Hakon is famous for his polyamorous relationship with Eira and Brita. Having both a wife and mistress is, of course, not out of the ordinary, but the fact that the trio go together everywhere like an actual family – and that the wife and the mistress are in a relationship with each other – is.
A tailoring workshop is the family business: Eira and Brita weave, sew and manage a some female workers, and Hakon deals with distribution.
The pictures represent: 1. Eira (left) and Brita (right), and two of their children Sigurðr and Ása; 2. An old drawing of the trio; 3. Eira and Brita selling a tunic (to Aidan, the young man looking in the mirror). 4. Inktober 2018 piece of them sewing.
_____________________
It started with me wanting to show that “Vikings could have two wives” isn't exactly historically accurate. I also wanted to illustrate a positive scenario of a man having a wife and a mistress, not the tragic one where the women just accept his infidelity because they simply have no choice (nor because they put his happiness above theirs because he's the head of the family). Partly because Hakon is a good guy (yes, quite a bit of a macho, but a kind one nonetheless) and he wouldn't want to make his wife unhappy, and partly because Eira and Brita are just as libertine as him. So, a situation where he sleeps around or brings women in the house and his faithful wife obediently “puts up with it” just didn't fit.
I love how you’ve put a positive spin on having an open relationship between the three of them. Too often, this trope is always played for drama and made very negative when not all cases are like that!
When the dark secrets of his past threaten to be exposed, Eyolf Sólhrafn - Norway's most famous mystic of the late 10th century - fears the end of his prosperous career, so he has no choice but to rely on the flimsy relationship with his new ally, the austere Yngvar Eindride. Though different like sun and moon, Eyolf and Yngvar start out as business partners, struggle with their clashing ideologies, political rivals and Eyolf's past mistakes and misfortunes, in the process building a stronger connection between them...
This is the EXTRAS section for the novella "Lucky Wolf", whose text you can read on Tapas: https://tapas.io/series/Lucky-Wolf
Here I publish one or more illustrations for each new chapter, along with sketches of the characters and scenes in the story!
Comments (4)
See all