All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews

Skald’s tales: ‘Stuf’s Tale’ and ‘Thorarin Short-Cloak’

Leave a comment
Coin of Harald Hardrada. Public domain.

I guess the vital question today is, “Do I think about the Roman Empire every day?” It’s the new “Am I a real man?”

I’ve pondered this topic. I think it all depends on what you mean by “thinking about.” I think about Western Civilization quite a lot – especially how it’s declining. That inevitably brings thoughts of Rome now and then.

But if it means, “Do I sit and ponder the glories (or failures) of the Roman Empire every day?”, no, I don’t think I do.

Being me, of course, I do think quite a lot about King Canute’s Dano-English empire, especially these days.

Which brings us to The Complete Sagas of the Icelanders, through which I am working my way at no particular speed.

I have two stories to report on tonight: “Stuf’s Tale,” and “The Tale of Thorarin Short-Cloak.”

These are short tales, and not very complex. Both involve Icelandic skalds in encounters with the redoubtable King Harald Hardrada. I can only conclude from them that Harald had a soft spot for skalds (he wasn’t a bad skald himself) and put up with a lot of guff from them he would have killed ordinary guys for.

Stuf was unusual in that he was blind, but apparently he had an adventurous spirit, and he voyaged to Norway to collect an inheritance. There, we are told, he got lodgings with a Norwegian farmer. One day the farmer spies some richly dressed men riding toward the farm, and he’s surprised to learn that King Harald has decided to spend the night with him. He warns the king (no doubt with considerable trepidation) that he’s not prepared for the kind of hospitality a king expects. Harald tells him never mind, it’s just a passing visit on other business.

While Harald is waiting for supper in the house, he asks Stuf his name, and they get into a discussion about names which leads to Stuf more or less insulting the king – though only by implication. Oddly, Harald enjoys this exchange and asks him to sit up with him. Stuf then entertains him by reciting a surprising number of poems he’s memorized. He persuades the king to give him a sealed letter to help him in his inheritance case. Later on, he’s able to become a member of Harald’s household and he writes him a formal poem.

The Tale of Thorarin Short-Cloak is, like the cloak, very short. King Harald and his men are sitting outside the church, waiting for evensong, having prepared themselves for worship by getting drunk in a tavern. Harald composes a mocking short poem about the short cloak Thorarin, an innocent bystander, is wearing, and Thorarin comes right back with a poem about how he’d happily accept a longer one as a gift from the king. Harald tells him to see him the next morning.

When Thorarin arrives at the hall, there’s a man waiting for him outside with a horn of ale. He tells Thorarin that before he gets any further, the king wants him to write a satirical poem about some guy named Hakon Suet-hood (otherwise unknown to historians, I believe). Thorarin composes the poem, but when he recites it for Harald, Harald says he never asked for any such thing. The aforementioned Hakon, apparently a good sport, welcomes Thorarin into his company. He asks Thorarin, as his penance, to compose another satire about a man named Arni. This Arni, unlike Hakon, takes offense and tries to kill Thorarin, but Hakon protects him. Finally, Thorarin gets the opportunity to recite his own formal poem for Harald, who gives him money and tells him to come back and see him when he returns from Rome (where he’s headed on a pilgrimage).

Like the last skald’s tales I described, Stuf’s and Thorarin’s aren’t much in terms of plot or excitement. They’re celebrity encounter anecdotes, and (in my view) their very artlessness argues for some basis in real events. Stuf has particular bragging rights in having insulted the most feared monarch in Europe and getting away with it – plus he got the king’s autograph.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Forgotten Children,’ by James Hunt

Leave a comment

James Hunt, author of The Forgotten Children, is the kind of writer who knows the story he wants to tell, but hasn’t worked out yet how to tell it. The story itself kept me reading, but the writing had me tearing my hair.

Jim North is a Seattle police detective who, with his partner Kerry Martin, works missing persons cases. The worst are the missing kid cases. When they’re called out to a family home one morning, the scene is doubly bad – the two parents have been shot to death, while their son – a foster child they’d been in the process of adopting – has disappeared.

But it gets worse. Soon there are two more double murders, with attempts to abduct the children – though one child escapes. What links them together is that all the children were adopted from a particular local orphanage. When Jim and Kerry arrive there, they encounter defensiveness and veiled hostility from most of the staff.

For Jim, cases like this are personal. He was himself a foster child and carries great bitterness about the things he suffered in the system. When his birth father – who was an evil man – died and left him a fortune, Jim entrusted the money to a foundation for foster kids, the management of which he leaves to its staff.

Jim’s empathy for the kids helps him identify clues that will in time lead them to a shocking truth.

Author Hunt is clearly passionate about his subject. But the story would have been more effective with better writing. His major failing, in my opinion, is overwriting. Like many insecure writers, he doesn’t trust the reader to take a hint. He has to lay everything out, then explain it again to make sure we get it. The characters’ personalities are described rather than demonstrated through words and actions (though, annoyingly, very little physical description is provided). The phraseology is often awkward, as in “And their city was just one cog in the giant wheel churning orphans through a revolving door.” Also, the dialogue was pretty stilted – even awkwardly theatric in the dramatic scenes.

Also, the author handled the solution in an odd way – the true culprit turned out to be no surprise at all, though there was a surprise twist afterward.

But… I did read The Forgotten Children all the way through. So the book wasn’t a narrative failure. All things considered, though, I don’t recommend it very highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything,’ by John D. MacDonald

1 Comment

“Sit over there,” she said, indicating a fake Victorian couch upholstered in shiny plastic under a fake Utrillo upon an imitation driftwood wall.

***

He was a loose, asthmatic, scurfy man with the habitual expression of someone having his leg removed without anesthetic.

If the lines above remind you a little of P. G. Wodehouse, I think that’s intentional. The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything is a unique work in John D. MacDonald’s corpus – basically a sex farce wrapped around a lighthearted science fiction/fantasy plot. I loved it as a young man. Re-reading it now (I had a sudden compulsion to do so) I still found it amusing – though elements that troubled me on my first reading are even more troublous today, so much has the world changed.

Kirby Winter’s uncle Omar, eccentric Miami inventor and financier, has died, leaving his nephew in something of a pickle. Kirby is a presentable, rather dull young man whose main personal problem is utter shyness and panic in the presence of girls (generally with slapstick consequences). On his death, Uncle Omar left Kirby his pocket watch and a letter to be opened a year after his passing, and ordered all his records destroyed. Now his business partners and the authorities are looking for 12 million missing dollars, which Kirby was the last one to have in his possession. His (true) protestations that he’s been giving the money away to charities and the poor, on Omar’s instructions, are not believed. So the police are looking for him.

To his rescue – ostensibly – come sexy Charla O’Rourke and her slick brother Joseph, who offer Kirby a means of escape on their yacht. Before long, Kirby realizes that their plans for him are not friendly. They want to get him somewhere where they can torture him until he tells them where the money is.

Kirby escapes them, and through a couple chance connections ends up in a swinging Hollywood director’s vacant apartment. There – to his complete surprise – he finds himself in bed one night with Bonny Lee Beaumont, a free-spirited young stripper with whom he quickly falls in love. But Kirby is concerned about Wilma, Uncle Omar’s only other employee, who will certainly be another target for the O’Rourkes. His plans to rescue her seem hopeless, until he discovers the secret of Uncle Omar’s watch, a way to make time stand still. Literally.

The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything is intended as a fun book, and it is. I loved it when I first read it (around 1980, I think). The central problem of the book is not in fact Kirby’s legal trouble, but his shyness with women. This appealed to me very much at that time in my life. But I had trouble with some of the practical gags in the book, employed as tactical diversions – particularly ones involving stripping women while time is stopped, so that they suddenly find themselves naked in public. That struck me as pretty cruel, even in those swinging times (though it’s Bonny Lee who usually plays the gag, which makes it a little less creepy). In today’s Me Too environment, of course, a writer couldn’t get away with that stuff at all.

The sex element in the book was generally more prominent than I remembered. Not explicit sex, but a fair amount of bed time and nakedness. Also a lot of Swinging Sixties pseudo-philosophy about how sex ought to be free and natural, untrammeled by traditional taboos and mores and legalities. That stuff was pretty much boiler plate in paperback literature at the time, but it has aged poorly. (Though I’m not sure things still weren’t better then than what we’ve got now.)

As an addendum, a TV movie was made of this book in 1980, starring Robert Hayes (of Airplane!), Pam Dawber (of Mork & Mindy), and Jill Ireland. The sex and nudity were toned down, of course, but what disappointed me was that they completely cut out what I considered the true heart of the story – Kirby’s overcoming of his shyness. This is precisely why MacDonald hated pretty much all filmed adaptations of his works.

In summation, I highly recommend The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything as a light read for grownups – with cautions for vintage adult material.

Publishing, Reading, Writing

‘The boring truth about the Library of Alexandria.’

Leave a comment

Today, I’m reading a book I’m enjoying very much. Actually I’m re-reading it – it’s an old favorite. I hope to review it tomorrow.

How’s the writing going? Not bad. Today I got back to laying down text, after several days doing research on Caithness and Orkney, where my characters are bound. I reached 50,000 words, which is half the length I’ve imagined for the book. So that’s on course.

Also, I finished revisions on a magazine article I was commissioned to do. This means, I’m reasonably sure, that I’ll have some money coming in at some point. Also a good thing.

Above, a nice YouTube video I found, on the Library of Alexandria. I remember a teacher in high school telling us about the great tragedy of its loss. According to this presentation, that’s all been overblown. Often by people who have have axes to grind (even some axes I grind myself now and then). But there’s less there than meets the eye, it would appear. No doubt much knowledge has been lost through the centuries, but the cataclysmic holocaust at Alexandria seems to be scholarly folklore.

It’s kind of comforting to know that scholars have their popular fallacies too.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Denial of Credit,’ by Peter Rowlands

Leave a comment

We’ve had an interesting time in recent weeks with Peter Rowlands’ Mike Stanhope novels. I read and reviewed the first two in the series, giving my opinion that the prose is good, the characterizations so-so, but the plotting weak. I had a surprise when author Rowlands himself showed up in our comments, a little stung by my criticisms but encouraging me to try the next book. So I bought and read Denial of Credit. It was, indeed, a better story – though I still have quibbles.

Mike Stanhope is an English journalist in the field of transportation and logistics. In the first book, he met and fell in love with Ashley, who lives in Cornwall, and he moved there to be near her. But they both have cold feet now about their relationship, and the problems of working remotely, far from London, add to the friction. Mike’s income has decreased, and he’s feeling the pinch.

Then he hears from a famous business mogul named Alan Treadwell. Treadwell is supposedly retired, and he wants a ghostwriter for his autobiography. It’s not an appealing offer, as Treadwell is famously hard to work with. But Mike isn’t in any position to turn work down.

The man proves just as difficult as the rumors say. He has definite ideas about how he wants the book to go, and specific instructions about whom Mike should talk to – and not talk to. But Mike is incurably – somewhat self-destructively – curious. He sniffs around in forbidden places, and what he learns will put him and others in danger.

My major complaint about the last book – the repeated need for lucky passersby to scare Mike’s attackers off before they kill him – was less of a problem here. Mike does have a couple fortuitous escapes, but they’re more complex than before, which makes them more acceptable in narrative terms. I think the characterizations are still a little underbaked, but I can’t deny the book held my complete attention all the way to the end.

One thing I like in these books is that they deal with the business world in an informed, nuanced way. Very few novelists are in a position to do this (John D. MacDonald was a sterling exception).

The book ends in a cliffhanger, but it’s part of a subplot line, so I don’t object to that.

Denial of Credit wasn’t perfect, but I enjoyed it and recommend it.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

A fatal slip of the tongue

Leave a comment
St. Magnus’ Kirk on Birsay, believed to be the site of the old Christ Church, where Jarl Thorfinn was buried. Photo credit: Chris Downer. Creative Commons license, Wikimedia.

When I wrote last night’s review of Orkneyinga Saga, I’d intended to mention one more thing, but I find I overlooked it. It’s not crucial to appreciating the book. Just an interesting point.

The saga includes one of the earliest references I’m aware of to a Freudian Slip. Not as such, of course. But I hadn’t been aware that the Vikings found such slips of the tongue as significant as psychologists do – only in a different way. Where we look for the voice of the subconscious, the Vikings looked for Fate.

The passage concerns the death of Jarl Ragnvald Brusesson, rival to Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty. He and his men had burned Jarl Thorfinn and his men in his house – or so he believed – and now he has traveled to the island of Papa Stronsay to collect malt for the Christmas ale. As they’re sitting around a hearth fire in a house there, someone mentions that more wood is needed for the fire.

Then the Earl made a slip of the tongue and this is what he said: ‘We shall have aged enough when this fire burns out.’ What he meant to say was that they would have baked enough. He realized his mistake immediately.

‘I’ve never made a slip of the tongue before,’ he said, ‘and now I remember what my foster-father King Olaf said at Stiklestad when I pointed out a mistake of his, that I’d not have long to live if ever my own tongue made a slip. Perhaps my uncle Thorfinn is still alive after all.’

Immediately thereafter the house is attacked by Jarl Thorfinn (who had indeed survived), and Ragnvald and all his men are killed.

I take this to indicate that there must have been some superstition about slips of the tongue being portents of death. It’s reminiscent of their belief in the “fetch,” the separate soul. When you see your fetch, it’s a sign you’re soon to die. It may be that the fetch also speaks audibly through slips of the tongue.

Or, it might just be an isolated anecdote about St. Olaf’s powers of prophecy.

Ragnvald, by the way, was the man who had saved King Harald Hardrada’s life after the Battle of Stiklestad, carrying the wounded 16-year-old prince off the battlefield and getting him safely away to Russia. Harald was now king of Norway, and Thorfinn’s overlord. Nevertheless, when Thorfinn went to Harald in Norway to explain it all, Harald was not greatly upset, and let him off lightly.

It seems he recognized a kindred spirit when he encountered him.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews, Writing

‘Orkneyinga Saga’

1 Comment

This book review will, on closer examination, turn out to be a sort of bait-and-switch, a partial review embedded in an author’s journal post. I’m still plot-wrestling, and I continue in PAUSE mode, learning the geography and trying to figure out what happens next as I send Erling Skjalgsson home from England by way of the Orkneys (and possibly the Shetlands. Haven’t worked that out yet).

As I told you, I realized the other day that Erling’s journey home to Norway has to bring him into a confrontation with Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty of Orkney, who had a problematic relationship with King (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson, Erling’s enemy. Thorfinn had submitted to Olaf as his overlord, but he felt Olaf had broken their understanding by awarding part of the jarldom to his brother Brusi. He might very well be willing to listen to Erling’s suggestion that he transfer fealty to King Knut of Denmark/England.

However, I discovered a further complication. In reading the Penguin edition of Orkneyinga Saga, the saga of the earls (jarls) of Orkney, I was reminded that Thorfinn ruled not only the Orkneys and Shetland. He also ruled Caithness, the northeastern part of Scotland, an area heavily settled by Norwegians.

And Caithness brings us close to Moray, which was the home of Macbetha – whom I included, you’ll recall, under the name Macbetha, in my last Erling book, King of Rogaland. Macbetha, who wouldn’t have been king yet at this point, would almost certainly have been an enemy of Thorfinn’s. (Though I always think about Dorothy Dunnet’s novel, King Hereafter, which is based on the theory that Thorfinn and Macbeth were the same person. She notes that the annals telling about Macbeth never mention Thorfinnn, and Orkneyinga Saga never mentions Macbeth [well, it mentions an earlier King Macbeth, but he’s a different guy]. In the saga, Thorfinn does fight a mysterious Scottish king named Karl Hundarsson, whom some historians have identified as Macbeth.) Anyway, it would be impolite to my readers not to reunite them with Macbetha while we’re in the neighborhood.

So how will I work all this out? I’m thinking about it. I have some ideas.

In any case, I’ll review the portion of Orkneyinga Saga that I read. I confess I didn’t finish it (this time through), because it covers a lot of history much later than the period I’m dealing with. Some of it, I should note, is very intriguing, especially the conscientious objection of (Saint) Magnus Erlendsson during a raid on Wales, and his subsequent martyrdom.

But my concern was with the career of Jarl Thorfinn. Thorfinn is an intriguing character, bigger than life. Sometimes he’s sympathetic, sometimes emphatically not. His climactic conflict with his charismatic nephew, Rognvald Brusisson, involves some very nice plotting (indicating – probably – a fair amount of fictional embroidering) and dramatic irony. One also notes the appearance of the name “Tree-beard,” very likely where Tolkien found it. The saga also includes one of our sources for the disputed practice of the “Blood Eagle,” a cruel method of execution which showed up in the History Channel “Vikings” series. (I myself incline to the view that there never was such a practice, but that it came from the saga writers misunderstanding a poetic metaphor.)

Orkneyinga Saga is one of the most striking and vigorous of the sagas. It’s not up to Snorri Sturlusson’s literary standards, but it still packs a punch and lingers in the memory.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Butcher on the Moor,’ by Ric Brady

Leave a comment

“My son Graham,” the old woman says over the phone. “I think he’s killed someone again.”

Henry Ward is a retired police detective in North Yorkshire. In Butcher on the Moor, the second novel in a series by Ric Brady, he’s awakened in the night by a call from a Mrs. Thomson, who says the words above. waking him up fully. He has no memory of Mrs. Thomson or of Graham, the son to whom she’s referring, but he met a lot of people in his years on the force, and gave out a lot of calling cards.

When he arrives at her house, he finds that she does indeed have an old card of his. She’s clearly mentally confused, slipping in and out of the present. But he grasps enough to know that she’s seen something that troubled her. He goes down into her cellar to investigate, and finds what looks very much like butchered human remains. Then Graham himself shows up, and Henry barely makes it out with his life, while Graham runs off into the moors, his personal stomping grounds.

Normally, this would be where Henry could drop the whole business in the hands of the working police, but they are severely understaffed and (apparently) generally incompetent. The only one he really trusts is DI Barnes, a woman detective who was badly injured in their previous adventure and is not quite healed up yet. Along with Henry and his bad hips (it’s a long wait for a replacement under National Health Service), they make less than a full-strength team. But Barnes gets approval to bring Henry on as a consultant, and he plunges into the case recklessly.

Henry’s frustration with retirement, along with the fecklessness of the working cops, combine to put him in a lot of places where angels would fear to tread. I found his disregard for his own safety when faced by younger, larger, armed opponents a little hard to swallow. But the story moved right along, the dramatic tension was high, and the characterizations and prose were good.

I wouldn’t rate Butcher on the Moor as top detective fiction, but I’ve read a lot worse.

Writing

Author’s journal: Sailing to Orkney

1 Comment
Coastline, Bis Geos, Orkney. Photo credit: Claire Pegrum. Creative Commons license, Wikimedia.

Today was one of those useful but frustrating days when I’m forced to learn stuff instead of write. I’ve come to another change of scene in The Baldur Game, my work in progress, and so I spent my writing time this morning watching YouTube videos. Which is easy work, but it leaves me with a guilty sense that I’m dogging it.

I posted about this on Facebook yesterday, but I’ll expand on it here. I’ve reached the stage in the story where Erling Skjalgsson has finished his time in England and is going home to Norway. But when shall he travel? That’s the problem.

Snorri says in Heimskringla that Erling returned to Norway in late summer after participating in King Canute the Great’s Baltic campaign. My problem is, why so late?

Historically, we have one fixed date in all this narrative that historians have been able to pinpoint for us. We know that Canute participated in the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II in Rome in March of 1027. So the whole business of the Baltic Campaign and the Battle of Holy River has to be fit in around that. I expect that this is one reason so many variant dates have been proposed for the campaign. Snorri seems to place it in 1026, which means Canute must have gone back to England, wintered there, and set out for Rome very early in the year.

But why would he do that? He’s just defeated Olaf of Norway and the King of Sweden. He’s forced Olaf to abandon his ships and return to southern Norway overland. One would think he’d want to deliver the coup de grace right away, while Olaf was on the run. Instead, he interrupts his war to run off to Rome.

However, I can see an argument for Snorri’s dating – indeed, I’ve adopted it for my story. Canute gets this invitation from the elite of Europe to come join them at the big party. It would not only allow him to be seen dining with the top Influencers, but it gave him a chance to get papal blessing for his Anglo-Danish empire. He must have been painfully aware that many European royalty viewed him as an ambitious freebooter, a barbarian who’d usurped a throne (like Conan). But this trip would show them. And if he got the pope’s blessing (which he did), it would permit him to return to his war refuting Olaf’s claims to be fighting on God’s side. (William the Conqueror would benefit from a similar endorsement later in the century.)

This is a very interesting development from a political perspective. Prof. Titlestad writes, in that classic (and well-translated) book, Viking Legacy, “The (probably informal) agreement between Canute and the pope in 1027 testifies to the fact that the age of free Viking warfare was over.” Canute understood that the old plunder economy could not persist. From now on Scandinavian kings must be part of the European Christian “club.” Private enterprise raiding had to go. The kings would be playing in the big leagues now.

But if Canute sailed for Rome in early 1027, why did Erling delay his return to Norway until late summer? One would think he’d want to go home and take back possession of his estates, fortifying his military positions and shoring up his alliances with Olaf’s enemies.

But as I thought about it, I realized that, even if Erling left in spring, he would probably go home by way of the Orkney and Shetland Islands (the usual route for Norwegians). And Shetland was ruled at that time by Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty, along with his half-brother Brusi. They had both acknowledged Olaf of Norway as their overlord, but there’s reason to think Thorfinn wasn’t entirely happy with the arrangement. I’ll have to delve into The Orkneyinga Saga to figure out how to mix Erling and his crew up in those matters, trying to get Thorfinn to turn on Olaf.

As a bonus, I had a flash of inspiration today about King Olaf’s character and destiny. This will – if I do it right – bundle the themes of the whole Erling series up in this climactic volume.

I only wrote a few words today, but it was a good writing day anyway.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deficit of Diligence,’ by Peter Rowlands

3 Comments

I’m ready now to keep my promise to review the second book in Peter Rowlands’ Mike Stanhope mystery series, Deficit of Diligence.

I think this book was a little better-plotted than the first, which is a good indication. Nevertheless, my overall impression was the same – good prose, but the storytelling leaves room for improvement.

Mike Stanhope, you may recall, is an English journalist working in the transportation and logistics field. He fell in love with a girl from Cornwall last time out, and now he’s moved to Truro to be with her. He got a semi-permanent job with the logistics company she works for, but he does freelance work as well (which will get him into some trouble).

When he hears from a lawyer that a woman in Newcastle whom he never heard of has left him her entire estate, he travels up there to learn more. And while he’s at it, he can do some reporting work there. But he allows his reporter’s instincts to confuse his professional loyalties, putting his Cornwall job in jeopardy. Also, he discovers that there’s a competing heir contesting the will, a desperate man who won’t stint at threats and violence.

Meanwhile, he begins to glimpse the outlines of a massive insurance fraud scheme, which puts him in conflict with still more dangerous men.

Deficit of Diligence includes several weaknesses in plotting, from my viewpoint. One is that our hero, though supposedly a seasoned professional man, makes a series of rash decisions, both professional and personal. He doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes (I can say, from experience, that a few good beatings teach most people some measure of caution).

Much of the plot in this book, as in the previous book, hinges on his recognition of someone he only knew briefly, many years ago. I realize I have a poor memory for faces, but this seemed a little far-fetched to me.

Finally, there’s the matter I blogged about last night – the plotting technique of allowing a “helpless hero” to blunder into a life-threatening situation, and then rescuing him through sheer dumb luck. I mentioned yesterday that it happened twice here, but lo and behold, it happened a third time. That’s just lazy.

Still, the prose was good, and I think the plotting was improved. (Though the book could still have been trimmed back without much loss.)