Below, my lecture at Union University, Jackson, TN — in case you’ve been longing to spend an hour with me. It opens with a short introduction by none other than Dr. Hunter Baker.
I was a little disappointed that my PowerPoint slides are out of shot; on the other hand, I didn’t always synch them well (my remote clicker didn’t always get through for some reason).
Probably best for me not to comment on the short portion I’ve personally viewed. I’m generally incapable of objective self-assessment. So judge for yourself.
I’ve been going through Paul Gitsham’s DCI Warren Jones series, and frankly it’s getting harder to carry on. The books have always been a little dreary, but The Common Enemy is positively depressive.
In the fictional town of Middlesbury where Jones is Chief
Inspector, a “super-mosque” is scheduled to be built. There has been considerable
push-back from white supremacist groups. On a night when a far-right party had
scheduled a demonstration, police pulled protection away from an existing
mosque to keep the peace at the parade. Someone then set fire to the mosque,
and two people were left injured, close to death. On top of that, one of the
leaders of the racist party leading the march was found stabbed to death in an
alley.
Inspector Jones and his team (and superiors) have to walk on
eggshells as they try to untangle a snakes’ nest of hatred, fear, prejudice,
and paranoia. If they can’t find who set the fire, minorities will accuse them
of covering up for bigots. If they can’t solve the murder, far-right extremists
will make the man a martyr.
It all leads to a shocking climax.
The book was well-written, but it had few rewards for me. I
felt I’d fought my way through a lot of tension and unpleasantness, only to get
a punch in the gut at the end.
On top of that, although author Gitsham did a pretty good
job treating all his characters – including the slimy racists – as human beings
with individual stories, and indeed in spreading some of the guilt around, I
noticed that one group came off as utterly innocent and entirely made up of
victims. That was the Muslims. You can’t blame the author, I suppose. You’re
pretty much not allowed to allow for any sin within Islam, in modern
publishing.
He’d later learn that it was for show, that Ingrid had the same fears and insecurities that plague all of us, that part of the human condition is that all decent people think they are phonies and don’t belong at some point or another.
The same but different. That’s what Harlan Coben’s novels tend to be. All based on themes of the strength of love, and the danger of secrets. But each one very much its own story. That goes also for his new novel, Run Away, which I liked very much.
Simon Greene is a successful financial advisor. He becomes a YouTube sensation briefly, when he attacks a homeless man in New York’s Central Park. What all the people who liked and shared his video, commenting on how evil he was, didn’t know, was that he was trying to help his drug addict daughter, to save her from the homeless man, who had gotten her hooked in the first place.
The daughter gets away. But then Simon and his wife Ingrid
get a tip about someone who might be able to help them find her. They end up in
a New York crack house, and shots are fired…
And Simon must go on alone to follow faint leads into a
convoluted tangle of bizarre criminal conspiracies. Gradually he learns that
his daughter’s plight is only peripheral to a much larger crime, and he will be
placed on a lengthening list of people marked for murder, due to no fault of
their own.
I found Run Away pretty amazing. Not only does Coben trace the familiar ground of family love and loss, and parental sacrifice, but he also creates a pair of unforgettable villains – remorseless killers who happen to be deeply in love, and very sympathetic in their scenes together. That kind of ambivalence shakes me more than distilled evil ever could. And the final revelation of the story was a genuine shocker, one to keep you awake pondering.
I thought the climax of Run Away a little far-fetched, but overall I consider it one of Coben’s best. Highly recommended. As usual with Coben, the profanity is minimal.
My first order of business is to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Hunter Baker, Dr. Ray Van Neste, and all the wonderful people at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, for making me so extremely welcome for the last couple days. It was a tremendous experience for me. I hope it was enjoyable for innocent bystanders as well.
I flew in to Memphis, courtesy of the school, on Monday. Dr. Hunter Baker met me, in two senses. He’s one of those people I’ve known online for years, but we’d never actually been in the same physical space before. He took me out for pizza (very good), and then back to the school for a short tour. That’s when I also got to meet Dr. Ray Van Neste, another online friend and the co-conspirator in my invitation.
They’re both deans. When you’re a dean, you can get away
with spending institutional funds on marginal literary figures.
Tuesday was the most intense day I’ve experienced in a long
time. It’s hard to describe. Hunter told me I wasn’t like he expected, based on
my self-descriptions on this blog. And he was right. I was in a different
reality on Tuesday. I was “on,” as in performing. Like when I used to act.
In retrospect, I’m not at all sure why I decided it would be
a good idea to wear my frock coat, vest, and tie when I visited classes on
Tuesday. Especially when I pulled out my monocle for reading, it must have made
me look distinctly bizarre. But it somehow made sense to me in my altered state
of consciousness. I sat in on Hunter’s Modern Political Thought class that
morning, discussing medieval political thought. Seemed to go OK. In the
afternoon I joined a writing class, and that was quite a bit of fun – or at
least the alien intelligence possessing my consciousness thought so.
All day I was in performance mode, and people enabled me by
asking me questions on subjects about which I had something to say. These elements
combined to make me appear to be an extrovert. The real me just hung on for the
ride.
Lunch that day was one of the best hamburgers I’ve ever had,
at a local place, and for dinner we joined another dean (whose name I’ve
forgotten, I fear) for a memorable meal at the nicest place in town. My alien possessor
handled this well, I believe.
Then in the evening, I did my big presentation on “When Christianity Came To the Vikings.” I am pretty much unable to tell you how it went, because my grandiose half thinks it was awesome, and my neurotic half thinks I messed it up completely. The truth, no doubt, falls somewhere in between, but where on a scale from one to ten, I can’t tell you. They inform me the video will be posted, and I’ll share it with you. But I will never have the nerve to watch it.
I do know I knocked my water bottle off the podium. Could have used that water.
There were a number of questions afterward (always a good
sign), and one fan who wasn’t a student or faculty member drove a distance to
be there (nice to meet you, Steve).
Then I returned to my guest room and crashed, feeling as if
I’d gone nine rounds with a prizefighter.
And Wednesday I flew home. It was a perfect spring day in
Tennessee, and in Minneapolis we were having a snowstorm.
As I’ve been working my way through Paul Gitsham’s DCI Warren Jones series, I’ve commented that Inspector Jones distinguishes himself from other series detectives in (seemingly) having no particular skeletons in his closet. No old traumas, or addictions, or PTSD, which seem to be obligatory for the genre.
How wrong I was. Plenty of skeletons are revealed in Silent As the Grave, in which all Jones’ chickens seem to come home to roost at once.
An elderly man is found stabbed to death in a park. The
crime seems unremarkable, except for the unusual dearth of clues, or a possible
motive. The man had been a simple gardener, without known enemies.
Then Jones is approached by a man he does not know, but
knows about. The man was his own predecessor in his present job – a cop gone
bad, disgraced and facing trial. He says the gardener was murdered at the orders
of a crime lord recently released from prison, now out for revenge. There will
be more murders, he says. He’ll help Jones solve the case, in return for help
in clearing himself.
Jones scoffs. The man is obviously trying to manipulate him,
for his own benefit. Then the man plays his trump card – Jones’s father was
innocent, he says, and he can help him prove it.
This is world-shattering. Jones’s father, we learn, was a policeman who committed suicide – Jones himself, a teenager at the time, found the body. His father was discovered to have been corrupt, and apparently killed himself out of shame.
Could that have been a mistake? Jones has spent most of his
life hating his own father. Has he been doing him an injustice? Or is his
informant just playing him cynically, for his own advantage?
Finding the answer will bring Jones himself, as well has his
family, into mortal danger before a complex mystery is finally unraveled. The
climax of the story is unexpected and shocking.
This one was somewhat more intense than I expected. The story
still moves a little slowly, as with all the books in the series, but all in
all it was pretty satisfying. Minimal cautions for language and mature subject
matter.
As previously mentioned, I will be lecturing in the Barefoot Student Union Building, Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. My subject will be, “When Christianity Came to the Vikings.”
More information here, if you’re in the neighborhood.
It’s pretty much all Vikings, all the time for me this week. A family member sent me a link to the following video, about a brand new Viking exhibition in Oslo:
You can read more about the exhibition in this article from medieval.eu.
Due to unforeseen reparations being carried out at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, the opening of a new Viking exhibition has been rescheduled. End of March – hopefully – visitors will be able to enjoy a bonanza of the more spectacular archaeological finds from the last ten years; add to this a selection of some of the highlights from an earlier time, and visitors may expect an enjoyable tour of the Norwegian Viking past. Later in 2025, when the new museum opens at Bygdøy, the treasures will be transferred there, supplementing the finds from Oseberg, Gokstad, and Tune. Perhaps finds from the newly discovered Viking boat in Østfold – as yet not excavated – will join the older treasures
Lots of cool stuff here. I’m pleased that the video maker, who rejoices in the extremely Norwegian name, Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, is not entirely convinced that women warriors existed, like me. I think I’ve been in this museum, if it’s the one I’m thinking of.
The voluntary nature of the Scandinavian conversion – in Denmark and Sweden at least – seems to have led to communities feeling that they did not need to significantly alter their artistic communication or abandon their traditional culture in order to be good Christians.
C. S. Lewis writes somewhere that one of the best methods of evangelism would be for Christians, not to produce more “Christian” work, but to simply do better work as Christians. From my perspective as an amateur historian, I would say that Martyn and Hannah Whittock (father and daughter) have produced superior historical work in producing The Vikings: From Odin to Christ, published by Lion Books, a Christian publisher.
It’s weird for a guy like me, a promoter of the historical value
of the Icelandic sagas, to say, but there’s good reason to believe that the
story of the conversion of the Vikings, as presented in the sagas, may be misleading.
The Whittocks point out – and somehow I’d missed this – that there is little
report of violence in the conversions of Denmark and Sweden. Only in Norway,
where saga writers had political motivation to glamorize Olaf Haraldsson as
Norway’s national hero and saint, do we have stories of torture and threats of
death.
It may be true that Olaf was a bloody-handed tyrant (I believe
that). But his work may not have been as influential in the conversion as the
sagas suggest. There’s good reason to think that the earlier Christian king,
Haakon the Good, who gets short shrift in the sagas, may have been a far more
effective missionary than history remembers.
This harmonizes with things I’ve been saying in my lectures
for some time. Now, having read the Whittocks’ book, I have more ammunition for
those arguments.
I’m also delighted that the Whittocks have very clearly read Bishop Fridtjof Birkeli’s untranslated book, Tolf Vintrer Hadde Kristendommen Vært i Norge (which Anders Winroth, for all his expertise, overlooks entirely in his book on the conversion of Scandinavia). I’m delighted that Birkeli’s important ideas, largely unknown to English readers till now, are being conveyed through this book.
The Vikings: From Odin to Christ covers a lot more than the conversion of Norway, of course. We start with a historical overview, then examine each Scandinavian country in turn, followed by various regions that the Vikings colonized. I have a couple minor quibbles – at one point they suggest St. Olaf’s opposition was motivated by heathenry, but they correct that later on.
I haven’t found a history book a page-turner in a long time. The Vikings: From Odin to Christ kept me turning the pages. I recommend it highly.
My reading pace is a little slow just now. Had some translation to do on Monday, and now I’m working hard on preparing for my lecture at Union University in TN next Tuesday.
While Norwegian archeologists in Trondheim’s city, excavated the market area, they stumbled upon a curious discovery.
It was 13 feet long, and while the wood had been destroyed over time, evidence such as nails and rusty lumps indicated that it was a boat. The boat dates from the 7th to the 10th century, a time when Vikings wandered the seas, raided and explored, according to the initial analysis.
Inside the boat, burial goods such as bronze, a piece of a spoon, and a key to a small box were discovered, alongside 2 long bones.
The DNA testing is yet to prove if the bones are human or provide any details that might bring more information about the person possibly buried in the boat.
The article indicates that scholars are surprised by the age of the find, but I don’t find it surprising that there would be human habitation, and burials, in Trondheim before the turn of the millennium. Trondheim didn’t become really important until Olaf Trygvesson’s time (around 1000), but we’re talking about arable land in a soil-poor country. Trondheim is a nice spot, with a good port. I’d be surprised if somebody wasn’t living there.
If you’d like to explore the Book of Kells, Ireland’s greatest medieval work of art (one the Vikings somehow missed), the entire work has now been made available online in digital form, thanks to the Trinity College Library, here.
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