that imagined the delinquent with an inverted morality, opposed to ours. If that were true —they objected—, the offender would feel no shame or guilt when caught, and he does feel it. Their conclusion was subtler and more disturbing: the delinquent does not reject the norms, he neutralizes them selectively, with learned justifications that suspend morality just before the act and let it return afterward. Matza would complete the idea in Delinquency and Drift (1964) with the concept of drift: the person is bound neither to crime nor to conformity, but floats between the two, and neutralizations are what releases the brake. They catalogued five: denial of responsibility («the circumstances pushed me»), denial of injury («no one was really hurt»), denial of the victim («they had it coming»), condemnation of the condemners («those in charge are worse») and appeal to higher loyalties («I did it for my own»). Askeladd does not pick one: he masters them all, and deploys them as it suits him.

// The subjectThe higher loyalty that justifies everything

If one technique defines Askeladd above the rest, it is the appeal to higher loyalties —the noblest in appearance and the most dangerous in practice—. Beneath the cynical mercenary beats a secret: Askeladd is the son of a Welsh slave and believes himself a descendant of a legendary hero of that land. His true identity, the one he hides behind a Norse name, is that of a man who knows himself different from and superior to the «brutish» Danes he serves. His entire plan —maneuvering between factions, deciding who lives and who dies, even the atrocious act that crowns his arc— he justifies to himself as service to a higher loyalty: to protect his native land, to honor his mother, to fulfil a destiny that no law of men could understand. Sykes and Matza warned precisely of this: the appeal to higher loyalties is born not from the absence of values, but from ranking them until fidelity to your own (family, blood, homeland) weighs more than the prohibition against killing. It is the alibi of mobsters and fanatics alike —«it is not for me, it is for my own»—, and for that very reason the most resistant: whoever uses it does not feel like a criminal, but like the fulfiller of a sacred duty. Askeladd kills for Wales in the same way Michael Corleone kills for the family: convinced he serves something that transcends him.

// The crackDoes the excuse come before the crime, or after?

The deepest crack in neutralization is one of causal order, and Askeladd embodies it without resolving it. Do the excuses precede the offense and enable it —the permit that releases the brake—, or are they after-the-fact rationalizations, stories one tells oneself later in order to sleep soundly? With Askeladd both readings can be defended. At times he seems to decide on the slaughter and only then look for sense in it —the alibi as consolation—; at others, his contempt for Danes and nobles seems so deep-rooted that it is already there, ready, before he draws his sword. The classic review by Maruna and Copes (2005) left this balance: neutralizations probably work less as a trigger of the first crime and more as maintenance —what allows one to keep offending without falling apart—. Askeladd is no moral debutant: he is a hardened professional of war, and in him the excuses seem to sustain a criminal career rather than to inaugurate it. There the theory shows its limit: it explains better the occasional offender who keeps a common morality than the veteran who perhaps hardly needs to justify himself any longer.

It is also worth not universalizing. Not every offender neutralizes: there are those who do invert their values, and those so hardened that they act without any inner alibi at all. Askeladd is a case especially rich in neutralizations because he is an intelligent, reflective man —the more lucid a person is, the more sophisticated their repertoire of excuses—, but it would be a mistake to read a general law into him. And, above all, one must hold the ethical line that no theory can cross: to explain is not to excuse. Reconstructing the mental scaffolding with which Askeladd authorizes himself to kill serves to understand how a rational human being lives alongside atrocity, not to lower his responsibility by a gram. The villages that burned and the men he slaughtered do not cease to be victims because their executioner had a good story to justify himself. The memory, here, is for them.