I’ve got a little translating work today, which puts me behind in my reading. So instead of a book review, here’s an analysis of another kind of storytelling — a video on Buster Keaton’s comedy film techniques. I’m a huge fan of Keaton. In my world, Charlie Chaplin is nowhere.
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Sea Shanties Are All Over TikTok, and Why Not
Postman Nathan Evans of Glascow, Scotland has spent several months or more posting music to YouTube and TikTok. He sings some of his own songs, covers of popular songs, and also traditional Scottish folk. On December 27, he posted a video to TikTok with him singing a New Zealand sea shanty called “Wellerman.”
That’s the song that has been copied and harmonized with a thousand times over to make international media outlets write articles on everyone on social media singing sea shanties. It’s incredible. C|Net has a run down of it with some examples.
Evans told them he is as surprised as anyone with his suddenly popularity, and in a TikTok video posted yesterday he reports he has a record deal to release Wellerman as a single.
He has been planning to do more sea shanties. Fans have offered their recommendations. I thought to suggest “Leave Her, Johnny” and “Bully in the Alley,” but I see he has done these already. (Though TikTok folks may want to dwell on Stan Rogers’s version of “Leave Her, Johnny,” for inspiration. Oh, and I see The Longest Johns have already put together social media choir of “Leave Her, Johnny” with a million views since 12/30.)
Stan Rogers wrote “Barrett’s Privateers” himself, as he says in this video. That’s one worthy of taking social media by storm, despite the swearing in the chorus. Another contender would be John Kanaka, as Lars posted earlier. Here’s another that would light some people up, “Bonnie Ship the Diamond,” sung at the pace a Gaelic storm.
Faith among the ruins
I have some dislocated thoughts I’m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you.
The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who’s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones miniseries. Beside him is his wife, Gry Molvær Hivju, who is a documentary film maker. They constitute, as you’ll note, a striking couple.
I heard about a documentary series they made together, and watched it recently on the Norwegian NRK network feed, using a VPN. I don’t know if it will ever be offered outside Norway. The series is called simply “Olav,” and it relates a personal quest to find the historical truth about Norway’s patron saint, Olav (or Olaf. Best known, of course, as a character in my novel, The Elder King) Haraldsson. We learn that Kristofer first learned of Olav as a boy, when his father, also an actor, played Olav in the annual Olav play presented (most years) near Trondheim, Norway. He tells us that Olav has been his hero all his life – the Viking who became a Christian king, and converted his country.
I’m not sure how seriously to take the dramatic arc of the series. Hivju may be playing a role as he presents himself as a lot like a little boy, shivering with excitement to go where his hero went and see all the evidence of his life. His disappointment is palpable as he travels to England, France, and Russia and finds – generally – that evidence for Olav’s life (outside the Icelandic sagas) is pretty sparse. Judging by the evidence, Olav was a fairly minor player on the European scene until after his death, when Norwegian churchmen and chieftains promoted him and his saga for political reasons. (I note that no mention whatever is made of the work of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, whose book, Viking Legacy, I translated. They even report that a Norwegian translation of the Icelandic Flatøybok has recently been released, but they don’t mention its publisher, Saga Bok, Prof. Titlestad’s publishing house, or even let us see a copy).
The final resolution of the whole thing (and I’d have bet my house that this would be the case) is that they conclude that history and faith are different things, and each is important in its own realm. I reject that principle in terms of the central affirmations of Christianity, though I don’t doubt that many false stories have been told of saints and holy men over the years. I wondered about Hivju’s own faith, which he never really explains. Does his faith include Olav’s God, or only Olav as a hero? None of my business, I suppose.
Around the same time, I was reading a couple books by Blake Banner, whose Cobra series of thrillers I’ve enjoyed very much. So I picked up a couple from his Dead Cold Case series, which I’d started and given up on for some reason. Reading again, I remembered why. I’ve never encountered a more God-bothered series of books, and in a bad way. In each of these books (as far as I could tell) the author felt it necessary to insert a few Awful Christians. Judgmental, repressed, joyless, hypocritical, and often criminal. His knowledge of Christianity seems to come primarily from a bad experience of Roman Catholicism – when he describes an American Methodist Church, he assumes that they cross themselves when they enter the church, call their services masses, and reject sexual pleasure as sin. I feel sorry for whatever bad experience the author must have had, but I couldn’t take much of it.
We live among the ruins of shattered faith today. Those who believe, generally believe in a subjective way that has little to do with the real world. Those who don’t believe seem furious at God for not existing. We who hold onto Christianity have lots of work to do. It may be illegal work, before long. But that’s how Christianity started, after all.
Aspire to Quiet Living
It’s been a hard year overall, though not entirely because of Covid. I know one person who died of the virus and many others who had it and recovered without incident. For months, our church has offered two services to allow people to spread out and livestreams one of them for the third of the congregation who won’t return until doctors give them a green light. (For only a few more days, you can watch the recording of our Christmas concert. I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my singing voice, but the rest of the choir and the instrumentalists are great.)
Tennessee has surged in new cases, but it still feels removed from us, at least by a step. I’ve worried about my aunt, who says she lives around many people who have tested positive, but she hasn’t picked it up. My wife and I have been exposed to it technically; two of my daughters could easily have been as well, but we’ve not had reason to pursue tests for it. Like I said, it feels a bit removed from us.
More immediate has been the tornado damage to one of our suburbs. The video above was taken on Tuesday this week and shows the edge of an area that tornados ripped up in April. Large houses were flattened, some smaller ones too, and others were skipped as tornadoes do. The trees tell most of the story. You won’t see the many houses behind me, completely destroyed, or my high school, that had built up since my days there but now has been scraped to the ground. Every building was compromised in the storm.
We had been in lock down for a few weeks when this happened. All of that was shelved when we turned out to clean up streets, help neighbors recover, and share food. I helped a church team build several storage sheds on our parking lot, which other members of the church and community used. (I plan to put up a smaller one in my backyard this year.)
New routines have come since then; normal has taken a hiatus.
I’ve heard many sermons on living a quiet, respectable life of prayer and service based on this passage: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:1-4 ESV).
Sometimes I wonder if the quite life is evangelical enough. I wonder if we live in noisy times and need bold witnesses to confront materialistic, entertainment-driven people who take their values from today’s famous who are only justifying actions they haven’t thought through. But I also think it’s peaceful, quiet people who clean up storm-damaged neighborhoods, who look after widows and shut-ins, and who take the time to pray for everyone they can think of. They aren’t people looking to make a name for themselves.
Will we continue to nurture the quiet life in 2021 or distract ourselves from it?
“Except for the porridge”
In pursuit of my mission to enlighten the world on Norwegian Christmas customs, I offer the clever TV commercial above, complete with English subtitles.
It will help your comprehension to know that the “nisse” is roughly what the English would call a brownie, or possibly a gnome. He is distinguished by his characteristic red cap. Every farm has at least one, and they control the farm’s luck. Get on his wrong side and he’ll sour the milk, sicken the livestock, sabotage the equipment, etc. My maternal grandmother’s father, according to my mother, blamed everything that went wrong on his farm on the smågubbe, the “little old man,” who was the same as the nisse (like the elves, they prefer it if you don’t use their name).
One matter of supreme importance in coexisting with the nisse is the Christmas porridge (julegrøt). The nisse expects to get a bowlful of the family’s Christmas porridge every Christmas Eve. You leave it out in the barn for him. He especially requires that a generous pat of butter be placed on top. Neglect that, and you can expect a very bad year. Sometimes it’s the farm owner’s fault, and sometimes the fault of a lazy servant. It makes no difference. The nisse must have his due. (I wonder who screwed up last Christmas.)
Tine is a popular brand of butter in Norway, and they did themselves proud with this charming and technically excellent ad, a few years back.
Maybe Effective Communication is More than 7 Percent Verbal
From our You Have Heard It Said But I Tell You desk, is only 7 percent of effective communication verbal?
Many people will note the importance of body language to being trusted or persuasive, and they may say spoken words are only 7 percent of communication, the rest being 38 percent tone of voice and 55 percent body language. Where did this idea come from?
It comes from reports on the communication research of Albert Mehrabian of UCLA during the 1960s. Philip Yaffe describes the two studies for Ubiquity. In one study, Mehrabian had his test subjects judge the emotion of a woman saying “maybe” in one of three different ways and then seeing a photo of her expressing these emotions. They guessed correctly more often after seeing the photo than by tone of voice alone.
In the other study, Mehrabian gave nine words, spoken in three different ways, and asked subjects to judge the emotion expressed. He concluded tone of voice carries a lot of weight in communication.
You can think it through yourself. Imagine the words “maybe” and “thanks” said in three different ways that would clue you in to what the person was saying. The excited maybe that hopes it works out, the uncommitted maybe, and the maybe that doesn’t want to say no to your face, at least in the moment. Nobody needed research to work this out. Was this Mehrabian’s actual conclusion?
Yaffe writes, “Professor Mehrabian’s conclusion was that for inconsistent or contradictory communications, body language and tonality may be more accurate indicators of meaning and emotions than the words themselves. However, he never intended the results to apply to normal conversation. And certainly not to speeches, which should never be inconsistent or contradictory!”
I am told Jonathan Edwards read his sermons with little emotion, addressing the back wall, yet his “The Excellency of Christ” is marvelous reading and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had people withering in the pews. Should we attribute this to the Holy Spirit’s use of the words? Sure, but how much human spirit is any of our words? Probably far more than 7 percent.
Tolkien’s House Already Protected
You may have heard of a fund-raising effort to solicit a few million pounds for the purchase of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford house on Northmoor Road. Big names from the movie adaptations have encouraged fans to donate to Project Northmoor.
The Tolkien Society says they will not support it, “citing its concerns that, among others, no Tolkien experts were serving as directors, that the building would not be open to the public, and that the plan they had seen ‘includes spiritual retreats,'” reported by The Guardian.
That smell of Christianity may be what scares The Guardian, but the Society has a number of reasons they decided against supporting the project, including that the house “is a listed building in a conservation area – with a blue plaque proudly showing its connection to Tolkien – meaning the property is well protected under the law and not in need of rescue.”
(via Prufrock News; Photo: Tolkien House, 2002, by Stefan Servos – Ardapedia/Wikicommons)
Concerning garlands
I posted this video of Sissel singing “Det Lyser i Stille Grender” the other day. Watch it if you missed it before, or watch it again; it’s worth it.
There’s one detail I wanted to comment on. That concerns the Christmas tree standing behind the singer. Note what they did with the shiny garlands.
In America, it’s customary to wind the garlands around the tree, top to bottom (or bottom to top, if you prefer; I’m not dogmatic on the point). The effect is similar to what snow looks like as it lays on the branches of an evergreen after a snowfall. But in Norway it’s common (though not universal) to arrange the garlands as you see here – hanging straight down from the star (or angel; again, I’m not dogmatic) at the top. The idea here (I believe) is to suggest the rays of the star shining down from Heaven. If you set a Nativity creche underneath, that works even better. I did a search for pictures of Norwegian Christmas trees, and often they look very much like ours, but I’ve rarely seen the star-ray configuration on an American tree.
Another difference is in the use of flags. A popular decoration in Norway is a garland of little paper Norwegian flags on a string. You arrange them on the tree as you would any other holiday garland. That sort of thing’s pretty much unknown in America, even in Republican households. We try to separate Church and State – but in Norway they had a State Church up until fairly recently. And the flag, after all, does feature a cross.
It’s common to deride American conservatives as flag-worshippers, but really the Norwegians have us beat on that point. Through the periods of agitation for independence under Denmark and Sweden, the display of a “pure” Norwegian flag (one not quartered with the flag of the “parent” country) was subversive, but relatively safe. During the Nazi occupation, having the flag was less safe, but that made it all the more precious. To this day, old people get tears in their eyes when they remember the day it was finally safe to display the flag again.
No doubt, as that generation dies off, this passion for the flag will diminish.
‘The Fall of Arthur,’ by J. R. R. Tolkien
Not long ago I reviewed Beren and Luthien, Christopher Tolkien’s scholarly reconstruction of much-revised textual material left behind by his father, J. R. R. Tolkien. I judged the book a sort of a scholarly exercise.
I’d have to say the same about The Fall of Arthur. Tolkien, always a promoter of Anglo-Saxon literature, wanted to demonstrate what he could do with Anglo-Saxon-style verse (pretty much the same as Old Norse verse), by re-telling the story of King Arthur in that meter. There’s a certain irony in that project, as the real King Arthur (if he ever existed) spent his life fighting the Anglo-Saxons.
Still, to the extent that it was finished, the poem works extremely well. There’s real vigor in alliterative verse, and the way it “sings” is strongly reminiscent of passages in The Lord of the Rings. One sees where Tolkien acquired his highly effective literary style.
Foes before them, flames behind them ever east and onward eager rode they, and folk fled them as the face of God, till earth was empty, and no eyes saw them, and no ears heard them in the endless hills, save bird and beast bale- ful haunting the lonely lands….
The poem, unfortunately, was left as a fragment, breaking off before it’s properly underway. Arthur is returning from his campaign in Europe, having been warned that Mordred has raised a rebellion in his absence. Much has been made of the fact that Lancelot, who betrayed the king with Guinevere, has not been summoned to help him. No doubt more would have been made of that, and this could have been a pretty rousing work of literature. But as it is, what we have is another interesting scholarly exercise.
There are notes at the end, and a couple essays by Christopher Tolkien. I should have read those, but wasn’t aware of them until just now.
Fishing in Lofoten
I have a lot of translating work to do (a good thing for me), and I spent about an hour already tonight trying to post something that didn’t work. So here’s a short clip of a from the 1950s, Norwegian fishermen at work in the Lofoten Islands. I think it’s herring, but I’m a landlubber.
Have a good weekend,
and watch your health.