Top 10 Strongest Vinland Saga Characters, Ranked

Vinland Saga has no magic and no power levels, just men like the one who kills four armoured Vikings with a single thrown spear. This ranking sorts the ten strongest fighters in Vinland Saga by what they do on the screen and the page, manga-only entries flagged.

All 10 at a glance

#	Character	Why they rank here	In the anime?
1	Thors Snorresson	Knocked out an axe-armed Thorkell barehanded	Yes, season 1
2	Thorkell the Tall	One thrown spear, four men on the shaft	Yes, season 1
3	Thorfinn	The only man besides Thors to beat Thorkell	Yes, both seasons
4	Garm	Traded blows with Thorkell and walked away	No, manga only
5	Snake	Askeladd's strength with Thorfinn's speed	Yes, season 2
6	Thorgil	Got inside a king's guard and nearly killed him	Yes, season 2
7	Askeladd	Never once lost to Thorfinn	Yes, season 1
8	Bjorn	Berserker who fights with the brakes cut	Yes, season 1
9	Gardar	Killed his guard detail while half dead	Yes, season 2
10	Wulf	The man who saved Canute from Thorgil	Yes, season 2

How we ranked them

Results in canon fights came first: who beat whom, and what it cost them. Testimony came second, because Makoto Yukimura lets his fighters rate each other out loud, which settles the top of this list. Third, we judged peak form, not final form, since the protagonist spends the back half of the story refusing to hit anybody. Beside the strongest anime characters of all time this cast looks modest. The anime's two seasons run to 48 episodes and cover two of the manga's four arcs, so much of the best fighting here exists only in print.

Spoiler warning: everything below discusses fights and deaths from all 48 episodes and the unadapted manga arcs.

1. Thors Snorresson: the Troll of Jom

Thors is the answer the series keeps circling back to. A Jomsviking commander, he walked out of Jomsborg in 987 with his wife and baby daughter; Thorkell caught him leaving, swung a two-handed axe at him, and Thors knocked him unconscious without drawing a blade. Fifteen years of farming in Iceland later, Askeladd arrived with a hundred-strong raiding band, and Thors went through the crew that boarded him using his fists alone, taking no lives, Bjorn's berserker rage included. The duel with Askeladd he won by trickery: he let his own sword snap against Askeladd's breastplate on purpose, baited the heavy hack that followed, struck Askeladd's sword arm at the elbow, caught the falling blade in mid-air and held it to his throat, then asked for a surrender rather than a kill. Archers finished him after he laid that sword down to save a child hostage, and he was still on his feet with a volley in him.

2. Thorkell the Tall: the strongest man alive, by his own admission second

Thorkell defected to the English purely because the fighting looked better over there. On London Bridge he meets a knife-armed Thorfinn barehanded, then picks up a log and swings it the way other men swing a staff. The feat fans quote, though, is the spear: thrown across open ground at Askeladd's retreating band, it kills four of them on one shaft. He is also the reason Thors sits above him. The two served together in the Jomsvikings, and Thorkell says plainly that Thors is the only man who was ever stronger than him. Across two duels with a teenage Thorfinn he loses two fingers and then an eye, which says as much about Thorfinn's edge as about how cheaply Thorkell holds his own body.

3. Thorfinn Karlsefni: ranked on the boy, not the man

Judging Thorfinn is awkward because there are two of him. The teenager who fights with a pair of daggers, one of them his father's, is a specialist rather than a bruiser: he closes distance faster than anyone in the cast, treats terrain and crowds as weapons, and survives duels he has no business entering. On London Bridge he took two of Thorkell's fingers and still lost, escaping into the Thames with broken ribs and a wrecked shoulder. The rematch went his way. He took one of Thorkell's eyes, Thorkell called the result himself and ordered his men to spare the boy, and the soldiers around Prince Canute started calling him Karlsefni, "the Promising". He also lost to Askeladd every time, which is the honest ceiling here. Adult Thorfinn is unrankable by these rules: after the Farmland Saga he will not raise a hand at all.

4. Garm: the fastest thing in the manga

Manga only. Garm turns up in the Eastern Expedition arc, which begins where season 2 ends, so anime viewers have never met him. Floki hires him to kill Thorfinn and it comes close to working. His weapon is a custom spear that splits into two short ones he fights with in both hands, and his real advantage is pace. He kills Vagn, one of the senior Jomsviking commanders, with no apparent effort, and he holds his own against Thorkell while carrying an ordinary spear rather than his own. Thorfinn only survives by throwing Garm's weapon out of reach; Garm's complaint afterwards is that he would have won had he kept it at full length.

5. Snake: the best swordsman nobody expected

Snake spends most of the Farmland Saga being funny, which hides the most technically complete fighter in the arc. His real name is Roald, he met the genuine Iron Fist Ketil at around fifteen and learned to fight from him, and he carries a curved sabre the Danish farmhands have no frame of reference for. His past sits in Miklagard, the Norse name for Constantinople, which is where a blade like that comes from. Thorfinn's read after a single exchange is the best evidence available: strength close to Askeladd's, speed approaching his own, and a curve that steals distance on every cut.

6. Thorgil: the one who got closest to killing a king

Ketil's eldest son is a former thegn of Canute's, and he plays like Thorkell with the good humour removed. At the Battle of Ketil's Farm he abandons the battle line to hunt the king personally, beheads the two guards who step in front of him, and fails only because Canute hears him coming and gets his own blade up in time. Thorgil's answer to being tackled and choked is to push his fingers into Wulf's eye; when that does not loosen the grip, he shoves clear and swims off. On the farm he is rated second only to Snake, and given what Snake needed to bring down one dying slave, that gap is thin.

7. Askeladd: the fighter you cannot plan around

This placement will annoy people: Askeladd loses cleanly to Thors, and Thorkell would fold him in half. What he has instead is a decade of keeping a hundred murderers in line and an unbroken record against Thorfinn, who attacked him relentlessly and never landed the kill. His swordsmanship is pure economy: the shortest route to a result he has already chosen. His finest violence involves no duel at all: assassinating King Sweyn while playing the madman, then arranging his own death at Canute's hand so Denmark would leave his mother's Wales alone. That is why he also sits on our list of the greatest anime villains.

8. Bjorn: rage with the brakes cut

Bjorn is Askeladd's second in command and the series' one textbook berserker. He eats a mushroom that switches off pain and hesitation, and for the minutes that follow ordinary men cannot put him down. The cost is his judgement, and afterwards his body, and Thors sent him flying with a single punch anyway. His last fight, a duel with Askeladd that turns out to be a conversation about friendship, belongs on any list of the saddest anime moments.

9. Gardar: the most dangerous dying man in the story

Gardar was a farmer until a war over an iron deposit called the men of his Swedish village away. Raiders hit it while they were gone: his wife Arnheid was sold into slavery and their infant son killed. Gardar ended up a slave himself, killed his master Kjallakr along with Kjallakr's sons and walked out. Snake ran him down, wounded him and had him roped up at Ketil's farm, which is the only reason he is not higher. Even then, half starved and bleeding, he bit through a guard's throat, got Arnheid to cut the ropes and killed the rest of the detail on his way out. He dies of those wounds shortly after.

10. Wulf: the man who trains the king

Wulf is Canute's head thegn and his battle instructor. He is the only man on that field quick enough to stop Thorgil mid-kill, and he does it by giving up his own weapon, hurling his sword through Thorgil's wrist and then tackling him. He carries on strangling Thorgil while his eye is being pushed out of its socket. He takes the last slot because season 2 keeps quietly showing him competent while everyone around him panics.

Who missed the cut, and why

Iron Fist Ketil is the trap. The farm owner's entire legend belongs to somebody else: the real Iron Fist was the warrior who trained Snake, and Ketil admits to Arnheid that he invented the reputation because nobody respects a coward who wants a quiet life. His younger son Olmar wants the warrior's life badly, botches his thegn trial, then kills one of Canute's men by sheer fluke when they goad him about it, which is what starts the war on the farm. Floki commands Jomsvikings and has Thors killed by proxy rather than face him. Hild is the interesting omission, and she is manga only. Introduced in the Eastern Expedition arc, she is a hunter and self-taught engineer who worked out a crossbow's mechanism by eye and built her own quick-reloading version, then holds Thorfinn at the point of it once she learns he killed her father. She stays off a strength ranking because the format rewards close-quarters winners, and her design is to never be in one.

Power without a sword

Canute would lose a duel to half the names above and it barely matters. He takes a kingdom, wins wars by deciding where other people's armies stand, and the one time somebody reaches him personally he needs Wulf to survive it. He is also the man who ends Thorfinn's slavery, by dropping his claim on the farm rather than winning anything. Leif Erikson never wins a fight in his life and still spends sixteen years searching for Thorfinn, then offers Ketil any price he names for him. That inversion is much of why Vinland Saga lands on lists of the best anime of all time and gets recommended alongside anime like Attack on Titan. The full cast is in our Vinland Saga characters guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the strongest character in Vinland Saga?

Thors Snorresson, the Jomsviking commander nicknamed the Troll of Jom. He beat the crew Askeladd sent at him barehanded without killing any of them, then won their duel. In 987 he had already knocked out an axe-armed Thorkell without drawing a blade, and Thorkell says Thors is the only man who was ever stronger than him.

Is Thorkell stronger than Thors?

No. Thorkell is stronger than everyone else in the series, but he served alongside Thors in the Jomsvikings and says openly that Thors was the better warrior. Thors had been out of the fighting life for fifteen years and still dismantled a raiding crew barehanded.

Did Thorfinn ever beat Thorkell?

Yes, in their second duel during the war arc. Thorfinn took one of Thorkell's eyes, and Thorkell declared him the winner and ordered his men not to kill him; soldiers around Prince Canute took to calling him Thorfinn Karlsefni, "the Promising". Their first fight on London Bridge went the other way: Thorfinn cut off two of Thorkell's fingers, then escaped into the Thames with broken ribs.

Is Vinland Saga Season 3 confirmed?

Not as of September 2026. No studio, staff or release window has been officially announced, and Anime News Network's encyclopedia lists no sequel. Makoto Yukimura addressed the rumours himself in January 2026, saying word of a third season in production had not reached him. The manga finished in July 2025, so the source material is complete whenever a season 3 is greenlit.

Where does the manga carry on after the anime's second season?

Season 2 adapts the Slave Arc, chapters 55 to 99, and its finale steps into chapter 100 with Thorfinn back in Iceland. The manga continues through the Eastern Expedition arc and then the Vinland arc, ending at chapter 220 on 25 July 2025 across 29 volumes.

Which strong characters has the anime not shown yet?

Garm is the main one: a young mercenary with a spear that splits in two, hired to kill Thorfinn and quick enough to trade blows with Thorkell. Hild and her crossbow are manga only too, as is the Jomsviking leadership that Thorfinn and Thorkell turn on together.