Of the Books Written on Lincoln There Shall Be No End

“There are so many Lincoln geeks that buy everything new that comes out,” Cathy Langer, the lead book buyer at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, tells Stephanie Cohen of the Wall Street Journal. Cohen goes on to report Langer’s claim “that in her years as a buyer, she has rarely turned down a title about the 16th president.” One such book is Killing Lincoln, which has sold over two million since its release a year ago September. Cohen states some 16,000 books have been written about President Abraham Lincoln, and there’s more to come.

To illustrate the volume of existing Lincoln works, the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington created a three-story, 34-foot tower sculpture out of Lincoln titles, meant to “symbolize that the last word about this great man will never be written,” according to the center.

Perhaps I should start writing a series of short volumes on the ignored presidents, like Polk, Hayes, Tyler, and Garfield. I could call them Thrilling Histories, e.g. The Thrilling History of James K. Polk. Or maybe they should be called the Presidential Insider’s Guides. Or maybe the What You Didn’t Learn series. (via Frank Wilson)

I’m going to Norway… Michigan!



Rasmus B. Anderson

Happy Sequence Day. I don’t know whether anyone else calls it that, but what do you call a day when month, day, and year are in sequence (ten-eleven-twelve)? This doesn’t work if you’re in Europe, of course, where they practice a far more logical dating system that proceeds from smaller to larger – day, month, year. I’d defend the American system with blustering chauvinism and outrage, except that I can’t actually think of an argument for it.

I won’t be posting again until Monday, Lord willing. Tomorrow I’m on the road to Norway, Michigan for the Leif Eriksson festival again, riding along with Ragnar and his wife. Early departure. No doubt I will not sleep tonight.

There’s a weird criss-cross sort of thing going on with this event. Leif Eriksson Day is actually Oct. 9, but we’re celebrating it on the weekend of the 12th, which is actually Columbus Day. Rasmus B. Anderson and his co-conspirators, who invented the Leif celebration, purposely located it a few days before the 12th to steal a march on the Italians. But they celebrated on Monday.

I heard a lecture on Anderson during the Chicago Vinland seminar a couple years back. A Norwegian-American author, educator, and diplomat, he worked tirelessly to raise consciousness of Leif Eriksson, and spearheaded the effort to get Oct. 9 made a national holiday, which only happened long after his death.

Oddly for a Norwegian-American (cough, cough), Anderson had some difficulty getting along with other people, eventually getting himself shunned by pretty much all his hyphenated countrymen. So he transferred his enthusiasm to Iceland, which worked even better for the Leif Eriksson stuff, because Leif was actually born there. Probably.

Leif Eriksson Day is an odd festival in any case. The weakness of the argument for Leif’s importance, historically, was always his relative unimportance. Leif came and went almost without leaving a trace. Columbus came and completely redecorated the place.

But nowadays Leif enthusiasts make that into a virtue! “Look at us! We’re not like those other Europeans! We don’t do anything! It’s as if we were never here!”

Anyway, have a good weekend.

Two kinds of atrocity: an ethical thought experiment

Here’s what I’m doing. I’m thinking “on paper” here. Trying to work out a moral equation. If my conclusion satisfies me, and if your comments don’t demolish it, I’ll probably cross-post it over at Mere Comments.

How many times have you gotten into the Body Count argument? You know what I mean. Somebody brings up the tired canard that “most wars are caused by religion,” or “religion has killed more people than any other cause.”

It’s good to note that, at least according to one study, that’s simply not true.

And when they bring up the Spanish Inquisition (you know they will), the most efficient answer is to point out that it took the Inquisition nearly a century and a half to kill 3-5,000 people while the atheistic Reign of Terror under the French Revolution murdered about 40,000 in less than a year.

Still, at least for me, that’s not entirely satisfactory. Saying, “We’re not as bad as you guys,” isn’t quite enough when you’re talking about killing people in the name of Christ, whether in the Inquisition, or during the Crusades, or under a pogrom. The deeper problem, in my view, is how to think about Christians who act like the worst kind of atheists (for of course most atheists are perfectly decent people), and how to judge their acts.

It seems to me that, from a moral point of view, there are two kinds of atrocity. One is the utilitarian atrocity, which is hideously evil. The other is the “spiritual” atrocity, which is infinitely worse—but only in one sense. Continue reading Two kinds of atrocity: an ethical thought experiment

Picking Up on an Author’s Worldview

Lavonne Neff says that despite the slow burn on J.K. Rowling’s new novel, The Casual Vacancy, the story builds out of what she believes is a “profoundly biblical worldview.” The story is one of a small English town, clearly described as post-Christian, and when the most Christian man around dies, a large body of characters step up to reveal themselves as the hypocrites they are. Neff says the story is bleak, but possibly noteworthy.

Leif Eriksson: Not a man on a mission



A very bad old picture of Leif Eriksson, posted here for your derision.



Today, as you’ve doubtless gathered from all the parades and celebrations in your neighborhood, is Leif Eriksson Day in the United States. Its date was chosen, not to commemorate the actual calendar date of Leif’s landing in Newfoundland (a friend tells me it seems to have happened in September on the basis of internal evidence in the saga), but in order to sneak in a couple days before Columbus Day and steal some of the Genoan’s thunder. Which the international Italian Conspiracy managed to thwart this year by arranging to have Columbus Day officially celebrated yesterday.

One aspect of Leif’s story which you used to hear about a lot, but much less nowadays, is his efforts as a missionary. According to Eirik’s Saga, one of the two classic saga accounts of the Vinland (America) voyages, Leif spent time at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson in Norway, where the king “bestowed great honor on him” (note what I said about such Icelandic visits to the court in yesterday’s post), and asked him “Are you intending to sail to Greenland this summer?”

“Yes,” replied Leif, “if you approve.”

“I think it would be a good idea,” said the king. “You are to go there with a mission from me, to preach Christianity in Greenland.” (The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, trans. by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, 1965, Penguin Books.)

This Leif did, to the great annoyance of his father Erik the Red, because Thjodhild, Erik’s wife and Leif’s mother, refused to cohabit with her husband after her conversion (this is questionable behavior under canon law, I believe, as it directly contradicts the teaching of St. Paul. I’m sure Father Ailill would have advised her otherwise). In the 19th and 20th centuries, when Christianity was more popular than it is now, many Leif enthusiasts looked on his voyage to Vinland as an extension of this mission, making him the first missionary to America. However, the sagas say nothing of that, nor of any attempt on his part to preach the gospel to the Skraelings (Indians).

In any case, scholars today are pretty sure the Olaf Trygvesson mission never happened. The story seems to have been introduced into the saga manuscripts fairly late. Early sources say that Olaf converted “five lands” to Christianity, but later writings credit him with “six lands.” The sixth land is Greenland, which the earlier writers hadn’t heard about, probably because it never happened.

I don’t think many historians seriously doubt that Leif was a Christian himself. The family gossip about religious conflict in his family has the ring of truth to it, and archaeologists have excavated a small church at his farm that matches the saga description of one Thjodhild built. But he wasn’t a government employee.

If you’ve read my Viking novels, you know that that was the Viking way.

More Angels in Movies

Joel Miller, author of Lifted by Angels: The Presence and Power of Our Heavenly Guides and Guardians thinks now is a good time for Hollywood to make more movies with well-drawn angels in them. “Perhaps all this newfound interest in biblical stories and characters offers Hollywood a chance to do it right for a change. Forget sappy, romantic, and cute. In researching my new book, Lifted by Angels, I was struck by how overwhelmingly powerful and even frightening angels are.”

Hollywood doesn’t understand frighteningly awesome angels because they don’t believe in a frighteningly awesome God. They see God mostly like Odin from Marvel’s Thor, wouldn’t you say? But as Joel says, the industry based in Los Angeles needs to overcome their biases at least once.

When Was the Last Time You Were Called Ignorant?

Mark Liberman tells us, “When you read or hear in the mass media that ‘Only X% of Americans know Y’, don’t believe it without checking the references — it’s probably false even as a report of the survey statistics.” He cites a few sources and gives an incredible example of the answers marked wrong for an open-ended question about former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. (via Alan Jacobs)

On this point, here’s a survey that appears to be done the right way, asking clear questions about religious practice and affiliation. It concludes that though many say they pray every day and have other spiritual or religious habits or experiences, “One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.” I wonder how much of this is a popular resistance to labeling one’s beliefs either out of a selfish desire to appear smart (like the voter who says he is undecided because he wants to appear to give both sides a fair hearing) or a belief that one cannot claim a label while not accepting absolutely everything ever claimed by someone of that label.

Laxdaela Saga

One of the pleasures of owning a Kindle, for the Viking enthusiast, is the ability it gives you to own a whole saga library and carry it around with you in a small package. One of the sagas I keep snug in my device is the marvelous Laxdæla Saga. In preparation for my trip to Høstfest in Minot, I thought I’d re-read it, because it’s a remarkable work, full of points of interest.

I should have remembered this, but Laxdæla Saga includes a proverb we still use today: “…Trefill saw that better was one crow in the hand than two in the wood.” I don’t know if this is the source of the English saying, but it wouldn’t surprise me. There’s another proverb I like too, less well known: “The counsel of fools is the more dangerous, the more of them there are.”

Laxdæla is often called a woman’s saga, because the central character is a woman, and a lot of business centers on women’s clothing and ornaments. I guess many scholars think it was written by a woman, and I’ll admit that’s not out of the question.

That central female character is Gudrun Osvifsdatter, a woman of remarkable beauty and force of personality, who gets married several times—to almost every eligible man around except for the one she loves. Although, as you’d expect in a saga, the story starts a couple generations before her birth, and continues through her old age, it’s her tragic love for a man named Kjartan Olafsson that forms the center of the story (you may remember them and their family from a brief appearance in my novel West Oversea).

It might be called a love story, but it’s a love story in the old style, born in a world where romantic love was not considered the jewel of life and a justification for most any kind of behavior, but was instead seen as a sort of madness which interferes with the normal business (and peace) of the family and community. Continue reading Laxdaela Saga

University Teaching Can Be Torture

Language Professor Andrew Piper writes about university teaching: “I have seen some pretty shocking stuff. The record so far was one instructor who would rewrite his lecture notes on the board in illegible handwriting and read them aloud as he wrote while facing the board. Not only was he talking…really…slowly, he was facing the wrong way! The idea of knowledge ‘transfer’ in this case seems distorted beyond all recognition.”

BTW, Alan Jacobs has praised this writer, saying “*Book Was There* may be the single smartest thing I’ve read about how book history connects to book future. Seriously.” Read more praise about the book to which this blog is tied here.