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I don’t want to be taken care of, Gunnhild wanted to scream. I want to be free.
Nothing in this life worth having comes easily.
The only thing that makes you special is how perfectly you fit the mold of what a woman is supposed to be, so you’re threatened by others who want to break out of it and be something more.”
“But the bigger question is, when the battle is over, how do we carry on? How do we put the horror behind us and go on living? It eats away at a person, little by little.”
But to me, you’ve been someone all along. You never had anything to prove.
Because if you can’t admit that your father isn’t perfect, how are you ever supposed to become better than him?”
“Your enemies are my enemies.”
“And your fate is my fate,”
winter had filled out her body in ways both she and Eirik appreciated, and also had created vivid red stretch marks on her breasts and hips and belly, of which she remained unselfconscious as she crossed the room.
He’d let her see him in his darkest moments, had let himself be vulnerable with her—and now, knowing exactly how profoundly his past haunted him, here she was, throwing it in his face purely to win an argument.
People seldom listen to reason when they’d rather be angry,”
There’s more to being a man than doing the things men are supposed to do.
I don’t think the dead want us to die for them. I think a better way to honor them is to live.”
“That a woman need not be defined by her men. That she can stand for herself and make her own way.”
Finally, although separate gender roles are likely to have existed in the Viking Age, this isn’t to say that people never crossed or blurred the boundaries between these spheres. Queerness is not a new phenomenon, and Halldor’s experience as depicted in this novel is just one way that someone we would interpret as transgender could have lived. We’ll never know how many people we’d recognize today as LGBTQIA+ have been omitted from history, but we have always been here, and we always will be.
