It was a quiet weekend, highlighted by a little shopping and housecleaning, as well as church as usual. Today it’s good and stinking hot—the first day this year I’d characterize by that precise and objective characterization. Nearly 100 degrees, at least on my back porch. I like it. I’m a summer baby, never really comfortable until I’m uncomfortably warm.
I recently wrote a paper for the Georg Sverdup Society (for the benefit of newcomers, that’s the scholarly society for which I serve as Journal editor. We’re mostly devoted to translating the works of Prof. Georg Sverdrup of Augsburg College, one of the founders of my branch [or “perversion,” some of our Lutheran readers are thinking] of Lutheranism—a sort of congregational Lutheranism).
My premise was that the roots of our peculiarity (or “perversion,” as above) may partly be found in Norwegian social tradition going back to the Viking Age. (Norwegian Lutherans in America were remarkable in that they split up into a number of competing Lutheran fellowships, unlike most of the other Scandinavian-Americans, who founded purely ethnic, one-size-fits-all church bodies). I suggest (I don’t think it’s provable one way or another) that this contentiousness (dare I say “diversity?”) may spring—in part—from the old Viking-Age political system, which Prof. Torgrim Titlestad calls “confederative,” and for which Erling Skjalgsson (hero of West Oversea, of which you may have heard) lived and died.
I sent the article to my friend and blurb-writer Dr. John Eidsmoe, because it occurred to me that this would be red meat to him. And indeed he responded quickly, correcting a couple of points of fact, but also very interested in my premise. He said, “You might say that Erling Skjalgsson was the Robert E. Lee of Norway.” That struck me odd at first, but on consideration there’s a lot to be said for it.
He also suggested that I might be the world’s greatest expert on Erling. Very flattering, but not true. Prof. Titlestad knows rings around me. Maybe I’m the greatest expert in America. But I’d bet there’s some hungry professor in some obscure Midwestern history department whom I’ve never heard of, who did a brilliant (and neglected) doctoral thesis on Erling. And who is very bitter about it, and will probably hunt me down and shoot me if my novel’s a success.
Still, it’s nice to be flattered. Flatter me all you like. I’ll make mordant, self-deprecatory jokes, but secretly I’ll like it, and don’t let me tell you otherwise.