Category Archives: Writing

Who was Vigleik Arnesson?

Work continues apace on The Baldur Game. I think I’m nearing the end of my initial drafts. Once I’ve finished this current red-pen revision, I plan to give it one more personal read-through, and then send it to some readers for comments. After that, I expect to do one more revision, and then move into the publication process. So I think that light up ahead may be the end of the tunnel, not just phosphors in my eye.

The tough part about nailing a large construction together is that you find out where you measured wrong. An intriguing little irregularity has appeared. I think I can describe it in vague enough terms not to spoil it for you.

If you read King of Rogaland (and of course you have. You haven’t left a review yet, though, have you? Not that I want to nag…), you may recall the wedding of Ragnhild Erlingsdatter (my hero’s daughter) to Thorberg Arnesson, a son of an important Norwegian family.

Okay, so I set that up. Thorberg will play a major role in The Baldur Game. So far, so good.

But in the saga accounts of the events I’m describing now, there’s another character named Vigleik Arnesson. He doesn’t actually appear on stage in my narrative, but an action he performs has important consequences. And I’ve been trying to figure out who this Vigleik Arnesson was. Snorri Sturlusson never tells us. One would imagine he was a brother to Thorberg, but I’ve seen several lists of those brothers, and Vigleik never appears.

I searched extensively online, not only in English-language but in Norwegian search engines. I found one notation on a Norwegian site that said Vigleik Arnesson was Erling’s nephew. But I couldn’t find out how that connection worked. Who were his parents?

Here’s where my scholarly sins caught up with me. In actual history, I learned at last, two of Erling’s daughters were married to Arnesson brothers – one to Thorberg (as I chronicled), but another to his older brother Arne. Vigleik was this Arne’s son. I had missed the Arne Arnesson connection completely. And the circumstances I set up in King of Rogaland left no room for that marriage. It has to have happened before the Thorberg-Ragnhild wedding, for various reasons, but I made it clear that (in my book) there’d been no previous alliances.

Now if I were Stephen Hunter, this would be no problem. He simply ignores any contradictions that pop up between various volumes of his Earl Swagger series. But I can’t do that. If you find contradictions in my Erling books (no doubt there are some), they’re due to sheer inadvertence. So I have to work this problem out in terms of my fictional world.

I think what I’ll have to do is wrest Vigleik from the bosom of his true family, and give him some other kind of pedigree. Perhaps I’ll marry his mother to some other Arne from some other family. It’s not that uncommon a name. I’m thinking about it.

When a man undertakes to write an epic, he takes on a vainglorious, hubristic task. He will make radical mistakes, demanding radical remedies.

All for about three paragraphs in the final book.

Nidaros Cathedral

So, I’m working away at ‘The Baldur Game,’ which I think is going to be a pretty good book. Better than pretty good, to be honest. Not that I’m unprejudiced. But this one’s a genuine epic — broad canvas, big action, historical figures, battles and obsession. The Viking book I always wanted to write, I think.

So, above, a little video of a tour of Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. This is where King (Saint) Olaf, a major character in this book, was buried. I believe his bones are still in there somewhere, but nobody’s sure exactly where (supposedly they were hidden to keep them from relic smashers during the Reformation).

I visited there once, briefly. It was part of a tour in connection with one of the cruises I lectured on. By good luck, they were doing a medieval fair in the Bishop’s Palace area that day. Fun to see.

According to my mother, my great-grandfather, her mother’s father, worked on the cathedral restoration in the 1880s. He came from a farm not far away.

Have a good weekend. My book is coming — possess your souls in patience.

Jordan Peterson and Andrew Klavan, on stories

I watched this video discussion yesterday, and it had me ready to stand up and cheer. I don’t agree with either of these men entirely (though I respect both immensely), but the essence of their theme is exactly what I’ve had on my mind recently.

In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis remarks that, although he was an atheist as a young man, he found — to his annoyance — that all the writers who really spoke to him believed in God. I think most of the real creativity in art today comes, to some extent, from our side. Some of the best artists don’t even know they’re on the Road yet, but they are.

3 things: Chapel, Mano, and red ink

Three items for you tonight. The video above, in case you care to view it, is my sermon last Thursday in the chapel of the Free Lutheran Bible College and Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. I note that it times out at 17 minutes, 57 seconds. The time frame they allotted me was 18 minutes. I did no padding or cutting on the sermon – it was the right length pretty much out of the chute. This is something I seem to have been born able to do, writing to a set time. I find it wholly inexplicable. Anybody know a politician who needs a speech writer? I work cheap. Preferably a conservative; I hate being a greater hypocrite than I already am.

Secondly, our friend Dave Lull, ever on the watch for references to the late author D. Keith Mano, for whom I cherish a fondness, sent me the link to this piece from National Review. An excerpt:

Keith was soon established within our senior ranks and was included in the periodic “off-sites,” where vexed NR policies were (endlessly) debated and (occasionally) resolved. He and I would sit together, two high-school sophomores in the back row of an algebra class, with D. Keith providing sotto voce commentary on the otherwise tedious proceedings. On one occasion I lost it and laughed out loud. NR publisher William Rusher, who on solemn occasions made himself available for hall-monitor duty, barked at us from across the room, “Perhaps Freeman and Mano would care to share that witticism with the rest of the group.” (We did not care to share it. It was about Rusher.)

Thirdly: Report from the writing front: I’m in the process of doing a paper revision on The Baldur Game. It’s well known that I’ve been almost entirely assimilated by the digital Borg; I read and write mostly electronically. Yet I retain a semi-superstitious conviction that I ought to do at least one revision per book in red pen on printed sheets. That’s what I’m doing right now.

And you know what? It does seem to be different on paper. I almost feel as if I’ve re-written the book by hand, in red ink. (Some of it’s even almost legible.)

I had thought the polishing stage was almost complete on this thing. I was surprised find so much substandard writing all of a sudden, like shining ultraviolet light on a crime scene. I’ve never noticed any difference in the reading experience between paper books and my Kindle. Yet revision, somehow, seems to be different.

‘If you don’t tell them a story…”

Unsplash license, in collaboration with Getty Images.

[The following is the text of the sermon I delivered at the chapel at the Free Lutheran Bible College/Seminary this past Thursday,]

And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’” (Luke 8: 9-10, ESV)

Dr. Sebastian Gorka tells a story about when he was writing his book, Defeating Jihad. When he’d finished it, he showed it to his wife and asked her what she thought of it. As a writer myself, I know what he wanted to hear. He wanted her to tell him it was the most wonderful book she’d ever read, and it would certainly be a bestseller and change the world.

But she didn’t say that. What she did was ask, “Is that all there is?”

He said yes. Here were his facts and his arguments. What was there left to say?

She told him, “You need to tell a story. Nobody will listen to you if you don’t tell them a story.”

So he went back to his word processor and he wrote an introduction. In that introduction, he told the story of a young man who’d been in the underground in Communist Hungary, back in the days of the Soviet Union. He was betrayed by the famous English traitor Kim Philby, and arrested by the government. Imprisoned and tortured.

Then, in 1956, the Hungarians staged an uprising. The man was released from prison, but he knew the Communists were coming back. He made plans to escape to the west. When he left, he took a friend’s 17-year-old daughter with him, at that friend’s request. The man wanted his daughter to live in the free world. They made the very dangerous journey across the border, and ended up in England. Later he married the girl, and they were Dr. Gorka’s parents. He says that whenever people talk to him about the book, they never want to talk about the main text. They ask him about that story.

“Nobody will listen to you if you don’t tell them a story.”

If God had asked my advice, back when He was planning how He’d reveal Himself to Mankind through a book, I’d have told Him to give us a book of Systematic Theology. You start out with a chapter on Epistemology – the science of how we know things. Then I’d suggest a chapter on Trinitarian Theology. And a chapter on the Incarnation. A chapter on Soteriology, the theology of salvation. At the end, a chapter on Eschatology, the Last Things. Everything organized, like the books I used to stock up in the bookstore for seminary classes. I’d want it laid out neatly, with headings and subheadings. Charts and bullet points would be nice, too. Think of all the theological arguments we’d be spared!

But for some reason – and theologians marvel at it to this day – God did not consult me on the subject.

Continue reading ‘If you don’t tell them a story…”

Had the Crew Dealt in Books They Would Have Gone Broke

An original limerick for your weekend.

A ship with a creative crew
would trade in Newport and ports new
their haphazard wares,
their slapdash and spares,
for the loan on their ship had come due.

Live within your means, readers, and stay ahead of any judicious loans you take out. And now, on with the links.

2023 Books: Bookseller and podcaster David Kern offers “eight novels published in 2023 that I’ve been handing to people because they remind me why I love novels in the first place.”

And more recommendations, this time of the spy-thriller nature from John Wilson—”more than enough regional and global conflicts to keep spies and spymasters busy and readers turning the pages.”

Writing in the Woods: The writing life can take many forms, like when a friend lets you live in a cottage on their land for a summer.

Writing about Magic: During the Renaissance, the practice of and the writing about magic produced mixed results. “Renaissance magicians were often bookish.” Sounds like Mr. Norrell.

Photo by Hector John Periquin on Unsplash

Writing report: Teasing my audience

Photo credit: Towfiqu barbhuia, Unsplash license.

I wish I’d started getting up early to write years ago. This discipline, which I adopted last year, has borne genuine fruit in steady, consistent progress on the book I’m working on, to be called The Baldur Game. This, in case you’re new here, will be the seventh and final (in six volumes) entry of my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson.

Of course, up until a few years ago, I got up at about that same time (6:30 a.m., if you must know) to get ready for my paying job. So I’d have had to rise around 4:00 a.m. to write in the early mornings, and I’m bloody well not going to do that.

So never mind.

I’ve said this before, but I really like this book. If it’s my nunc dimittis, my Simeon song, the final work of my life, I’d be just fine with that. Looking ahead, I have no idea what I’ll write next. I took a cooling off break from revising a few weeks back, and tinkered with a book I started long ago, and got stuck on. I still made no progress at all. I’ve got a character I like and a setting that intrigues me. But I can’t think of a problem to set for the guy. I just seem to send in one rabbit after another, to see if he’ll chase one, but he’s not interested. Raymond Chandler had a formula from which I’ve profited many times – “When in doubt, send in a couple guys with guns.” But in this story I’ll soon have a room full of (metaphorical) guys with guns, and none of them seems to have any idea what to do with them. I think some of them might be ATF.

But I’m happy with The Baldur Game. Last year, when I was lecturing to a group, somebody asked if I could bring back a character they liked from an earlier book. I had assumed that character dead, but on examination of the story I discovered that no body was ever actually found (you think I remember everything I ever wrote? At my age?). So I did bring that character back, and they turned out to serve an excellent purpose in the plot.

I also decided to do something I’d vowed not to do from the beginning, because it just rounds the saga out, and I figured a way to use it thematically, and I just think I owe it to my fans.

Am I teasing you now? Trying to raise expectations?

I guess I probably am.

‘What About the Vikings?’

Me playing Viking in Norway, at the Hafrsfjord Festival in 2022, with the president of the Karmoy Viking Club.

The thought has been nagging at me of late that my personal author’s page, www.larswalker.com, hasn’t been updated much over the years, except for announcements of new book releases.

I felt particularly guilty about my “Vikings” page, since it contains an essay on my historical views which – while I haven’t changed those views much – has not kept up with trends in scholarship and popular opinion. I don’t lose much sleep over it, as I’ve always found most trends and popular opinions laughable. Still, I’ve neglected my readers.

So I offer the following update, which I’ll ask my revered webmaster to add to the old one:

WHAT ABOUT VIKINGS?

I included a short essay on the Vikings in this space when this site was first established. But the world moves on, and I find that piece (you can find it below this one) no longer addresses the current situation. My views have changed very little, but I think I need to explain them in a new light.

When I wrote the original essay, back before the turn of the century, the prevailing scholarly view of the Vikings (a view considered “revisionist” at the time) was that the violence of Viking culture had been exaggerated by monkish scribes, “prejudiced” because Vikings kept burning down their homes and enslaving or killing them (which strikes me, personally, as a reasonable excuse for a prejudice). The prevailing view in the late 20th Century was that the Vikings (viewed as a culture, rather than as participants in an activity, which was the original sense of the word) were primarily involved in trade, and that their occasional ventures into raiding (mostly in response to the inflexible attitudes of the vile Christians) were relatively rare and reasonably justified.

I thought this view nonsense. I noted that the purveyors of this theory tended to gloss over the fact that the Vikings’ first and foremost item of trade, at least in the first centuries, was human slaves. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t consider the slave trade a peaceful occupation.

But the other day I watched, for the second time, Robert Eggers’ 2022 film, “The Northman.” I can only conclude, based on that movie, that I’ve won the “peaceful Vikings” argument completely. Perhaps I’ve won it too well. Eggers’ Viking culture is thoroughly violent and brutal. Force is all that matters there, and the individual must either possess power or submit to it.

This view strikes me as just as unbalanced as the old one. It overlooks (as Prof. Jackson Crawford has noted) the importance in Viking culture of being a “drengr,” a man of honor and character. In the movie, for instance, the ball game of “knattleikr” is played by thralls (slaves), and fatalities are considered trivial, since thralls are cheap (note: they were not cheap). In the Icelandic sagas, however, free men play knattleikr themselves, in order to showcase their courage and skill.

This narrow view also overlooks the Vikings’ democratic tradition (emphasized in Viking Legacy, the book by Torgrim Titlestad which I translated). The Vikings in fact mistrusted raw power, and mitigated it through limiting their kings under the law, subjecting royal decisions to the “Thing” assemblies of free men. Viking society was far from egalitarian, but they revered law, cherishing it as fundamental to a functional society. They cared, in their own way, about freedom – for themselves, anyway. (This is the human norm, by the way – the concept of the brotherhood of Man came to us from Christianity, and has been internalized slowly, even among Christians.)

Why this radical change in popular views of the Viking Age? I think it rises from the political climate. Scholarly opinion in our time is the obsequious servant of politics. (Perhaps it always has been. The current academic fascination with intersectional power may be plain projection.)

For most of my lifetime, the North Star, the guiding principle, of this Political/Scholarly-Industrial Complex has been contempt for Western Civilization. When Vikings were viewed as outsiders to that civilization, scholars had to regard them positively. Now that they have come to be viewed, sometimes, as insiders, the original Dead White Males, they can be despised – when convenient.

The truth of the Vikings is that they were like everyone else. They lived the best way they knew how, according to their lights. (Snorri Sturlusson understood this in the 13th Century. Moderns are often less sophisticated.)

In my view, one major point that’s generally overlooked in our discussions of the Vikings is that the Viking Age was the Scandinavian Age of Conversion. When the Vikings first hit Lindisfarne in 793 AD, they were mostly heathen (though missionary activity had probably begun even then). By the (generally accepted) end of the Viking Era – the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 – the Danes and Norwegians were solidly Christian and the Swedes not far behind. One of the chief reasons for the end of Viking activity was a nascent internalization by Scandinavians of the Christian ethic – an ethic they still haven’t entirely embraced – like everyone else.

There’s another point too. That point – a major one, though intellectually disreputable – is the element of fun. When I fell in love with the Vikings as a boy, it was the image of a dragon ship under sail, headed off to adventure, that gripped me. An idea formed in my mind of a bold hero at the prow of such a ship, a free man sailing out to test his courage and seize his fortune. That image – in time – coupled with the historical figure of Erling Skjalgsson and gave birth to my series of historical fantasy novels, The Year of the Warrior, West Oversea, Hailstone Mountain, The Elder King, King of Rogaland, and The Baldur Game.

Robert Eggers’ movie contains not one moment of that kind of fun. I hope my Erling books do a better job.

A skald’s reward

Egil Skallagrimsson, from a 17th Century Icelandic manuscript.

Egil sat down and put his shield at his feet. He was wearing a helmet and laid his sword across his knees, and now and again he would draw it half-way out of the scabbard, then thrust it back in. He sat upright, but with his head bowed low…. He wrinkled one eyebrow right down onto his cheek and raised the other up to the roots of his hair…. He refused to drink even when served, but just raised and lowered his eyebrows in turn.

King Athelstan was sitting in the high seat, with his sword laid across his knees too. And after they had been sitting there like that for a while, the king unsheathed his sword, took a fine, large ring from his arm and slipped it over the point of the sword, then stood up and handed it over the fire to Egil. Egil stood up, drew his sword and walked out onto the floor. He put his sword through the ring and pulled it towards him, then went back to his place. The king sat down in his high seat. When Egil sat down, he drew the ring onto his arm, and his brow went back to normal. He put down his sword and helmet and took the drinking horn that was served to him, and finished it. Then he spoke a verse….

The passage above comes from the Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson (from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders). It’s a rather famous scene, in which we get to observe some of the nuances of the ancient poet-king dynamic. Egil is considered the greatest poet (skald) in the world, and he’s well aware of it. Even at the court of Athelstan the Great of England, one of a skald’s A-list gigs, he feels entitled to a certain level of appreciation. At this point he doesn’t feel he’s been getting it, and his passive-aggressive show produces a mollifying response from the great king. Egil is a prima donna, and prima donnas must have their due.

All of this is only vaguely connected with my theme tonight, but it came to my mind as an illustration. My own case is that I don’t feel unrewarded. I feel rewarded in the very best way.

It came to me during my morning writing session today. There are few satisfactions in life to match that of reading something you’ve composed and being able to say, “You know, that’s pretty good. That’s what I’d like to read in a book myself.”

And I thought, what rewards do I have as a author? There’s the pleasure of seeing my work published (though I have to admit there’s less satisfaction in viewing an e-book than in holding a genuine printed volume. But I’ve had that pleasure too). There’s money – though my books have brought little of that. There’s fame – which has eluded me thus far. Has the king withheld my gold ring?

No, I realized. The work itself is my best reward. I know I’m writing this book for myself when I was twelve years old, desperately longing for a good Viking novel to read. And I think I’m getting the job done. No amount of money could buy that satisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take money and fame if they’re offered. But in a pinch this is enough.

The Long Serpent reaches metaphorical port

Above, the folk song “Ormen Lange (The Long Serpent). I think I’ve posted versions of this song a couple times previously, but in each case they were more authentic than this one. I believe the song itself derives from a Faroese chain dance song, and the original song structure is a little foreign to Americans. This version was recorded some years back by a Norwegian folk group called the Wanderers, who dumbed it down a little, making it something I personally enjoy a little more.

And why do I post yet another version of a song I’ve already bored you with (at least) twice? Because it’s about King Olaf Trygvesson and his long ship, and he was Erling Skjalgsson’s brother-in-law, and this post is my public announcement that this past Saturday, I completed my (apparent) life’s work. At least in first draft. I finished the job of getting the essential story of The Baldur Game all down on paper. Or screen. In written form, in any case. There’s lots of revising and reviewing and rewriting to do yet, but the story is tentatively finished. I know how it comes out. I’ve typed END at the end.

The author is generally the last to know whether a story is any good, of course. But I’m pleased. This is, I think, the book I always wanted to write.

If I have not created deathless art, I have at least realized my delusion, like a mad scientist in a B movie.