Berserker: the Morgan Rogers Archetype

Théoden, son of Thengel, King of Rohan and Lord of the Mark, sits atop his castle and smirks. "No army has ever breached the Deeping Wall," he says, "or set foot inside the Hornburg." Rain patters against his armour. Below him, an endless stretch of roiling black comes onwards; the bowels of Isengard have emptied and spit out ten thousand devilish soldiers in wicked, flanged armour, and they've come to throw themselves pointlessly against the walls of his people's bastion, the legendary castle of Helm's Deep.

And so it begins. Théoden watches his pitiful group of defenders repel the monstrous assault and smirks again. "Is this it?" he says. "Is this all you can conjure, Saruman?" Atop the Deeping Wall, an impenetrable stretch of ancient stone, a ranger called Aragorn leads the defense. It's holding. He and his lithe blonde friend, the elf Legolas, throw ladders and attackers off the wall as soon as they summit, send them crashing back into the endless sea of flesh. More enemies stream forwards in their thousands, but Aragorn and Legolas could do this all night, and the Deeping Wall has never been breached, and cannot be breached.

Then he spots it. Out there in the dark, amongst the clattering armour and the slick mud and the rain that falls in sheets, Aragorn sees a spattering of light. A burning torch, like a giant sparkler, moves through the crowd, and the crowd parts to let it. Holding this torch is a big, muscled creature, an orc bred for one purpose. It sprints at the Deeping Wall.

Aragorn cries to his friend. "Bring him down, Legolas!" The elf shoots the orc, but it just twitches under the impact of the arrow, and keeps coming. "Kill him!" Another arrow, another twitch, and the orc keeps coming because it was built for this, put in this exact place by a tactician who spotted a weakness in the Deeping Wall nobody else had ever thought to exploit, a little drain in its centre which is now packed with flammable explosives - and this orc was built to go berserk, to be filled with arrows and keep going, keep going, sprint at the impassable defenses until the torch strikes a spark and the unbreachable is breached.

"Kill him!" Aragorn screams, desperate now, and a third arrow strikes the berserker, and then the Deeping Wall explodes.

"A host of dark shapes poured in. 'Devilry of Saruman!' cried Aragorn. 'They have crept in the culvert again, while we talked, and they have lit the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet.'"

Morgan Rogers is having quite the season. Aston Villa sputtered into the early challenges of 2025/26; they failed to score entirely in the first 360 full minutes and by the time they did, in a tepid 1-1 draw with ten-man Sunderland A.F.C, they'd gathered three points from the opening five games. Mention of a title challenge would've been met with a hearty guffaw.

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