All posts by Lars Walker

Religion, Uncategorized

In a Viking church

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A fragment of a wall painting from my ancestral church at Aakra, Norway.

Here’s something one of my Facebook friends brought to my attention. The Viking Museum at Ribe, Denmark, has unveiled its recreation of what they think a 9th Century Viking church in Denmark would have looked like. It is not – as you can see – exactly what you’d expect. And by you, of course, I mean me.

I’ve never bothered to describe Father Ailill’s church in detail in my Erling books. I assume it was built of wood, and I conceived of it of being similar to the average Viking house. In Hailstone Mountain, I describe it as having at least one tapestry hanging on the wall. It has an altar in front. Pews were not used in those days. I’ve kept it vague.

But here come these Danes now with their bright painted walls. I’m reminded of the church at Åkra, near Skånevik, Norway, an ancestral church of mine I visited two years ago. (Picture above.) It’s not as old as the Viking Age, but pretty old. There was one place where restorers discovered a bit of wall painting underneath a door frame, over the top of the sacristy door. They left that section of frame hinged, so you can lift the piece of wood and see the painting below. They believe it showed a scene of Samson killing the lion.

In any case, I do have quibbles. The brightness of the photos in the article should not be taken to indicate what churchgoers saw in the Viking Age. The building would have been illuminated mostly by lamps. There would have been a lot of shadows. The brightness of the images would have been necessary in part (I think) to make them visible at all in the general gloom.

Speaking of light, I’m curious about the windows in this reconstruction. My own understanding is that glass windows, in that period, were rare and extremely expensive. I expend quite a few words, in my work in progress, The Baldur Game, in having Father Ailill describe, on a visit to England, how amazed he is to see a modestly large glass window in the palace at Winchester. And Erling is quite proud of one small window in one of his halls. I imagined no windows at all in Ailill’s church.

However, the people at Ribe are experts. They undoubtedly know a lot more than I do. (Though I’m not sure Norwegian churches would necessarily have followed Carolingian fashion.)

In any case, those windows look pretty extravagant to me. I wonder what archaeological evidence there is for them.

Reviews

Watching old TV: ’87th Precinct’

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Reading an 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain recently reminded me that there was a TV series, long ago, which I remembered enjoying – even before I knew the books existed at all. I checked it out and found and watched it on YouTube. And it’s not bad at all.

One major departure from the books is that the pretense of a fictional city is dropped entirely. This 87th Precinct is set solidly in Manhattan. The fairly large cast of the books is trimmed back here – we have Steve Carella (Robert Lansing), Meyer Meyer (Norman Fell), Bert Kling (Ron Harper) and Roger Havilland (Gregory Walcott). Although I’ve read several of the novels, I’d forgotten the character of Det. Havilland altogether. Wikipedia tells me that he’s a corrupt and unpopular cop in the books, but here he’s a good guy, kind of like Cotton Hawes, who doesn’t appear at all until a single episode late in the series (it only lasted one season). Gina Rowlands is also there as Teddy, Steve Carella’s deaf wife.

The casting could be worse. This was the first role I ever saw Robert Lansing in, and he became one of my favorite actors (though from what I’ve read of him, he wasn’t popular with the people he worked with). Ron Harper as Bert Kling looks about right – blond and young. Norman Fell as Meyer is a disappointment. Meyer in the books is a complex character with an ingrained stoicism dating back to traumatic antisemitic violence in his childhood that caused him to lose all his hair. He’s a large and strong man. Fell did not shave his head for the part (that was pretty rare in those days) or bulk up, but it’s not just that. Fell was primarily a comic actor, and he plays Meyer that way –downbeat Jewish comic relief. Not entirely, but mostly. (Meyer has never had justice done to him on the screen, as far as I know.) Gina Rowlands was lovely, but a blonde rather than black-haired as Teddy was in the books.

The scripts are based on the original novels, whittled down for the time available, with roles switched for the actors on hand. In terms of storytelling, it was really very good, adult television for the 1960s, and it deserved a longer run. Some familiar actors show up – Robert Vaughn as “the Deaf Man,” Robert Culp as a psychopath, and Leonard Nimoy as a young heavy.

Bottom line: Pretty good show. Worth a watch.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Catch a Spy,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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It’s New Year’s Day 1944; the world war is winding down. But Toby Peters, shabby Los Angeles private investigator, has a new celebrity client – Cary Grant. Grant, a naturalized US citizen from England, has been doing unofficial work for British Intelligence. He has recently heard from a source among American Nazi agents, who has secret documents to sell. But the source doesn’t want Grant to bring the money; he has to send someone else. That someone is Toby Peters, who, despite being the smallest of small-timers, has a reputation for reliability and discretion.

But when Toby shows up at the designated exchange spot, people start shooting. The seller of the papers ends up dead, and the money and the papers disappear. Grant wants Toby to keep searching for the conspirators, and it will lead to great danger for Toby and all his motley friends.

The usual eccentric cast of characters is here as always – Gunther, Toby’s Swiss midget best friend, and Sheldon Minck, the worst dentist in the world. Jeremy Butler, Toby’s office landlord, who is also an ex-wrestler and a poet. Mrs. Plaut, Toby’s apartment landlady, who is almost totally deaf and inhabits a bizarre world of her own. Not to mention others.

When I think about it, in the end, the whole thing would have worked out better if Toby and Cary Grant had left the case to the FBI from the start. But it’s not about the plot, it’s about the Keystone Kops chase.

To Catch a Spy was lots of fun.

Religion

When a storm is a rock

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Jesus Calms the Storm – Fresco by Silvestro Pistolesi in the clerestory of the Church of the Transfiguration at the Community of Jesus. Creative Commons attribution-Share alike 4.0.

And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” (Matthew 8: 23-27, ESV)

My Heaven-sent translation work continues. I had a good day yesterday and got a little ahead of my quota. This is good, because I translated nothing on Saturday (and I don’t write for money on Sundays if I can help it). I need to translate 100 pages each month for the next five months to deliver on time. I’m 50 pages in now, and the month isn’t half over yet, so I’m doing just fine.

But it never hurts to run ahead of schedule. Impress the client, and if I finish sooner, I get my final payment sooner.

The laborer, as the Good Book says, is worthy of his hire.

Speaking of the Good Book, I was struck by the passage printed above during my devotions last week. I wrote about the Sermon on the Mount not long ago, and now I’m in the early passages that follow the sermon. I’ve read the Bible a number of times since I was a kid, but I never noticed until recently how much context means.

I wrote about it in my earlier posts – how counterintuitive Jesus’ teaching is (none of these thoughts are original to me, of course. I’m coming to them from the back of queue). The bottom line seems to be, “Build your house on a rock.” But what’s the rock like? It has nothing to do with a good job, or saving money, or investing in bonds or real estate. The rock Jesus is talking about seems to be solidly anchored in mid-air. Invest in Heaven. Step out onto the stormy waves – that’s your real security.

And Jesus demonstrates this in Matthew 8:23-27. Immediately after He delivers the sermon, He’s confronted with human chaos – he meets a leper, the very embodiment of disordered health. He heals the leper. He heals a centurion’s servant – the centurion, interestingly, doesn’t need to observe Jesus performing the miracle; he believes without seeing, earning approval. Then Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, and then he’s mobbed by a multitude of “many who were oppressed by demons.” That’s the disordered state of the world – exactly what He’s been preaching against; exactly what He came to fix. Then a couple of disciple wannabees show up, offering to follow Jesus, but with reservations. Jesus puts it on the line – it’s all or nothing. They can’t handle the apparent insecurity and back off.

 And then what does Jesus do? He gets into a boat and starts across the Sea of Galilee.

I think I’ve written about this before. I allude to the theme frequently in The Baldur Game (it’s coming, it’s coming!). The Jews thought of the sea (any sea) as Chaos, as Sheol, as Hell. The place of maximum insecurity, maximum danger. The opposite of the Rock we’re supposed to build our houses on. And Jesus just sets out to sail on it. Not only that, but He’s headed for the Decapolis — pagan territory, where demons dwell.

And as they’re crossing the Sea (or lake), a storm blows up – which I understand is common on Galilee. And the disciples are terrified, and (one assumes) they’re running the sail down and bailing and rowing like mad…

And Jesus is sleeping like a baby. They wake Him, and He says, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” And he snaps His fingers (so to speak) and the storm turns over on its back like puppy wanting its belly scratched.

What Jesus is saying, I think, is “Buckle up, boys, this is what it means to build your house on a rock.”

The church, I think, is built by people who see faith as an adventure. It withers under people who see it as a job of work.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘Killer-Glum’s Saga’

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Reading on in Volume 2 of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one was fairly long – “Killer-Glum’s Saga”. (Also known as Viga-Glum’s Saga, which is just the same thing translated.)

I struggle to describe Killer-Glum’s Saga, as it really left no strong impression on me. Most great sagas feature some kind of powerful motivation for the main character – vengeance or a woman’s love or the righting of some great wrong. Killer-Glum has none of those things. He’s just a guy who goes through his life, and happens to have a talent for man-killing.

The saga writer seems to sense this lack, because he begins Glum’s tale with a trope borrowed from a thousand sagas, folk tales, and fairy tales: The hero starts out as his father’s least promising son, showing no initiative and often being taunted for his laziness. But when it comes down to cases, he proves extremely adept at fighting and killing, and before long he is the most powerful man in his district. We are told that he maintained this power for an unusual length of time. But eventually his enemies get the best of him, and he loses his property and has to move elsewhere. In the end he is converted to Christianity and dies in old age.

There are many incidents here, and a hundred characters to try to keep track of, but not much of a central narrative line. The situation is not improved by the fact that the text is somewhat corrupt.

One interesting scene did strike me – at one point Glum’s son kills a man, and Glum wants that fact not to be known. So he compliments a thrall on doing the killing, repeating the praise so may times that the stupid thrall begins believing it himself. Early medieval brainwashing.

My final evaluation is that Killer-Glum’s Saga is not one to read if you’re new to saga reading. This one is for the saga buffs; it demands a little effort.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Hark!’ by Ed McBain

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It had been many years since I’d read a novel by the late Ed McBain (who was actually Evan Hunter, which name was itself at first a pseudonym for Salvatore Lombino, who legally changed it to Hunter). I was a fan of McBain’s 87th Precinct novels for a long time, but Eight Black Horses offended me. It had to do with a rapist who was targeting pro-life women, and at one point the author had a policewoman musing that she thought both sides were wrong. I thought it was awfully generous of McBain to concede that pro-lifers were no worse than rapists, and stopped reading the series.

But Hark!, an 2004 87th Precinct book, came up on a deal recently, and I figured, after all we’ve been through since, Eight Black Horses was actually pretty mild stuff. I figured I’d give it another chance.

Verdict: Hark! wasn’t bad, but I don’t like McBain’s writing as much as I used to.

The 87th Precinct books are set in a city called Isola, which is obviously New York City under an assumed name. The central character has always been Detective Steve Carella, but a regular cast of other detectives supports him. A recurring character in many of the books has been a criminal called “the Deaf Man.” The Deaf Man is a genius, and bears a grudge against the 87th. So he periodically reappears sending them mocking messages that provide cryptic clues to whatever major score he’s planning on their doorstep in order to prove how dumb they are.

This time he’s sending them hand-delivered notes containing quotations, mostly from Shakespeare. Much of the book consists of the detectives brainstorming what the messages might mean. There seem to be recurring themes of word reversals, palindromes, and anagrams. Also hints about books. But there really isn’t enough information to guess, which is just the Deaf Man’s game.

Several subplots involve man-woman relationships. Steve Carella is planning a double wedding – remarriages for his widowed mother and his sister. Detective Burt Kling is dating a black doctor, and feeling the social pressure. Detective Cotton Hawes is dating a television reporter and wondering whether she cares more for him than for her career. Another detective is dating the only woman on the squad. Even the Deaf Man is living with a prostitute who’s helping him with his scheme but may be smarter than he assumes.

But the best part of the book, for me, was a small subplot involving a detective from another precinct named Fat Ollie Weeks. Fat Ollie is a perfect comic relief character – he’s fat (of course), and he’s not too bright. His ideas of police procedure are Neanderthal, and he’s a bigot and a sexist. But recently he started dating a Hispanic woman cop, and he’s finding better impulses blossoming within him, to his own surprise and discomfort. Also, he’s working on writing a novel which is apparently pretty good.

Hark! was an okay novel, but I found it a little slow, and all the police brainstorming got a bit wearying (though there were amusing moments of cop ignorance about Shakespeare). I was reminded how society has changed during a scene where a superior is apologetic for asking the woman detective for “a woman’s point of view.” Back then that kind of talk was considered sexist — today the woman’s point of view is considered the only acceptable point of view.

Also, I rebel against the whole idea of the Deaf Man. At the beginning, Ed McBain’s books were praised for their authentic descriptions of police procedure. But the Deaf Man is pure Hollywood. Real criminals don’t act like that, or so I’ve been informed.

Still, Hark! wasn’t bad, in its way.

Music, Uncategorized

Climbing mountains and a broken Hallelujah

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Speaking as an old man who has climbed a number of metaphorical mountains of the literary sort (and zero ones of the real sort), I know how to begin a massive writing – or translation – project. At least I know what works for me. The trick, in my experience, is not to look at the mountain.

If you think about the size of the mountain as you begin, you’ll soon grow disheartened.

You have to concentrate on today’s work. What will I do today? How much can I accomplish just today?

If you write merely one page every day, you can produce a 365 page book in a year. (It takes me considerably longer, though, when you include revisions. But you get the point. One step at a time.)

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as the Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 6:34)

Anyway, I’ve ordered some orthopedic aids to help me sit for long periods at my laptop, and I’m on the case.

The video above troubles me.

Not because of the artist herself – Lucy Thomas, who apparently won some talent program and obviously has an astonishing voice. I like her singing very much.

And not the song in itself, in particular. Leonard Cohen was in some ways the archetypal Israelite, forever wrestling with God. And this song expresses his troubled world-view in transcendent fashion.

My problem is that somebody – as you can see from the captions – is promoting it as a worship song.

Dearly beloved, “Hallelujah” is not a worship song! (I’ve written some drivel about it before in this blog myself.) It’s a song about sex, couched in near-blasphemous biblical imagery. It’s a brilliant piece of work but it doesn’t belong in your church.

It’s disrespectful both to God (who is not being properly revered) and to the artist – whose work is being twisted in a direction he never intended.

I understand the Christian impulse to turn all things to God’s glory.

But art deserves respect for its own sake. Not to be hijacked, even by well-meaning worship leaders.

At least give it time for the copyright to run out.

Uncategorized

Call me ‘Lars the Disappointing’

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An awful image of Erik the Red, from the 1688 book, Gronlandia, by Arngrimur Jonsson. Good, free pictures of Erik are hard to find.

I’m not sure whether this is good news or bad news, but my productivity on this blog is likely to be reduced a little for the next five months. I’ve snagged a new translation job, one that promises to be a bit of a challenge.

I can’t tell you what the job is at this point, because it’s a private thing for a scholarly project, and nobody has given me permission to talk about it. If I find out differently, I’ll let you know.

But I will say I’m translating a very long biography from Norwegian to English. I’m not actually certain I can meet the hoped-for deadline. But I’m gonna try my best. That means less time reading for pleasure, and fewer reviews on this blog, I fear.

What I’ll post instead of reviews I have no idea.

But tonight I’m going to post about Viking names.

As you may have noticed if you’ve read about the subject, Vikings used what’s called the “patronymic” in naming. A patronymic is not a family name in the sense we undertand them, but simply an indicator. Thorvald’s son Erik is called Erik Thorvaldsson. Erik’s son Leif does not inherit the surname Thorvaldsson, but is rather called Leif Eriksson (you may have heard of him). The surname is just a pointer – I’m talking about this Leif here, not that other Leif over there.

But the Vikings also liked to add nicknames. This brought the identification to what we information professionals like to call “a further level of granularity.” Which means it involves more detail; it’s more specific. Erik Thorvaldsson was known as Erik the Red, which was likely to single him out even better than the patronymic did.

But an interesting thing sometimes happens with these nicknames (though not in Erik’s case). Sometimes they replaced, in practice, the person’s original name. Take for instance Thorleif Skjalg, the father of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my Viking novels. (Skjalg probably means “squint-eyed.” I like to think of Charles Bronson.) Thorleif Skjalg was so identified with his nickname that his son ended up being known as Erling Skjalgsson rather than as Erling Thorleifsson. And Erling went ahead and named one of his own sons Skjalg. So the nickname became a proper name.

Another example is Snorri Goði, a historical personage who appeared as a character in my novel West Oversea. (Goði is Icelandic for Priest or Chieftain.) His original name, according to the sagas (he appears in several), was Thorgrim. But even as a child he proved so difficult to handle that he got the nickname Snorri, which means (I believe) tangled or complex (related, I further believe, to our English words snare and snarl). And the name Snorri went on to become a fairly common Norse name. (The first European child born in America, according to the sagas, was named Snorri Thorfinsson.)

Aren’t you glad I shared this?

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Fearful Yellow Eye,’ by John D. MacDonald

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On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the safest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.

It’s always cause for celebration for this reader when another Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald shows up on bargain sale. This time it was One Fearful Yellow Eye, notable (in this reader’s opinion) for the quality of its prose.

Years ago, our hero Travis McGee, lanky and languid Florida “salvage specialist,” found a young woman named Glory contemplating suicide on a beach. She’d had an astonishing run of bad luck and tragedy. He took her home, fed her and reassured her and took her to his bed, and eventually she went on with her life. She met an older man, Dr. Fortner Geiss, a prominent Chicago physician, who admitted to her he was dying, but they gave each other a couple good years, in spite of his adult children’s hostility. Now he’s dead, and she’s discovered that his considerable wealth has disappeared. In his last months, he’d converted everything to cash, which is nowhere to be found. The inevitable – but counterintuitive in such a good man – conclusion is that he’d been blackmailed.

So Glory calls on McGee. His deal is to look for things people have had stolen from them, and if he finds it he keeps half. That’s okay with her.

McGee flies to Chicago and agrees to look into the problem. He’s a little out of his element in a Chicago winter, and Dr. Geiss’s son and daughter are no warmer – especially his daughter Heidi, a gorgeous ice queen. It’s not a big surprise when Heidi becomes McGee’s special rehabilitation project.

One Fearful Yellow Eye is not, in my opinion, one of the best McGee novels in terms of plot. I thought the ending strayed a little close to deus ex machina.

But in terms of prose, I’d rate it one of MacDonald’s best. He was soaring as a stylist in those days. Although I’d entirely forgotten the plot here, I found more lines and passages than usual that had stuck in my mind from previous readings:

“Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”

The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city….

I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report: The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. And you can’t hardly taste the additives.

Anyway, I got a kick out of One Fearful Yellow Eye. Cautions for sexual situations and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dancing In the Dark,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Another Toby Peters novel by Stuart M. Kaminsky. Light, seriocomic entertainment. Can’t go wrong with these. In fact, I think I found Dancing In the Dark a little funnier than most of the others.

Hard-luck Hollywood PI Toby Peters has been having a run of unaccustomed good fortune. He actually has a little money in the bank for a change, and his creditors aren’t hounding him. Then he gets hired by Fred Astaire. Astaire’s job poses certain challenges. A woman named Lyla, mistress to gangster “Fingers” Intaglio (who got his nickname because he likes to cut people’s fingers off) demanded he get her dancing lessons from Astaire. Once Astaire agreed, she started pressuring him to go to bed with her, or else she’d denounce him to her knife-happy boyfriend. Toby’s on the case, even if it involves learning to dance – a pastime for which he has zero talent.

Before he knows it, Layla has been murdered, and she’s only the first of a string of victims. Backed up by his cowardly dentist friend and his gigantic ex-wrestler/poet office landlord, Toby does his best to avoid gangsters, solve the murders, and keep Astaire out of the newspapers. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a new relationship with a woman who got away many years ago.

The sexual mores here are not ones I approve of (but what else is new?). And Toby makes a decision to let one suspect off that puzzles me.

On the other hand, at one point he finds himself dancing with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. That seems to me to qualify as a good day even if somebody’s shooting at you.

Bottom line – Dancing In the Dark is a fun book, and one of my favorites in a fun series.