Art by Jeremiah Humphries

Artist Jeremiah Humphries has done it again. Here’s an illustration of a scene from Erling’s Word, the first part of The Year of the Warrior.

Thanks, Jeremiah.

Dr. Hunter Baker reminded me of a photo series of snowflakes, up close and personal. Incredible beautiful.

Every Viking reenactor, unless their given name is something like Ulfljotr Bjørnhjaltrsson, needs to choose a Viking name. My first name was easy to figure out — “Halvdan” means “half Danish,” which is close enough for a Norwegian with one Danish grandfather. But for my last name (or patronymic, properly) I was thinking of using “Jordensson.” Because my father’s name was Jordan. I shall explain the spelling discrepancy.

My grandmother once told me she named my dad after a guy she knew growing up in Iowa. I assume that guy’s name was Jorden, which is a respectable Scandinavian name not related to the biblical river in any way. This guess is reinforced by the fact that, although Dad’s birth certificate (which I have somewhere around here) says “Jordan,” his baptismal certificate (which I’ve also got) spells it “Jorden.”

My problem is I’m not sure if Jorden is a Viking Age name. I did a little web searching, in English and Norwegian, trying to find the history of the name. How far back it goes.

To my surprise, it’s not listed in any of the Norwegian (or Danish; I checked) name lists. There’s one list which claimed to have every name carried by more than three people in Norway, and Jorden didn’t make it.

There are three guys named Jorden in America. A name search that came up told me so. But not in Norway.

So the name has gone out of fashion to an amazing degree in its homeland. This might have to do with embarrassment. “Jorden” means “earth” — in the senses of both the planet and dirt. Also it’s pronounced “urine,” which is awkward for English speakers. Which most Norwegians are nowadays.

Still, it amazed me.

1. N.D. Wilson, an author more of us should be reading, explains the fundamental flaws in The Hunger Games. Self-sacrifice? Not hardly. “Revolutions,” he says, “are not started by teen girls suicide-pacting with cute baker boys. Oppressive regimes are not threatened by people who do what they are told.”
2. George Eliot writes, “And when we stood at length and parted amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing … on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.” She is being quoted in this brief post on art without God and what that means for morality.
3. A father of boys and girls talks about their roles in the world as informed by Star Wars and other movies. There are many problems with his brief presention, which I’m sure a worldview class could pick apart for a month, but I think he asks some good questions and makes a fair point. What is a girl to take away from watching Star Wars? Hope the boys fight well so she can reward them in the end? What should a boy take away from that movie? That he must fight to win and get the girl in the end? (And to touch on one problem with this presentation, may I ask why I should assume patriarchy is wrong? Is it that men are mostly wrong?)

The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth. This is where science—certain aspects of science—are seized upon, assimilated, or sometimes simply plagiarized in decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value. One such use—and it is a curious reversal of Aristotle—is the boast of factuality: the work of the artist is said to be research; his creations are findings.

—Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (1971)

Maureen Mullarkey expounds on this remarkable idea in one contemporary art exhibit series, WeakForce.

Today I used my Kindle Fire HD with the Overdrive app to borrow and download, for the very first time, a book from the Hennepin County Library (one of Lawhead’s, if you care). I’m a student of library and information science, you know, and this is how I stay on the cutting edge.

What have I learned in my class so far? The most disturbing thing is that all that stuff we’re digitalizing to “preserve it?” It’s all crumbling to dust. CDs, DVDs, floppies, tape, every single digital medium deteriorates over time. As I recall they give the average CD-ROM a little over 20 years.

The most stable media for preserving data remain, for the time being, archival quality paper and microform.

Just to give you something to worry about tonight.

What “important” books have you read that left you cold?

Someone on Facebook posted a link to an article (not sure if it was this one; there are several out there) about this newly unveiled portrait of the Danish royal family, produced – though this seems incredible – at the family’s request, apparently.

If somebody did a portrait of your family like this, would you pay them?

I made a crack on my friend’s comments about how this is actually considered cheerful in Denmark, home of Hamlet and Kierkegaard.

But in fact I think it’s more ominous.

As a certified amateur artistic wiseacre, my immediate interpretation of these spooky figures, backed up by classical ruins, was that the purpose would seem to be to portray the royal family as doomed, a crumbling remnant of an outmoded social order.

And I bet the royals understand that, but know that pointing it out would just open them up to accusations of trying to suppress artistic expression.

But even more, it struck me that the composition reminded me viscerally of another famous royal portrait. This one: Continue reading Cheesy Danish →

One of three known photographs of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken by David Bachrach.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It was on this day 150 years ago that Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the battlefield cemetery. The words have become part of our national canon, and not without reason. Lincoln had the rare qualities of having both a first class mind and a masterful prose style. This is particularly interesting when we remember that he had about the least formal education of any American president. If he had not existed, it would have been impossible to invent him.