All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

A fatal slip of the tongue

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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’

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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

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“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

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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

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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.)

Reading, Writing

Author’s notebook: The helpless hero

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Photo credit: Luis Villasmil. Unsplash license.

Yesterday I reviewed a mystery novel by Peter Rowlands. I praised the prose, but thought the plotting and characterization below par. Still, I bought the next book – which I’ll review, I imagine, tomorrow. Tonight I want to comment on something that struck me as I read that second book.

Author Rowlands, as I see it, is still learning the craft of storytelling – as am I, to be honest. One weakness in this book is his overuse of plain luck in order to get the hero out of trouble. On two occasions in this story (so far) his hero has been at the mercy of genuine murderers, but has been saved by the timely appearance of chance passersby.

This is one of the big problems with that species of hero I might call “the helpless hero.” In some ways it’s a great strategy to make your hero an ordinary guy (or gal) with no particular skills or experience with violence. It raises the dramatic tension nicely. The reader identifies with the character and thinks, “What would I do in a situation like that? Could I survive?” (Honest answer: probably not.)

But that’s also the problem. How does he survive? Your James Bonds and Orphan X’s possess training and well-honed instincts for self-defense and survival. But your helpless hero twists in the wind. Rowlands chose to solve that problem, in this book, by resorting to dumb luck twice. My own rule, in reading and writing, is, one dumb luck escape per customer, per story. Any more than that is pushing credibility. Real life offers numerous instances of repeated lucky breaks – and unlucky breaks. But fiction isn’t as strange as truth. You can’t push your reader’s credulity. He paid good money for this book (unless, like me, he takes advantage of free promotional offers).

One work-around that’s become popular – and I’ve commented on it more than once in reviews – is bringing in what I jokingly call “the psycho killer friend.” He doesn’t actually need to be a psycho killer, of course. Probably better if he’s not, come to think of it. But he needs to be physically strong and skilled in fighting. It helps if he’s ruthless too, and condescending about the hero’s moral scruples. At some point in the past, your hero will have pulled a thorn from his paw or something, earning his undying loyalty. This PKF can be on call for  those times when your hero knows he’s going somewhere dangerous. He might even be savvy enough to shadow your hero on his own initiative, when his experience tells him his friend is being foolhardy. A nice twist can be introduced if you remove the PKF’s protection as you’re building up to the final confrontation, forcing your hero to work without a net. (Best not to save your one budgeted lucky break for the climax, though. The effect of that is kind of anticlimactic.)

Another acceptable solution is to have the authorities (usually the police) secretly keeping tabs on your hero, ready to appear, like the US Cavalry, in the nick of time, to the hero’s (and hopefully the reader’s) surprise.

Any other suggestions?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Alternative Outcome,’ by Peter Rowlands

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Sometimes one great virtue in a book, especially if it’s a virtue that’s grown rare and is much missed, will outweigh a few flaws. That’s the case I have to present for Alternative Outcome by Peter Rowlands.

Mike Stanhope, our hero, is an English journalist in the field of transportation and logistics (think trucks and containers). He makes a fair living, but is not fulfilled. For fulfillment, he wrote a mystery novel, which he self-published as an e-book. The book was sparked by a chance encounter in a railway station, when he ran into a woman who reminded him of a girl he’d known as a boy. He met that girl at a coastal resort where his family vacationed, and had a crush on her, but only spoke to her once. He combines this memory with another event that occurred around the time he knew the girl – a big jewelry robbery nearby. One of the robbers was never caught, and it’s rumored that some of the loot was never recovered.

Then someone burgles and searches Mike’s apartment. That’s only the beginning of his troubles, as he realizes that someone has read his book and assumed that his description of the crime is based on actual knowledge – which is not the case. Now wholly engaged, Mike makes a real effort to find the girl he remembers and learn what really happened with he robbery. This will lead him into genuine mortal danger, but also into a new romantic relationship.

I thought Alternative Outcome lagged at times, and some of Mike’s decisions seemed implausibly rash. Nevertheless, this book had one supreme virtue that I prize and rarely see anymore: Author Rowlands, who is in fact a journalist in the transportation and logistics field, can actually spell and write a grammatical, coherent English sentence. I reveled – I luxuriated – in the clean, comprehensible prose. The weaknesses in the story weren’t enough to put me off as long as I had this good writing to enjoy.

Recommended. Cautions for language and sexual situations.

Authors

Snorri’s place

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Tonight, in the absence of any ideas from my corner, here’s a short video from the great Jackson Crawford, filmed at Reykholt, the home of Snorri Sturlusson, the great Icelandic saga author, poet, and chieftain. Crawford explains some things about Snorri’s life. And death. Which happened right there. That pool is geothermally heated, by the way.

Have a good weekend.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Winter Grave,’ by Peter May

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And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.

What do you say about a book that was well-written, one which you enjoyed, when you believe that book to be effectively (if unintentionally) in the service of evil? That’s my problem with Peter May’s A Winter Grave.

Actually it’s not that big a problem. The answer is to tell the truth and let the reader make up his or her own mind.

The year is 2051, and climate catastrophe has struck the earth. The tropics are uninhabitable now, and the loss of the Gulf Stream has turned Scotland into a subarctic wasteland. Addie Sinclair, a weather monitor, climbs a mountain near Loch Leven to check her equipment and discovers the body of a man, frozen in the ice.

Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow police detective. When his superior tells him to go up to the village of Kinlochleven to investigate, he begs off at first. He explains, truthfully, that he’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will be retiring from the force. But when he hears Addie Sinclair’s name he changes his mind, saying it was a false alarm. Because Addie is his own daughter, from whom he has been alienated a long time.

Cam boards an electronic, self-piloting helicopter with a friendly forensic scientist. But when they arrive, murder quickly follows, and Cam is soon fighting for his life in the midst of blizzards, while trying to find a way to explain to his daughter – after all these years – the real cause of her mother’s death.

Peter May is one of the best mystery writers out there, and A Winter Grave showcases all his virtues. The prose is excellent, the characters interesting, the setting vivid, the mystery confounding.

But it’s all in the service of the Green religion. The message of this book, when you get down to it, is, “Wake up! If you don’t surrender all your liberties to the government without delay, so they can implement draconian regulations on every area of your life, future generations will be cursed, and it will be all your fault.” It’s a fascist book, though I’m confident the author is a true believer and intends nothing of the sort.

One thing I found ironic was the book’s depiction of the Green movement as a beleaguered, embattled little cause with diminishing political power, rejected even by the news media.

I can only dream.

Writing

Author’s journal: Holden on to hope

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The current Holden Lutheran Church building. Photo credit: St. Olaf College

I’m pretty sure a one-hour road trip to my home town didn’t used to exhaust me the way it does nowadays. This is partly because I’m ancient and venerable, of course – and I have particular reason to be aware of that just now. But I’m pretty sure it’s also because we didn’t have constant, disruptive highway repair going on in those days. I suppose one must bear in mind that the highways – like the glaciers and the pyramids – were much younger back then. But I also suspect that the Powers That Be just like messing with Gaia-killing auto drivers.

Which is a roundabout way of approaching my story. I drove down to Kenyon, my home town, today. It was the second time I’ve been there in a week, not a common occurrence. A group of my high school classmates and I gather somewhere for lunch every time there’s a fifth Wednesday in any month. Today was that day. We met at a new café in Kenyon, which is remarkable in itself. Kenyon has rarely been capable of supporting more than one restaurant, and sometimes it hasn’t been up to any at all. I wish the folks at Angie’s well. The food was pretty good.

There was really little reason for me to go down today, though, since I saw most of these people on Saturday. (Must be the gypsy in me.) We held a class reunion Saturday, which we do every five years. (And no, I won’t tell you which anniversary it was. No doubt it’s possible to deduce my age through a web search, but I’m not going to hand it to you on a plate.)

We met in a nice little park in Holden, a township north of town. Holden is pioneer country for Kenyon, one of the earliest Norwegian settlements in the area, going back to the 1850s. This was long before my own family moved up from Iowa to settle ignominiously southwest of town, with the newbies. Holden was the home and headquarters of Pastor Bernt Julius Muus, a prominent Norwegian-American pastor and church planter. Muus is best remembered as a main founder of St. Olaf College in Northfield. In his day, however, he was equally notorious for being sued by his wife for divorce – something that just didn’t happen among Lutheran clergy at the time. It became quite a scandal – the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjornsen, on tour in the U.S., interviewed Mrs. Oline Muus and found – to his own surprise, since he hated the Norwegian clergy – that he sympathized with her husband. Prof. Georg Sverdrup of Augsburg College (the subject of a journal I edit), took the wife’s side, seeing Pastor Muus’ behavior as symptomatic of the dictatorial tendencies of too many pastors in church bodies he disagreed with. The radical journalist Marcus Thrane wrote a satirical play about the affair, which was produced in Chicago.

In spite of the fact that I was standing on what had once been enemy territory, from a Georg Sverdrup point of view, I had a good time in Holden Community Park, next door to the church, where they’ve restored an old railroad depot as a shelter.

I’m not sure whether attending reunions is good or bad for the human psyche. It’s a little melancholy to see how much one’s friends have aged (though a moronic but benign natural response assures one that oneself looks better than everybody else). But it’s morally good, I’m convinced, to display oneself before the others, giving them the same reassurance. Also, of course, to renew acquaintances and see what everybody’s been up to. And to learn everybody’s name over again, because I DON’T RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE RELICS!

I can say for sure that the experience knocked me for a loop psychologically. I’ve been weird for days now, and I fell off my diet. Various explanations for this reaction occur to me, but I’m not sure of any of them.

Nonetheless, I carry on relentlessly with my novel writing. I’ve wrapped up the Baltic Campaign of King Knut’s war against St. Olaf (the man, not the school). Now I must build up, with tragic inevitability to… well, you’ll know when you read the book. I’ve been experimenting with some limited multiple viewpoint narrative in this work, and that’s where I’ll be going now. I’ll need to pause at least one day in laying down words, to organize my research.