I recently learned that the archaeologist Birgitta Wallace has died, aged 91. (She is featured in the Canadian video above, which is in English with French subtitles.)
Birgitta Wallace is memorable to the world for her outstanding work as chief archaeologist at the Viking site at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland (which I have visited, he mentioned casually).
She was the successor there to Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, the original discoverers of Viking artifacts at the site. Helge Ingstad was adamant throughout his career that the Vinland (“Wineland the Good”) of the sagas was the place he’d found in Newfoundland and nowhere else. He insisted – for some reason – that it was impossible that the Vikings could have gone anywhere else. “Stop looking. This is all there is,” was his message. The fact that no grapes have ever grown at that latitude did not trouble him – he considered the wine story pure fantasy.
Birgitta Wallace was less convinced. She noted that butternut shells were found in the excavations at L’Anse Aux Meadows, and butternuts also do not grow at that latitude. But they do grow at latitudes where grapes grow. She believed (and most historians today agree) that other Viking settlements very likely did exist in America. We just haven’t found them yet. We may never find them.
For me, Birgitta Wallace had the distinction of being about the most famous person I ever met personally. She spoke at the Chicago seminar on Vinland organized by Prof. Torgrim Titlestad back in 2010, which I attended. I walked up to her and told her I would like to be able to tell my friends I’d met her. We shook hands (very delicately; she was quite frail). It never occurred to me to take a selfie – I’m not in fact sure whether I even owned a phone with a camera in those days.
In the world of this movie, the Vanir gods have pointy ears, and the Aesir have regular ears. I think I carry the Vanir look off pretty well, don’t you?
Who’d have thought it? I had an adventurous weekend, by my standards.
Memorial Day is a solemn day, and I spent it solemnly, in part out of reverence, but to some extent because I was recovering from Saturday’s and Sunday’s exertions.
On Saturday I helped make a movie – hence the elfin photo above.
There’s a young man I met through my Viking reenactment group who told me, sometime last year, that he was involved in making small independent movies. I told him that I have acting experience, and am generally available. He said he might have a part for me in the one he was working on.
Some time later, he sent me a script – or a piece of a script. My part would involve three scenes out of a longer production. I would be playing the Norse god Njord. A small role, but as we old troopers like to say, “There are no small roles, only small… paychecks.” The production is described by the writer/director as “Star Trek meets Norse mythology.” I would wear my regular Viking outfit.
Then there was a long pause. A filming day was proposed a couple months back, but got cancelled because of somebody’s car trouble. Finally we were all able to get together this past Saturday, in a basement in South St. Paul. I’d been told we’d be working in front of a green screen, which shouldn’t mean a lot of hassle.
But once I arrived, and been issued pointed ears (a surprise) and met the (very pretty) young woman who’d be playing my daughter, the goddess Freya, the director said, “You know, it’s always better to shoot on location.” What location could stand in for the halls of Asgard? After a few minutes we were all in a car, headed off to the state capitol.
The state capitol.
I’ll tell you the truth – it would never have occurred to me that you could just march into the capitol building (after a three-block trudge from our parking spot – in costume, of course) and shoot a film. Surely there’d be security. Surely there’d be rules.
Well, there was security, but they ignored us. And if there are rules, nobody seemed to care. (Continued on next page.)
I never feel qualified to say a bloody thing about Memorial Day, having neither fought in a war myself nor lost a close loved one in a war. I merely carry a deep sense of indebtedness to countless people (mostly young men) who have paid the highest price you can pay in this world.
So I keep coming back to “The Mansions of the Lord,” from the 2002 movie, “We Were Soldiers,” written and directed by Randall Wallace. He wrote the song too, because the one he was looking for didn’t yet exist.
The wonders of my set-up some years ago, when I had fewer books to sell, and before I had a Viking tent of my own.
In case you’re in the general area this weekend, I will be making a not-so-rare public appearance, Saturday and Sunday, at the Fantasy of the Lakes Renaissance Festival in Lindstrom Minnesota. This will be my first time at this event; they claim to be family friendly. (Though I sometimes pretend to be too good for Renaissance Festivals, I am in fact a lowly fantasy writer, after all.)
This will also be my first opportunity to offer my entire Erling Saga for sale in paperback form. For many years only The Year of the Warrior and West Oversea have been incarnate, and I’ve given away promotional bookmarks for the e-books of the rest of the series. When people asked if they were available in paper too, I’ve mumbled something about “maybe someday.” Well, someday is now. I assume after this I’ll have to answer questions about whether there are e-book versions.
There’ll be questions about audiobooks too, of course, so I’ll still get to practice my “someday” responses. (Troll Valley is coming, though. I’m about a third of the way through it. Didn’t get much done this morning; Friday mornings are rough because the garbage trucks rattle by.)
Pray for me. I’ll be dealing with human beings, and that’s always a trial.
I’m going to bore you again tonight with another update on my audiobook exertions. Today’s session was okay, but yesterday’s was remarkable. I talked about it on Basefook, but I feel like expanding on the subject here, and I’m between books to review.
What happened yesterday was that I was working on Chapter 3 of Troll Valley. Since I’m sure you’re familiar with that classic work of the imagination, you’ll surely remember how Miss Margit, the fairy godmother, tells Chris the story of The Twelve Wild Ducks.
What I realized as I was reading was that I was having a good time. It was fun.
I don’t have a lot of fun anymore (never did, to be honest). But one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most – and gotten least opportunity to do – is acting. The peculiar convolutions of my psychology have made me one of those natural actors who are naturally shy (there are more of them than you may think. Henry Fonda was terribly shy. Audrey Hepburn was too, and Meryl Streep is, according to a quick internet search). Some of them had (or have) stage fright too, something I have mercifully been spared.
But still, audiobooks may be just the medium for me. I can do them all by myself, and act my little heart out. The Twelve Wild Ducks gave me an opportunity to do both my Scandinavian accent (which is pretty good, I think) and my English accent (passable, at least in small portions).
Anyway, I had a ball yesterday.
And I thought about how I’ve wrestled with this project. Dealing with my crippling fear of the recording software. Working at it doggedly, a little each day, as much as my insecurities permitted. Incremental progress. How long have I been at this?
And now I’m starting to have fun. I took a risk, and now I’ve received a small reward.
Jordan Peterson talks frequently about taking small steps. If you can’t clean your room, clean a drawer. If you can’t do that, dust a shelf. Begin small and escalate. Supposedly, as you do more and more each day, some gland will excrete little shots of dopamine into your system, making you feel happy.
Frankly, this has never been my experience. There was a period in my life when I worked hard at trying to be more social. Smile (very hard for me). Speak to strangers (harder still). I was seeing a counselor at the time, and he cheered my efforts on. I’m pretty sure that helped. But then I moved away, and lost that support. I continued trying to be outgoing in my new environment, but gradually I ran out of gas. The little dopamine shots that were supposed to reward my efforts failed to show up. My emotional bank ran out of funds and I reverted to shyness.
And then there was music. As a kid I took 6 years of piano lessons. I never really got better. I hit a sort of glass ceiling. Later in life I spent about 3 years trying to learn guitar. Smack up against the same ceiling. Steady, incremental work, but no progress. No payoff. I assumed I must have a dopamine blockage.
But at last I’ve achieved a thing. In my seventh decade, I’ve learned a life lesson.
I always was a late bloomer.
I may be ready to marry by the time I’m in my 80s.
Still haven’t finished the book I’m reading, so you get further puerile musings on art tonight.
I have read Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty twice, and I’m still not sure I understand it. I kind of suspect that’s the point of the book – that art is essentially an effort to convey an experience that can’t be pinned down in words. You “catch” it or you don’t. Kind of like Zen, I suppose, though I hate to use that comparison.
But my point (I think) is that art is mysterious and evasive. There are formulas, but they never really touch the heart of the thing. It’s what C.S. Lewis called “Joy” in Surprised by Joy, and he linked it with Romanticism – which, not coincidentally, is what The Truth and Beauty is also about.
I watched one of Klavan’s interviews on YouTube the other day, and (if my memory is correct) he said he talked about the value of Pi and Fibonacci’s theorem in TTAB. He said that Pi expresses itself in Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, which, he maintained, suggests that the Trinity itself is expressed in creation. Every living thing around us, from the smallest single-cell animal to the human and the elephant, develops according to that ratio. The leaves of the trees tend to grow in tripartite forms. Fractals create three-part shapes, leading to astonishingly naturalistic digital images.
The value of Pi – the number three plus a little more. Three, but not a static three. There’s some mystery added, a little extra to surprise us and keep us off balance.
Theologians have scoffed at the legend of St. Patrick teaching the Irish about the Trinity by showing them a three-leaf clover. “Bad analogy,” they say.
But what if the clover expresses the Trinity in a more profound way? Not as an analogy, but as an artifact? The metaphorical fingerprints of the Potter in the clay vessel He has created?
I think this Fibonacci stuff may be one reason why I was never a good artist, back when I was young and dreamed of making a living with pencil and brush. An art teacher in high school once told me I was good at symmetry, and that pleased me. But symmetry isn’t what you want in art, I think, most of the time. You want dynamism –a sense of movement, if only the movement of the viewer’s eye.
I missed that Fibonacci knack – dividing things into threes, creating a compelling imbalance. My work just sat there. (Among its other failings.) I always think of a panel from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip that impressed me – Hobbes leaps at Calvin, and the line of his body and tail is so elegant that you can feel the motion. I could never draw a line like that, though I wanted to very much.
Anyway, I guess it all goes back to a basic disconnect between our impoverished age and the past (the break came during the World Wars, I think). The old artists believed they were expressing God (or even pagan gods), and sought to recreate beauty. Nowadays, artists only think they’re expressing themselves – and they believe themselves to be cosmic accidents (bad for the environment too).
Christians are capable of producing really great art. Subcreation. Genuine, God-reflecting beauty. We’ve done it in the past. And our competition is occupying itself taping bananas to walls. It should be an easy contest.
But we need a) to take art seriously, and b) to encourage our talent.
Tonight I must be in an antic mood, for I intend to talk about Art.
This is, of course, absurd. I am a middlebrow, generally unknown fantasy writer. Google my latest novel (The Baldur Game, in case you forgot, which is not unlikely) you’ll find that the only person talking about the book online is me. I have zero standing to make pronouncements about Art.
But I’ve had a couple thoughts. I’ll maunder on about the first one tonight. The next one will be provided the next time I find myself with a night without a book to review.
One truth that grows increasingly unavoidable as one grows old (though I think I’ve never repressed it much myself) is that we are going to die. The sands of time are sinking, the sun is setting in the west. Choose your metaphor.
I’m inclined to think of it as like floating down a river. You can’t slow your velocity and you can’t go ashore and rest – you are forever being carried by the current.
The river has pleasant stretches and unpleasant stretches. Some stretches are horrible. Some are delightful.
But good or bad, they speed past. The bad ones come to an end, but so do the good ones.
And sometimes you see one so wonderful, so sublime that you want to preserve it. You want to share it. You feel that the world will be better – it will be an act of love for humanity – if you can just preserve that moment for others to enjoy as well.
That’s what art is. An effort to preserve – to freeze – one of those fleeting moments and make it available to others.
Art, therefore, is an attempt at stopping time.
Or it was, until the Postmoderns decided that Art should be an exercise in self-expression, the less interesting the self, the better.
Today, free association. Because I used to work for the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations. (Actually, no – I just free-associated that thought.)
What actually happened was that I was reading the latest issue of the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty magazine today, and saw an article about the founding father John Dickinson. My brain burped, and somehow the name came out “Dick Johnson” in my mind.
That sent me sliding down the memory hole, to my antique boyhood. One of the only books we had in our home was the anthology of light verse, What Cheer, published by Modern Library, edited by David McCord. I spent a lot of time with that book, understanding about half of what I read but fascinated by the rhyme, rhythm, and word play. One of the poems that caught my fancy was an American political ditty about the politician and soldier Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850). I can’t find the poem in my own copy at the moment, but I remember the chorus going, “Rumpsey-dumpsy, rumpsey-dumpsy; I, Dick Johnson, killed Tecumseh.”
The poem struck me at the time because I had a schoolteacher named Dick Johnson. I wondered, vaguely, who this Dick Johnson might be (I did not wonder about Tecumseh. Contrary to what the educational demagogues are telling us today, we did learn about Native Americans in school back then). Once the internet became available, I eventually looked the man up. He had a fascinating story, one that demonstrates some of the overlooked nuances in American history.
Going straight to the headline, Richard Johnson was Vice President of the United States under Martin Van Buren. He holds the distinction of being the only V.P. ever elected by the Senate under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution.
Johnson was a Kentuckian. He attended Transylvania University and became a lawyer, being noted for doing pro bono work for the poor. Among the properties he inherited from his father was a female slave of mixed race, what they called an “octoroon,” named Julia Chinn. He fell in love with her. It was illegal for them to marry, but Johnson treated her as a common law wife and acknowledged their children. This arrangement would impair his political career, but he remained faithful to her until her death in 1833. Both their daughters married white men, though they were not permitted to inherit his property.
He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and then became the first native Kentuckian elected to Congress. He was one of the “war hawks” in the run-up to the War of 1812. Notably, he supported the claims of Alexander Hamilton’s widow to army wages which her late husband had refused during the Revolution, despite the fact that Hamilton had been a member of the opposition party.
Back in Kentucky, Johnson raised a troop of 300 volunteers for the war and they elected him their major; later he became a colonel. Most of these volunteers’ actions were against the Native Americans allied with the British. At the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, he led a charge against the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in which Tecumseh was killed. Johnson himself never claimed to have fired the shot that struck that charismatic man down, but several others said he did. Historians are undecided.
The capitol was in ruins, burned by the English, when Johnson returned to congress in 1814, and they met in temporary quarters. As a legislator, Johnson pushed for pensions for military widows and orphans, and for public improvements in the west.
In 1819 he was elected to the Senate (state legislatures did it back in those days, you may recall). In 1820 he voted in favor of a law to bar slavery north of the 36˚30’ north latitude line (with the exception of Missouri). In 1822 he proposed a bill outlawing imprisonment for debtors in the US. It did not pass, but he reintroduced it every year. (Full disclosure – he had debt troubles of his own.)
He became a supporter of Andrew Jackson, and was one of the original founders of the Democratic Party in 1828. In 1825 he succeeded in getting funding for a school for children of the Choctaw nation which was established on his own property and which he oversaw (there were accusations of conflict of interest).
On an amusing note, Johnson sponsored a bill in 1823 for funding an expedition to discover whether the earth was hollow. This proposal failed. In 1828 he lost a race for reelection to the senate. He returned to the House in 1829. In 1832, his law to abolish debtor’s prisons finally went through. He was considered as Andrew Jackson’s running mate in 1832, but Martin Van Buren got the nod. Friends, including Davy Crockett, urged Johnson to run for president in 1836, but he ended up as Van Buren’s running mate. Much of Johnson’s political opposition rose from distaste, especially in the south, for his racially mixed domestic situation. Thus, though Van Buren did win the presidency, Johnson got considerably fewer electoral votes, and the race was thrown into the Senate, as mentioned above.
His tenure as vice president was not notable, except for continuing accusations of conflict of interest, and his adoption of a personal fashion brand – he made it a practice to wear a red tie and vest at all times. In 1840, although Van Buren was reelected, Johnson was not. By that time, it is reported, his mind was beginning to fail.
Back home in Kentucky, he served in the state legislature and was one of Daniel Boone’s pallbearers. He died of a stroke, aged 70.
The early 19th Century is a somewhat neglected period in our common memory, it seems to me, except for a few incidents like the Alamo and the California Gold Rush. But I always found it a fascinating time, full of idiosyncrasies, as the new country tried out its muscles, tested its limits, and tried to figure out exactly what kind of a country it wanted to be.
Here’s the latest news from the Saga Heritage Foundation, the organization that produced the wonderfully translated book, Viking Legacy.
Their next projects, as I understand it, are English versions of the Flatey Book and Tormod Torfaeus’ Latin history of Norway. I doubt there’ll be much work for me in all this, but it’s worth spreading the news.
Prof. Titlestad, who wrote Viking Legacy, is the fellow in the wide-brimmed hat.
What is on Walker’s TV as he writes this blog post, America asks.
The TV series above. It’s been my habit for some time to turn to some old TV show or movie at this time of day, as a sort of white noise. Quite often it’s been some old British crime TV series. I watched, for instance, several episodes of an ancient series called “Z-Cars” (pronounced, of course, “Zed cars”), which in its earliest seasons featured a beardless Brian Blessed as a uniformed cop – one of his early acting jobs.
Now I’ve found this 1985 British miniseries set in Norway, entitled “Maelstrom.” It was broadcast in the US, on one of the cable networks, back in the late ’80s, and I recorded it on VHS at the time because, after all, it was set in Norway, and it wasn’t awful.
It stars an English/Swedish actress named Tussi Silberg as a British woman who discovers that a Norwegian millionaire she’s never heard of has left her some property and a dried fish factory. Mystified, she flies over there, where she finds everyone welcoming, and nobody seems to begrudge her a share of the family’s rather large fortune. But strange occurrences… occur, and behind it all there’s the continued puzzle of what possible connection the old man might have had to her.
It’s not bad. The acting’s fair, except for some histrionics at the end. The psychology is pretty naïve. And, of course, there’s the beautiful Norwegian scenery.
