I’m reading another long, long book – I don’t know why I put myself through these things. This circumstance forces me to come up with creative ideas for the blog, and blast it, Jim, I’m an author, not a creator!
My work on The Baldur Game proceeds on schedule. I’m nearing the final climax – the Battle of Stiklestad. So I thought I’d look for a YouTube video about the battle. Informational for you and I can always use more local color. But, oddly enough, there aren’t any YouTube videos on the subject that I consider much good. Someone should address this need, which will doubtless become acute once The Baldur Game is an international bestseller and a Major Motion Picture.
But my searches led me to the holiday of Ólavsøka, the great national holiday in the Faroe Islands (it’s the celebration of the feast of St. Olav, not coincidentally on the anniversary of the battle). I’ve reviewed a couple of Chris Ould’s Faroes mystery novels (which I’m enjoying a lot) recently, so I thought I’d post a video about that event. But most of the videos I found were just shots of people in folk costumes walking through the streets of Torshaven. Perfectly good in their place, but I wanted something with a little more scenery. I finally found the video above, which I think rather nice. Here is another place I’d like to visit someday, though it’s becoming increasingly unlikely.
I hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving. Mine was just fine.
Photo credit: Famartin. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.
I think it’s been a few years since I’ve performed my Thanksgiving act of public benevolence by sharing with you my mother’s pumpkin pie recipe. This is the only kind of pumpkin pie I actually like. And, since I’m a ridiculously picky eater, you’ll probably like it too.
The recipe is simple. Stupidly simple. You don’t need to print it out — you’ll remember it.
Do everything it says in the instructions on the pumpkin pie filling can (any brand will do), EXCEPT:
Instead of using 2 eggs, use 7.
Pour into 2,, not 1 deep dish pie shells.
Otherwise, continue following step 1.
That’s it. The result is 2 light, custardy pumpkin pies. No need to thank me; the warm sense of magnanimity I feel is reward enough.
Heljarayga was a small, natural cove no more than a hundred yards wide at its midpoint. Beyond that I couldn’t see much. The mist hung like a damp dust-sheet over the headlands and above the almost mirror-smooth water it appeared to ebb and flow slightly, gossamer fine. The stillness made you want to hold your breath. Nothing and nobody moved.
I knew a few things about the Faeroes before I started reading Chris Ould’s mystery novels. One of my Norwegian cousins (gone now) was married to a Faeroese woman (still around). The hymn, Tiðin rennur, which Sissel sings so beautifully, comes from there…
And they still hold an annual whale hunt in the old Norse tradition. The old Norse tradition was to herd whales into a bay or inlet and beach them in the shallows, then kill them there. It was an important element of survival in a subsistence economy. (My own ancestral home in Norway is a farm called Kvalavåg, which means “whale bay” or “whale inlet.”) But the custom has been abandoned in most places. In the Faeroes it still continues, stubbornly maintained as a central element of local culture. This has not entirely escaped the notice of anti-whaling organizations, and that fact generates the central conflict of The Killing Bay, second of Ould’s Faeroes mysteries.
Our hero, Jan Reyna, is still in the Faeroes. He’s an English police detective (born in the Faeroes but raised in England) currently on suspension, not sure if he even wants to go home. He rather likes the Faeroes, and most of the relations he’s met there, but he doesn’t really feel at home.
The female cousin who’s hosting him brings him along to witness the grindadráp, the whale hunt. He’s not enthusiastic about the thing, but doesn’t feel qualified to judge. While there he meets Erla Sivertsen, a female Faeroese native who’s working as a photographer for an environmental protest group, documenting the kill. While there Erla clashes with Finn Sólsker, a local fisherman, but violence is averted.
Not long after, Erla is discovered murdered, and the local investigators, led by Jan’s new friend Hjalti Hentze, have it as their first job to check whether Finn has an alibi. (This is awkward because Finn happens to be his son-in-law.) When Erla’s coat and hat are discovered hidden in Finn’s fishing hut, Hjalti is forced to arrest him, but he’s not convinced of his guilt. In addition, why is he getting pressure from his superiors to close the case before he’s examined all possible leads?
The mystery in The Killing Bay was well-constructed and solid, but it was the setting that really riveted me, as it did with the previous book, The Blood Strand. Author Ould does a masterful job of evoking the setting and atmosphere of the islands. I felt like I’d been there.
Highly recommended. Cautions for language and mature themes. Environmental politics are treated with an even hand.
I found the above video on YouTube, and as you can see it’s entitled, “There’s no way Tolkien was speaking English here.”
This is fascinating. If you’ve read biographies of Tolkien, you’ll have read about the fact that his speech in conversation tended to be garbled. (He’s said to have blamed it on an injury to his tongue, though that’s disputed.) The most famous recording of his voice, where he reads short excerpts from The Lord of the Rings, is not hard to understand — and that isn’t surprising, since everyone agreed that when he was lecturing he was always loud and clear.
But here we hear him casually enthusing about one of his favorite topics — trees, and he’s babbling away pretty incomprehensibly.
Good characters do a lot to make a book work. But now that I’ve finished You’ll Get Yours, by Gerald Hansen, I think it’s possible to overdo it.
In the city of Derry, Ireland, a middle-aged woman’s body is found, dressed only in sexy underwear, on top of a cannon on the old city wall, her thumb superglued inside her mouth. As Detective Inspector Liam McLaughlin begins investigating, they find the woman hard to identify. No one seems to have known her. And when she finally is identified, as a woman who worked as a stocker at a nearby supermarket, it turns out she’s still a bit of a mystery. She seems to have no family, and there’s no record of her existence prior to four years ago.
In time it’s revealed that she’s been living under a false identity. She was once – briefly – famous, as a member of a Spice Girls-type girl band that had a few hits in the ‘90s. None of the other old group members are living in hiding, though, so what was she afraid of?
And the cops’ work won’t be made any easier by the almost universal hatred for the police that lingers in Derry, a residue from “the Troubles” of the old IRA years. In the end the solution will take them back to an old crime that time can’t bury and no one could possibly guess.
The emphasis in You’ll Get Yours is vivid characterization, and frankly I thought it was a little overdone. DI McLaughlin is a slob who’s always getting interrupted in the middle of eating a sandwich. His subordinates include a feminist detective with OCD, a fashion-plate womanizer, an over-eager rookie detective, and a female computer nerd. I think I was supposed to be amused by their interactions and frictions, but I found it all a little overdone and unconvincing.
The book wasn’t really that bad, plot-wise, and the solution was horrific and moving. But I couldn’t help being annoying by the comic book characterizations.
I should note, however, that references to religion were mostly respectful, and the author took trouble to avoid cursing.
I don’t watch a lot of movies anymore, even on home streaming. (A miniseries I worked on, by the way, Gangs of Oslo, is now on Netflix. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.) But for some reason I was flipping through the offerings on that same provider a few days ago, and I came on a film I’d never heard of, The Pale Blue Eye, based on a novel by Louis Bayard. In spite of its title, it’s not a Travis McGee story, but a period piece set at West Point in 1830, featuring Edgar Allan Poe. I was intrigued.
Retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is summoned to meet the commandant of West Point Military Academy, to investigate the death of a cadet. The young man was found hanged to death, but – bizarrely – his heart was cut out of his body. As Landor begins asking questions, he’s approached by a cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), who has unique insights and soon proves himself an invaluable assistant. Landor’s suspicions begin to focus on the family of Dr. Marquis, who did the initial autopsy, as Poe begins falling in love with the doctor’s lovely daughter, who is subject to seizures.
The internet tells me that response to this film has been mixed, but I must say I found it fascinating and effective. It’s beautifully photographed, and the costumes look very authentic to my eye (I’d have to check with my costume historian friend Kelsey to know for sure). Christian Bale does his usual superior work as an alcoholic investigator with a secret sorrow. Harry Melling is absolutely splendid as Poe. First of all, he looks like the guy in the photos. I have no way of knowing if the real Poe had the same kind of nervous tics in real life, but Melling sells it – I believed him entirely.
Robert Duvall also appears, and I didn’t recognize him at all (which is praise for an actor).
Also, witchcraft is treated as a negative thing, which is both historically accurate and gratifying. The ending, with its twist in an epilogue, is a bit confusing, but I’ll buy it.
I recommend The Pale Blue Eye, for grownups. Cautions for mature situations.
I spent the day balancing the pains in my ribs, shoulder and head with painkillers and doing a passable impression of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the sofa.
I knew nothing of Chris Ould or his Faeroes mystery series before I bought The Blood Strand. But I got a deal on it, and it was set in the Faeroes, a Nordic community I’d never visited fictionally (or in real life) before. I’m used to being depressed by Scandinavian Noir stories, but this one turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
Jan Reyna is an English police detective. He was born in the Faeroes, but his mother divorced his father and took him away when he was very young. Then she died, leaving him to be raised by relatives in England. He only met his father once, and then they got into a fistfight. But now the old man is hospitalized in the Faeroes following an accident and a stroke, and Jan succumbs to his aunt’s pressure to go and see his father while he’s still alive.
Arriving in the Faeroes, whose language he’s entirely forgotten, he finds his father (who turns out to be rich) unable to communicate. He meets his two half-brothers, one openly hostile, the other friendly. He also meets a local detective, Hjalte Hentze, who’s trying to figure out why Jan’s father was found in his car with a shotgun in the footwell, blood on the door, and a briefcase full of money in the trunk. That curiosity only increases when a young man’s body is found washed up on the shore with shotgun wounds. When he asks Jan to help out, Jan has nothing better to do… except for trying to find out why his mother left his father all those years ago.
I liked Jan Reyna and the other characters in The Blood Strand. The descriptions of Faeroese culture and scenery were interesting, and the unfolding mystery kept me fascinated. Though set in a historically Scandinavian setting, this book was not actually written by a Scandinavian, which may explain why it didn’t try to depress me to death. I had a good time reading it, and I look forward to the sequels.
Recommended. Not much offensive content either. References to Christianity (the Faeroese seem to be pretty religious) were mostly respectful.
King Olaf Trygvesson, as painted by my friend (okay, my acquaintance) Anders Kvaale Rue. I’ve never asked him why he pictures Olaf with a haircut documented as being popular with Danes.
Tonight, three more tales from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Oddly, they’re all about guys named Thorstein. Perhaps the name was a statistical favorite among Icelanders. Or perhaps the name was becoming a go-to for storytellers, like “Jack” in so many British folk tales.
First, there’s “The Tale of Thorstein of the East Fjords.” We’re told that he was “young and fleet of foot,” though those qualities don’t really figure in the story. He is on a pilgrimage to Rome, and while traveling through Norway he comes upon a richly dressed young man defending himself against four attackers. Thorstein decides to intervene and kills three of the attackers. The young man he rescued tells him that once he gets back from Rome, he should go to King Magnus’s (Magnus the Good, I assume) court and see him. Just ask for Styrbjorn. (Styrbjorn was the name of a famous Swedish hero. I don’t know of more than one man who bore that name, and he was long dead by this time.)
One assumes that Thorstein goes to Rome and returns to Norway, though the saga writer fails to mention that. The next scene shows Thorstein showing up at the king’s hall, where he sends a message in, asking for Styrbjorn. All the kings’ men have a good laugh at somebody asking for Styrbjorn (like somebody today asking for Eliot Ness or Frank Sinatra, I suppose), but eventually the king himself silences them, explaining that he himself is this “Styrbjorn.” Thorstein ends up going home to Iceland with a lot of money.
The second tale is “The Tale of Thorstein the Curious.” This Thorstein went to Norway and joined the court of King Harald (Hardrada, I suppose). One day the king assigns him to watch his clothing while he’s taking a bath, and Thorstein can’t resist looking into his bag. There he sees a couple knife handles made from a strange, golden wood. When the king comes out of the bath, he intuits that Thorstein has peeked. Displeased, he demands that Thorstein fulfill a quest or lose his favor. He must fetch the king two more knife handles of the same wood – but he won’t give him a clue as to where such trees grow (considering Harald Hardrada’s history, it might have been anywhere in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Scandinavia). Thorstein eventually fulfills the quest, but only by way of escaping a giant serpent. In an oddly prosaic epilogue, we’re informed that this Thorstein died with Harald in England.
Finally we encounter “The Tale of Thorstein Shiver.” This Thorstein has joined the household of King Olaf (at first I assumed this would be Saint Olaf, but by the end it’s clear that it’s Olaf Trygvesson). One night the king gives a command (for no apparent reason) that no man is to go out to the privy without a buddy. Thorstein wakes in the middle of the night and is reluctant to wake anyone else, so he sneaks out alone. In the privy he encounters a demon. Then follows a sequence in which he asks the demon three times about which damned souls scream the loudest in Hell. The demon tells him about three famous Nordic heroes, describing their sufferings in the fires of perdition, and (at Thorstein’s request) each time screaming in imitation of that hero. Meanwhile, with each question the demon inches closer to Thorstein. But just before the demon can grab him, the church bells start ringing, and the demon flees back where he came from.
In the morning, the king asks how everyone slept. Thorstein confesses his disobedience, but King Olaf isn’t much bothered over that. He explains that he heard the diabolical screaming, and therefore ordered the bells rung, saving Thorstein from Hell.
There’s an interesting addendum. The king asks Thorstein if he felt frightened at any point, and Thorstein says he doesn’t know what fear feels like, though he shivered a little during the demon’s final scream.
This seems to anticipate a motif we find in several Scandinavian folk tales catalogued in the 19th Century – “The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear.” It seems to me that what we’re observing in these stories is a stage in the evolution of the folk tale – the point where stories are still connected to actual historical figures (likely the storytellers’ ancestors), but are growing increasingly extravagant and fabulous in the process of retelling.
When commenting on a book not easily available to readers in this country (I ordered my copy from England), it’s probably appropriate to call my review a reading report. Posting this does you no particular good, but I’ve spent a couple days reading the book (which I wanted for research on my Work In Progress), and I’m gonna get a review out of it, by thunder.
The Vikings in Britain by Henry Loyn was published back in 1995, which is a while ago, I must admit, especially in a rapidly expanding field of knowledge. No doubt much of the research in the book has been superseded, but in aggregate it seems to give a pretty good overview.
In fact, what The Vikings in Britain appears to be is a textbook, designed as a broad introduction. Just the facts, so to speak (so far as they can be determined). The material is presented through a combination of chronological and geographic perspectives, which seemed to me a little confusing. The book is, apparently, part of a series entailing certain format constraints, including length, so the prose is pretty dense.
My sad final impression after reading is that it wasn’t much fun. That makes it ideal for the textbook market, I suppose, but in my opinion there’s no excuse for a book about Vikings being boring. (Look at Viking Legacy for a sterling example of engaging historiography and [cough] translation.) If you happen on a copy of The Vikings in Britain, and want to mainline a lot of information in a minimal number of reading hours, this book might be right for you.
The video above is one I found in my aimless wanderings on YouTube. The thing to bear in mind, if you watch it through (it’s not long) is that while I was watching it the first time, I had no idea what the artisan’s intention was. I thought at first the goal was a kind of Chippendale chair rail, and I simply found it visually engrossing, the same way I used to watch my Windows computer defrag.
And then it became “captive rings” (something I’d never heard of before), and I was astonished. What a wonderful thing, I thought.
And then it came into my mind –
[Let me just break in here with a disclaimer. I think I’ve made it clear before that I don’t believe in extra-biblical revelations, in the sense of treating them as the words of God. If I, or an angel from Heaven, tell you, “I have a new revelation from God for you,” run away.
On the other hand, I don’t doubt that God sometimes speaks to us personally, to encourage or even guide us. This may be a case of that. Or not. Remains to be seen. But I like it enough to share it here.]
So it came into my mind that maybe I’m like that piece of wood.
I’ve probably mentioned, in one or more of my too frequent navel-gazing posts, that the personality I possess now is not the one I was born with. I have it on good authority, from uncles and aunts, that when I was a little boy I was outgoing and friendly. These traits were knocked out of me in my upbringing, leaving me desperately shy and socially awkward.
To make it worse, all my life I’ve been informed by a series of employers (often while they were firing me) that it was precisely those personality traits (the ones I lost) that they wanted and didn’t get from me.
But looking at that woodturning video, it occurred to me, “Maybe I’m like that piece of wood. It didn’t start out to be a set of captive rings. It started out as a perfectly good, useful tree branch. First it was cut off, then it was dried in a kiln, then it was put in a lathe and subjected to a series of cuts and gouges which I can’t help anthropomorphizing as extremely painful.
But the result is something that delighted me. The captive ring piece is, to me, for want of a better word, wonderful.
Just possibly (I thought) I was put through all the stuff I’ve been through to make something wonderful out of me. (My guess would be my books, but who knows? Maybe I said the right words to somebody thirty years ago, and I’ve been riding on that one good act ever since.) I’m reminded of the potter in Jeremiah 18.
Of course, being me, I can’t resist looking at the question from the other side too. One should never forget the wisdom of this old internet meme:
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