Just a couple links from me tonight.
I just got my membership card today from the Friends of the Viking Ship, the society devoted to saving and preserving The Viking, the replica of the Gokstad ship that was sailed from Norway to America for the Columbia Exposition in in Chicago, in 1893. Nowadays replica Viking ships are fairly commonplace, but this was the very first, and no one was entirely sure it could even be done.
A few of you are Viking aficionados, so I thought I’d just mention that they’re always looking for support. It’s far from the most important cause in this sad old world, but it would be a mournful thing to be told the old ship has crumbled with no one to care.
Speaking of this sad old world, the always thoughtful Theodore Dalrymple has a profound article up at City Journal. It’s called Modernity’s Uninvited Guest. The subject is theodicy (the question of how a good God could create a world full of evil), and he relates it to the utopian fantasies of the Left, by way of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 18th Century critique of a book of theology.
The superficiality of this argument requires, from a modern standpoint, little commentary. But even Doctor Johnson—a man with a delicate sense of personal imperfection who once stood several hours bareheaded in the rain in the Uttoxeter marketplace, in penance for having been disrespectful a half-century earlier to his father, who had run a bookstall there—did not criticize it strongly. Both he and Jenyns were a world away from our modern concerns about evil. Accustomed to our comforts and our delicate sensibilities, we would find their world unbelievably harsh; yet their notion of evil strikes us as naive and almost innocent. Despite the violence of Johnson’s review of Jenyns, the two men agreed more than they differed. They lived on the cusp of the Enlightenment but were both, at least in their treatment of evil, pre-Enlightenment in outlook. The burning question for them was not “Why do men behave evilly?” but “Why is there evil at all?”
That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow—scandal and passion among Norwegian pioneers!
Thanks for mentioning this. During the 1893 world’s fair, Norway also contributed the “stave church” or Norway Building which is now in Little Norway in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, a beautiful place! There is so much history connected to this ship that it should almost be considered a duty for those who are passionate about this part of our heritage to learn more and support it’s maintenance until a more permanent home in a worthy, solid and accommodating structure can be found.
Baard is the son of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger, author of Viking Norway, which I reviewed here.