Dark Ages

The Dark Ages is the metaphor Lars Mikkelsen uses to describe what he sees as the survival of archaic power relations in the present. In his conversation with Victoria Bergman, the phrase links the historical treatment of women as property to contemporary attitudes toward rape, then extends the argument to adults’ treatment of children. The scene makes the term less a label for a past period than an accusation about what has not changed: laws and customs may shift, while assumptions about who has authority over another person persist.

The phrase in conversation

Mikkelsen introduces the idea after Victoria asks why he thinks a troubling state of affairs continues. He smiles warily and notices that she seems to be questioning him, but answers rather than retreating from the exchange. His claim that society remains in the Dark Ages is therefore presented as an argument he is prepared to explain, not as an unexplained slogan. He asks whether Victoria has heard of bride kidnapping; she shakes her head, leaving him to set out the historical example himself.

The scene gives the metaphor a conversational progression. Mikkelsen starts with a practice Victoria does not know, explains the power it gave men, and then traces what he considers its modern residue. The movement from question to example to contemporary implication makes the term a framework for interpreting present conduct. It also shows Victoria encountering a view that she had not expected to hear from a man working as a police officer: his explanation surprises her, and she had never imagined that a man could think in these terms.

Women, law, and ownership

Mikkelsen describes bride kidnapping as a means by which men could force marriage through abduction and sexual assault. In his account, the woman’s exploitation then constrained her choices, while the man gained rights over her property. The point of the example is not simply that a woman was harmed; it is that the surrounding social order treated her consent and independent interests as subordinate to male authority.

He connects that arrangement to the historical treatment of rape as a property offense rather than a crime against the woman herself. As he explains it, legal protections were organized around a man’s rights to what he regarded as valuable sexual property, whether by arranging the woman’s marriage or keeping her for his own use. The woman had no meaningful say in what happened to her. Mikkelsen’s account thus makes ownership the connective idea between forced marriage, sexual violence, and law: the woman is treated as an object whose fate men decide.

He then turns from the historical example to familiar ways of discrediting victims. A woman may be said to have refused but secretly meant assent, to have dressed provocatively, or to seek revenge on the man. Mikkelsen presents these explanations as traces of the older premise that her words and interests can be overridden. The contrast between the apparent modernity of such excuses and the property logic he identifies is what gives his use of the Dark Ages its force. The novel presents this as his diagnosis of persistent attitudes, rather than as a separate historical survey.

Children and adult authority

Mikkelsen extends his argument beyond gender. He concludes that the medieval attitude toward children also persists: adults continue to regard children as their property, to punish them, and to raise them according to rules adults make for themselves. The parallel is structural. In both cases, a person with less power is treated as belonging to someone with greater authority, and that authority is allowed to determine the weaker person’s fate.

This extension broadens the metaphor from a critique of rape attitudes into a critique of adult power over children. Mikkelsen does not describe a particular child or case in this exchange; instead, he names a general attitude and the practices through which it is expressed. His compressed conclusion also changes the scale of the conversation. What began with Victoria asking about one social problem becomes a claim about how adults understand their rights over other people, especially those with little ability to refuse or make their own rules.

Victoria’s response and the metaphor’s significance

After setting out his reasoning, Mikkelsen asks Victoria whether she is satisfied with his answer. The question closes the explanation but also returns the exchange to its immediate relationship: he has recognized that she is scrutinizing him and invites her judgment. Victoria finds him genuine and passionate about his work. She still hates cops, but he does not behave like one. Her reaction records a limited shift in how she reads him, not a resolution of her distrust.

The Dark Ages metaphor matters here because it joins social analysis to characterization. Mikkelsen’s language makes present-day victim-blaming and adult control legible as continuations of an older logic of ownership, while his willingness to articulate that critique complicates Victoria’s expectation of a police officer. The scene does not establish that the past has literally returned. Instead, it uses his analogy to insist that supposedly obsolete ideas remain active when women’s refusals are discounted or children are treated as possessions. Victoria’s surprise marks the force of that claim: the unsettling part is not only what Mikkelsen says about history, but that she had not imagined he would say it.