Christina here, and today I’m contemplating violence. No, not personally, but in books and films, as well as in real life. It’s kind of hard not to with everything that is happening around the world today!
Right now I’m in Sweden again, and there have been a lot of stories in the press here lately about how gun violence and the number of murders each year are escalating. When I was growing up, this used to be a very peaceful country and if there was even one murder a year, it was a sensational story picked over by the press for weeks, if not months. These days there’s maybe one a week. ONE A WEEK! How did this happen? It’s getting to the point where no one bats an eye at reading the headlines and that’s very sad.
I think we are all becoming desensitised to violence. Or perhaps going backwards to how things were in the past, when punishments were harsh and it was a dog-eat-dog kind of world. Having studied and written about the Vikings for a while now, I’m fully aware of the brutality some of them displayed (although as I keep saying, the marauders were a minority, not the majority of the population). They thought nothing of it, nor did their victims. Given half a chance, they would have been just as violent in return. It was the norm, but that was a 1,000 years ago!