Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Norse horse

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Icelandic horses at the beginning of summer. Photo credit: Guillame Calas. Creative Commons license.

Fair warning: There won’t be a post on Friday. I have faith in you; somehow you’ll endure.

I’ll be playing Viking at an odd venue on Friday and through the weekend, the Minnesota Horse Expo at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul. The Viking Age Club & Society has been asked to provide context for the Icelandic horse exhibit this year. There will even be fight shows in the arena, though sadly the fighters will be old guys (not me; I’m still not up to that), as our young Vikings aren’t available. In real life, the Vikings would have probably had the stallions themselves fight, using goads on them. It was the Vikings’ favorite sport.

Things I’ve learned about Icelandic horses, mostly through internet research:

• It’s illegal to import any horse into Iceland, even an Icelandic horse. Once an Icelandic horse leaves the island, it must stay away forever. They’re afraid of bringing in exotic diseases or parasites.

• Icelandic horses have two extra gaits, which other horses can’t do (and only some Icelandics can do). One is called the tölt, a “four-beat lateral ambling gait” said to be “comfortable and ground-covering.” The other is the skeið, the “flying pace,” “fast and smooth” according to Wikipedia, a “two-beat lateral gait.” (Skeið was also the name of a kind of Viking ship; Erling Skjalgsson owned one of those.)

• Breeders of Icelandic horses consider them the purest of the northern breeds.

Author and artist William Morris (1834-1896) made a tour of Iceland with friends in 1871, producing a journal which I consulted (through a kind loan by Dale Nelson) in my research for West Oversea. He grew very fond of the horse he rode on that tour, and planned to bring it home with him. However it went lame before embarkation, so he took another horse instead. It lived to a good old age and grew very fat on his estate in England.

I shall tell you more about Icelandic horses next week.

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Taking up space

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Disabled parking permit
Photo credit, Tony Webster, Creative Commons

Let me sing you the song of my ethical struggles.

One of the nice things that came from my last hip surgery, aside from rapidly diminishing pain, was my temporary disabled parking tag (it’s like the one pictured above, but red). When I asked my doctor about getting one, during my pre-surgery examination, he said, “Sure, I’ll fill out the form for you. How much time you want on it?”

I said, “I think the last time I got about three months.”

He said, “Ah, I can do better than that for you. I’ll give you one that goes till August.”

And thence comes my ethical dilemma. Barring complications, I can’t foresee needing such a permit anywhere near that long. In fact I’m relatively sure that I won’t be able to justify using it (to myself) much past next month.

And yet there is a voice, somewhere inside, that cries, “You earned it! You paid your five bucks for it! Use it as long as you can!”

I am ashamed of that voice. I once knew someone who obtained a disabled parking permit he didn’t deserve, “through a friend,” and used it regularly. I judged him pretty harshly for it.

I’m even a bit ashamed to use the permit right now. Objectively speaking, I’m in a lot less pain than I was for years before the surgery, when I had to park with the cis-abled folks. I can make an argument that I should destroy the permit now, that I’m cheating on a moral level.

My evil inner voice replies, “Even more reason to use the thing as long as you can! Society owes it to you! Don’t you deserve something for your suffering?”

No, I don’t really think so. There are people with genuine, serious disabilities who need those parking spots. I can easily imagine someone who uses a wheelchair circling the lot, unable to find a space because posers like me are taking them up.

I got groceries tonight, and used a convenient disabled spot in front of the Cub store. When I was done, as I was driving out of the lot and thinking about writing this very blog post, I saw a young man walking toward the store. He was painfully thin, and he leaned heavily on his cane. “He can’t even drive,” I thought. “He walked here from home.”

Was that a sign? I think that was a sign.

Uncategorized, Writing

Plans: How to make God laugh

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I have to get back in the habit of blogging five times a week, even when I don’t have a book to review or some link to share. I think I won’t go back to talking about my personal pains and neuroses, or at least not as much. Anyway, I’m presently enjoying one of the most pleasant periods I’ve enjoyed in some time. I’m done with grad school – nothing left but getting the document in the mail. I’m still adjusting to the freedom. And I’m coming up on two months since my surgery, so my incision’s largely healed up and I’m suffering more from the stiffness caused by learning to walk straight and unsupported again, than from post-procedure discomfort. I don’t recall ever feeling so stiff as I did last week, but then I’m calling on muscles I’ve permitted to dog it for more than two years.

My obvious next project is to start the next Erling book. Don’t have a title yet (I do know the title of the next book, assuming things fall out as I plan), but I know the period of history I need to cover. The days of purely imaginative Erling novels (West Oversea, Hailstone Mountain) are over. Now we get back to established fact, and the epic face-off between Erling and King Olaf Haraldsson, who was destined to be Norway’s patron saint.

But I wasn’t sure how to approach this stretch of the story. Part of the problem is that it’s going to involve the lowest moment in Erling’s life. You’ve got to finesse that kind of plot point with great care.

Last night, driving home from work, my mind sparked across one of those synaptic gaps that puts two things you’ve been thinking about separately into bed together. And I figured out – I think – a way to approach this book. So I sat down and wrote about a thousand words.

This is what we writers call “a start.”

Oh yes, it’s time to start playing Viking in earnest again. Next event – we’re helping with the Icelandic horse exhibit at the Minnesota Horse Expo at the state fairgrounds in St. Paul, April 22 and 23. I plan to be there both days, if my body fail me not.

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Mississippi, Lower the Confederate Flag

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A South-Carolinian professor of history, who has many good reasons to celebrate his Confederate heritage, talks about the problems with the Confederate flag.

After the Civil War, the Confederate battle flag took on new meanings on the Southern landscape. It became thoroughly identified with a movement known as the Lost Cause, which sought to memorialize and preserve a collective Southern memory celebrating the Confederacy. However, as African-Americans were entering into civic spaces, running for office and voting in large numbers during Reconstruction and into the 1880s, they began to represent to Southern whites many of the great changes affecting the Southern landscape — chief among them a threat to Southern white political power. The Confederate flag began to be used publicly as a symbol that represented a return to “white rule.” Further, the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 became a legal tool to help whites regain political control through massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Through literacy clauses, poll taxes and interpretation clauses, African-Americans were almost entirely removed from the voting process in Mississippi until the mid-1960s. In the midst of this, attacks on African-Americans in the form of lynchings and violent intimidation attempted to keep African-Americans from political activity or challenging a new system of white control.

He recommends the state of Mississippi put this symbol behind them. “Mississippi can be a beacon to the rest of the world that love, selflessness, repentance and reconciliation can reign.”

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A Rosee outlook for Vikings in America

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Viking house at L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, photo by Lars Walker
My photo of a reconstructed Viking house at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

It’s been some time since I did my public duty by updating our erudite audience on the latest news from the world of Viking studies.

This story has been making the rounds lately, and to be honest it’s got my ears standing up. Archaeologists have used satellite imagery to identify a site in southwest Newfoundland that looks very much like a Viking Age Norse settlement.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” says Parcak. “Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.

“This new site could unravel more secrets about the Vikings, whether they were the first Europeans to ‘occupy’ briefly in North America, and reveal that the Vikings dared to explore much further into the New World than we ever thought.”

It’s too early to know for sure yet, of course. When the Ingstad group excavated the one known Viking site in North America, L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, it took quite a lot of digging before they found something indisputably Norse – a ring-headed bronze pin, used for fastening a cloak. There’s a difference between finding a sod building, however much it might resemble the houses in Greenland, and finding something that couldn’t possibly have been left by Native Americans or English or Portuguese fishermen. That’s what they’ll be looking for now.

A lot of us have been waiting for something like this for some time. Prof. Helge Ingstad, having discovered his Vinland site in the 1960s, planted his metaphorical flag there and declared, “This is Vinland. This is all of Vinland there ever was. There’s no point for looking for any more traces of the Norse on this continent.” Everyone respects Ingstad immensely, and almost nobody agrees with that contention anymore. Ingstad thought that many of the saga descriptions, especially those speaking of grapes, were just folklore accretions to the story, because grapes have never grown at that latitude. Nowadays we take those descriptions more seriously – especially since butternuts were found in the excavations. Butternuts have also never grown at that latitude, but they do grow where grapes grow. This new site, further south along the Saint Lawrence Seaway, leads in the direction most scholars have been thinking of.

So this is exciting. We’ll be watching for more news.

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‘The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok’

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As you know, I’m not exactly a fan of the “History” Channel’s Vikings series. However, this book, which seems to have been produced in order to capitalize on the show’s popularity, was actually worth the money to me.

The Legend of Ragnar Lodbrok is a compendium of sagas, poems, and ancient annals, providing pretty much all we know of Ragnar’s legend out of the middle ages. The stories have very little credibility as historical sources – other than the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is sparse on details, and Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, which is a hopeless mess assembled with little historical or critical sense.

But it’s not often that I run into material on the Viking Age that I’ve never read before, and most of this was new to me. The saga story of Ragnar “Hairy Breeches” was written down long after the original events, and these sagas contradict one another in details and are generally unreliable. But they also contain many agreements, and the kernel of a true story seems to be here.

Only one section, the poem Krákumál, shows evidence of bad OCR reading, including a number of misprints. The rest of the book is well edited, and the scholarly notes are of high quality.

Worth reading, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

Religion, Uncategorized

Good Friday

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It almost seems sacrilegious to say that this Good Friday (a name that’s purposely paradoxical), is a particularly good Friday for me. But so it is. This is the day of my manumission, the day my chains were loosed. I uploaded my completed capstone project today. Assuming I don’t fail (which is always possible, if unlikely), I’m done with graduate school forever.

If anybody wants me to get a doctorate, they can get me an honorary one.

Now comes the uneasy transition to civilian life. Today I mostly vegged out on the sofa, still feeling the vague guilt any graduate student always feels, when they’re not doing school work.

Well, it wouldn’t do to celebrate too much, on Good Friday.

Speaking of which, Michael Card:

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Hip, hip, hooray

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I woke up lying on my left side this morning, which made it a good day.

Let me explain. I had my left hip replaced, as I’ve mentioned, about a month ago. One of the things they tell you when you get your upgrade is that it’s good to lie in bed with the wound side down. Helps the healing somehow. This, of course, is easier said than done. Even while you’re on the prescription pain killers (which I quit weeks ago), you’re not so numb that lying on top of your stitches is something you’d ever choose to do for fun.

But this morning I found that I’d rolled over on that side in my sleep. Which means I’m healing up. I knew that already, of course. On Saturday it occurred to me that I was in less pain than I’d been the day before the operation. So it’s all upswing from here on.

And I’m almost done with my graduate school work. My capstone project paper is essentially written; just a little buffing and padding to do. Monday’s the deadline, and I’m likely to turn it in before then.

All this makes right now a pretty good time in my life.

It’s been a strange 2¼ years. I began school way back in late 2013, and then came the first hip replacement in January, and now I’m recovering from the matching procedure just before finishing the academic work for good. A long stretch of time, bracketed by prosthetics.

This is not what I expected my life to be like when I got to middle age. But it has been interesting.

They say prisoners feel a reluctance to leave the penitentiary after an extended stay. It doesn’t matter how grim and abusive the prison is – it has become familiar and comfortable, in some way. Outside the walls anything can happen – do I remember the rules? Have the rules changed?

I feel something vaguely similar about facing life after grad school. Not that I have to wonder what I’ll do with my time. I’ve got novels to write and a regular blogging schedule to pick up again. I’ll be able to have dinner with friends in the evenings, without rearranging my study schedule. But it’s a change, and in my heart I don’t much like change.

So will I go for my doctorate now?

Not if I have anything to say about it.

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Knight of Zootopia

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Knight of Cups: “Man must be willing to commit to love and open himself to new life. More specifically, he must cleave to a woman and be ready to have a child. . . . [Terrence Malick’s] Knight of Cups not only states this truth, it dramatizes our resistance to it. ”

Zootopia: “The beautiful bit is that despite the heavy themes, Zootopia never comes off as preachy or pandering. This is one of the strongest bits of Mouse House storytelling since the first Toy Story. Every scene works, the tension is effective and the payoff is more than satisfying. In the process, kids might not even notice the “good-for-you” messages throughout. But they are likely to experience the emotions that surround issues of racism, sexism and community.”