Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga: The Book of the Icelanders and The Story of the Conversion,’ translated by Siàn Grønlie

Leave a comment

This will not be a review exactly, as I don’t feel qualified to judge a translation from a language I don’t read, and a work of scholarship above my level of erudition.

But to me, it was very interesting to read Íslendingabók, Kristni Saga: The Book of the Icelanders and The Story of the Conversion, translated by Siàn Grønlie, published by the Viking Society for Northern Research. My friend Dale Nelson gave me my copy a while back.

What we’re dealing with here is heavily annotated translations of two different books, quite short, which deal with the conversion of the Icelanders. We know the author of the first book, the Book of the Icelanders, Ari þorgilsson, who is considered by some the father of Icelandic history. The author of the second, more detailed book, The Story of the Conversion, is an unknown churchman. The books center on one of the most famous events in northern history – the decision of the Icelandic Althing to peacefully adopt the Christian religion. Ari’s account seems to be primarily aimed at telling the story of his own prominent family, while the author of The Story of the Conversion seems more concerned with spreading the glory around to several of the prominent families.

The thing that I particularly noticed was the passage in The Story of the Conversion (a story familiar also from Heimskringla) that told about the incident in Trondheim where King Olaf Trygvesson, offended by the Icelanders’ outlawing of his missionary Thangbrand, arrested a group of Icelanders. He was persuaded not to harm them before one of their number could go to Iceland and get their countrymen to convert. I noticed that one of the men listed in this group was Thorarin Nefjolfsson, whom you may recall is a character in my novels West Oversea and King of Rogaland. I thought at first that this was fresh information, but a look at Heimskringla informs me that Thorarin is listed there too – I just never noticed him before.

It seems likely that Thorarin stayed in King Olaf’s retinue, and that may have been where he met Erling Skjalgsson. But I have them meet in Iceland in West Oversea, and give them a dramatic adventure together. And I think that was appropriate in terms of fiction. I felt that Thorarin’s bond of loyalty to Erling had to be a particularly strong one, in order for him to take the extraordinary risks he took to help rescue Asbjorn Selsbane for Erling.

I read somewhere – without a source cited – that Thorarin died with Olaf Haraldsson at the Battle of Stiklestad. I’d like to know how he retained Olaf’s favor after pulling such a stunt.

Anyway, this book is an impressive work of scholarly translation, and is recommended for serious students of Icelandic history and the sagas. Not light reading.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words,’ by Barry Day and Tony Ring

Leave a comment

I took to American food from the start like a starving Eskimo flinging himself on a portion of blubber. The poet Keats, describing his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer, speaks of himself as feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. Precisely so did I feel … when the waiter brought me my first slab of strawberry shortcake … ‘No matter if it puts an inch on my waistline,’ I said to myself, ‘I must be in on this.’

There are biographies of P.G. Wodehouse out there; I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them. But a deal showed up on P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words, and I figured I’d give it a try. It’s neither a long nor greatly illuminating work, but it is an opportunity to revisit a lot of Wodehouse’s best stuff, which can’t help being entertaining.

The scheme here is to go through the facts of the author’s biography, relating them to various quotations from his works. This book’s authors, Barry Day and Tony Ring, admit that we don’t know for sure how Wodehouse’s thinking worked, and we can’t always rely on his own statements on the subject – he considered himself rather a dull fellow, and embroidered his statements accordingly.  But overall I think I learned a little reading it.

There isn’t a lot of drama in the story, except of course for the lamentable account of Wodehouse and his wife being detained by the Germans during World War II, and his grievous error in making recordings that the Germans used for propaganda. This mistake resulted in his never returning to England (though he could have gone back after a time, and the queen knighted him in absentia), but becoming a US citizen. The authors take what I consider the correct view – that Wodehouse dropped a brick but merely through thoughtlessness. And regretted it.

I did notice one error in the book. The authors believe (no doubt deceived by Jeeves’s glamor) that valets stand higher in the social order “Downstairs” than butlers. This is wrong. The butler was king of the servants in an aristocratic household. If Bertie had married and set up a stately home, I expect Jeeves would have been promoted to that lofty office.

But otherwise, I had a good time with P.G. Wodehouse In His Own Words. Recommended.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Embers of the Hands,’ by Eleanor Barraclough

Leave a comment

I like to think I keep relatively up to date on Viking studies, both for my writing and for my second life as a Viking reenactor. But as Dunning and Kruger have taught us, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know – and I think I’ve learned to settle for being better informed than most people, to keep up with the state of the art as stuff gets published for popular consumption.

So I bought Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, which was recommended to me by a couple friends. And I have to say it’s an impressive book within the limits of its intended purpose.

Embers of the Hands pairs well with Kat Jarman’s River Kings, which I reviewed a while back. Like that book, it considers the Viking world through examination and analysis of archaeological artifacts. But Jarman’s book centered on one artifact (a bead), while Barraclough uses a number of artifacts to elucidate various aspects of the Viking world.

The emphasis here is on ordinary life – the way the people who weren’t famous lived. The clues given us by the things they used and left behind , that enable us – to some extent – to look at their world through their eyes. Author Barraclough possesses a happy gift for description and empathetic thought.

And that gift is needed, because I feel I must admit that I found the book rather dull in stretches. Most of us were lured into Viking studies by way of romantic dreams, of adventure and heroism. Embers of the Hands is pretty relentlessly unromantic. This approach is an excellent corrective for people like me – writers and reenactors. I think it will have more trouble holding the casual reader, who may be looking for bigger and more colorful stories.

Still, it’s a well-researched and well-written book, and ought to be read and pondered by its intended audience.

I might mention that the author seems not much interested in the contentious issue of shield maidens, and I was very grateful to her for that.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Pain in the Belly: the Haugean Witness in American Lutheranism,’ by Thomas E. Jacobson

Leave a comment

This was quite a long book, but I read it pretty quickly. Because it fascinated me. I suspect it won’t be as fascinating to you (well-written though it is), because it’s about matters near to my own heart and history.

When the old Hauge’s Synod, a small Norwegian-Lutheran church group, entered into a merger with other Lutheran groups in 1917, someone expressed satisfaction that they’d be able to “gobble up” the Haugeans now through sheer weight of numbers. Someone replied that that might be so, but it was likely to give them pains in the belly. That’s the inspiration for the title of Pain in the Belly: The Haugean Witness in American Lutheranism, by Thomas E. Jacobson.

The Haugeans are my people, and I’ve written about them often here, so I won’t give a lot of background. The Haugeans were a movement of lay evangelism and pietism originating in Norway around the turn of the 19th Century. They never left the state church, but operated as an independent movement within it. When Norwegians began immigrating to America in the mid-1800s, the Haugeans, having no state church to react against, eventually organized themselves into a loosely organized church body of their own (the first Norwegian Lutheran church in America), which survived (with some splits) up until 1917, when they entered a merger with other Norwegian American Lutheran groups, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

Author Jacobson spends about half his book explaining this story to the reader. The information is available elsewhere, but is necessary to set the stage. The other half of the book involves more original scholarship, as Jacobson has gone through (sometimes meager) records to provide an account of how the Haugeans returned, in a sense, to their original position, operating as an independent force within a larger church – preaching, teaching, doing good works, and agitating for a more devoted Christian life.

I read with great interest, as almost every page mentioned places I know and institutions I’m familiar with. Also people whose children I’ve met (or heard preaching); some of them I met personally over the years. (I myself am cited as a source, by virtue of a booklet I wrote for the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations.)

First of all, I want to say that the book is very well written. Thomas E. Jacobson has a clear, lively style, most welcome in a historian. He is also admirably even-handed in dealing with controversies, in spite of a tendency to refer to any preaching involving law and morality as “dark and legalistic.”

Pain in the Belly, alas, is probably unlikely to attract a large audience. Students of American church history will be interested, as well as anyone involved in the burgeoning field of Lars Walker studies.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Hidden Realms: Scandinavian Folktales,” by G. K. Lund

Leave a comment

Once, the Lord wanted to test if all people could agree on something, like wishing for rainy weather. For three years, there was no rain on Earth, causing great distress. He thought that now everyone was in agreement to wish for rain, and it came. But on the same day, a woman had hung her clothes out to dry, and she was not happy at all. “That’s typical,” she complained. “If it’s been dry for three years, it certainly could have lasted one more day.”

I’ve long had a minor interest in folk beliefs and superstitions, for incorporating in my stories if for no other reason. The folk beliefs of Scandinavia interest me most, of course, but if you read accounts from further abroad, you tend to see great commonality. Everybody seems to have believed in “little people” who lived at the margins of society, and their tales of human interaction with such folk tend to exhibit very similar motifs.

G. K. Lund’s Hidden Realms: Scandinavian Folktales presents a selection of her own translations of folk stories (called sagn, which is pronounced very much like “song”). These are not fairy tales as such – as she takes pains to explain – they aren’t fully formed fantastic tales. They’re more like anecdotes. Some of them are only one or two lines long.

The greater part of the stories involve what were known as Vættir, a broad classification that includes all the Scandinavian fantastic beings. Mostly these are elves, dwarfs, trolls and what the Norwegians call nisser – like a brownie or a gnome. There is no exact taxonomy, of course; the creatures often mix and match traits and can be hard to distinguish from one another.

There are rules for dealing with them, of course, but the rules can vary from one story to another. It’s generally agreed that it’s not a good idea to follow them “into the hill” where they live, or to eat their food, but both those taboos are sometimes broken without harm. Sometimes humans can fool them and profit thereby, and at other times they pay a high price. Sometimes an act of kindness to them brings rich reward, and but at other times it can be a mistake, as when a kind farm wife sews a new suit of clothes for the “barn nisse” only to have him stop helping with the farm work because he doesn’t want to get them dirty.

Such stories fascinate me; I’ve always wanted to write a story about them that captured their alien logic. I’m not sure I’ve ever come close.

G. K. Lund’s translations in Hidden Realms are generally quite good, though I nitpicked from time to time, as one does. The book features very handsome illustrations – somewhat reminiscent of Theodor Kittelsen (see last night’s post) though a little smooth for my taste.

Very enjoyable, if you’re into this stuff.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘A Short History of England,’ by G.K. Chesterton

3 Comments

We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all…. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.

Anyone approaching G.K. Chesterton’s A Short History of England in the hope of learning many facts is likely to be sadly disappointed. I expect Chesterton himself would have been astonished at the very expectation – in his day, anyone who bought a Chesterton book knew he’d be getting a polemic. A witty polemic that might be very illuminating – even if one disagrees with the premises – but the author assumes a fair knowledge of the dates and facts from the outset. What Chesterton offers is a fresh perspective.

In this relatively short, very superficial overview of English history, the author has two advantages in creating his provocations – first of all, he’s G.K. Chesterton, a man who forever looked at the world as if in a fun house mirror or a photographic negative; and secondly that he’s a Catholic, a perpetual outsider in a land of lapsed Protestants.

Sometimes he can be surprising – he seems to anticipate interpretations of events that were unusual at the time, but are commonplace today – such as that the Saxon invaders in Arthur’s time may have only been an aristocratic minority.

As Chesterton sees it, England went wrong at two major junctures (aside from the Reformation, something he thinks self-evident) – when Richard II lost his bid to reform the government, and when, more recently, England began to ally itself with the Germans. He is writing, of course, as World War I rages, and is comforted by the fact that England is once again allied with France, which he considers a much more fitting combination.

I do recommend A Short History of England, but only if you already know a good deal of English history. (I’ll admit a lot of the names were unfamiliar to me, too.)

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed,’ by Maureen Callahan

3 Comments

What Marilyn could not see was that Bobby, like Jack before him, was less interested in strengthening her than annealing her; heating her up like white gold, then leaving her alone to cool down, making her more pliable, bendable, easier to manipulate. Wearing down her strength.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table for lunch with my family one day back in the early 1960s. The news was on the radio, and the announcer mentioned that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, had suffered another miscarriage. There was, the report said, great grief in the family.

My grandfather, who was at the table with us, said drily, “All that money Joe Kennedy made running bootleg whisky during Prohibition sure didn’t bring their family much joy.”

Talk of the Kennedy curse was common back then, and continues today. But Maureen Callahan’s book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed offers a more prosaic explanation – Jack was carrying asymptomatic chlamydia, and had infected Jackie.

That’s essentially the tone of this book – there’s a lot of legend and romanticism in the Kennedy story, but it all boils down to some pretty sordid facts about a truly degenerate political dynasty.

The book is told from the viewpoints of a series of women (there are many, and more could have been listed) whose lives were ruined – and sometimes ended – because they flew too close to the Kennedy flame. Some had their reputations ruined, a couple died (at least one murdered), and one was crippled for life. What they got from the Kennedy men was a brief encounter (none of them seem to have been very good lovers) and all the bad consequences, because no Kennedy male ever took responsibility.

The stories are told out of sequence, which can be confusing to the reader. Also, because viewpoints change, characters often surprisingly change… character. Someone who was kind in one story is vicious in another. As in the play, Rashomon, it all depends on the point of view. There’s little sisterly solidarity here – the women tend to rip each other up when wounded.

I was often annoyed by the author’s point of view. She seems to be an orthodox neo-feminist. For her the real problem with all these women was that they’d been expected to marry and have children. If they’d just devoted their lives to career and money, I suppose, they’d have found happiness and fulfillment.

Frequent jabs are taken at the Roman Catholic Church, which admittedly does not cover itself in glory in this narrative. However, more recent Kennedys, like Jack Jr. and Bobby Jr., affirm(ed) feminism, and there’s no implication that their hypocrisy was feminism’s fault.

Even when I was a Democrat, I was never a Kennedy fan. So I wasn’t shocked by these revelations, and had no illusions to be dissed. But the coming new administration, which I support, includes one of the characters described in this book, and not one of the least reprehensible. He must be watched – no journalistic firewall will protect him this time out.

My conclusion is that Ask Not is an important book, clearing out a lot of mythical cobwebs in an era of American history. It is not a salacious book, and not particularly sexy to read. It’s dismal. A dismal, bleak story about a dysfunctional family with abysmal values that held too much power too long.

Non-fiction

Is Evil Merely Banal or Profound?

Leave a comment

Douglas Murray discusses the success of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and its failure of as both a concept and a conclusion from the trail of Adolf Eichmann.

“Together with Eichmann’s contemporary attempts at memoir-writing—which were known about by the time of the trial—an Eichmann entirely different from Arendt’s emerges. Wonder of wonders, it is the Eichmann that the world knew existed until Hannah Arendt came along.”

He wasn’t “a mere bureaucrat” but a man who was proud to be a part of the murder of six million Jews. Nazis in Argentina wanted to believe the Holocaust was a hateful lie. “To Eichmann, these efforts to minimize the Holocaust were offensive—something like spitting on his life’s work. Eichmann knew that the six-million figure was accurate, and he seems to have only realized gradually that his audience was hoping for something quite different from him.”

Murray then describes the use of evil banality by contemporary journalists as a way to wave away the acts of terrorists.

“Pure evil. Terrible evil. Unfathomable evil—all of these things for sure. But ‘banal’? No—nothing could be further from the truth. And yet today, the idea of pure evil seems unavailable to many cultured minds. Perhaps it is too theological. Or perhaps we think such terms come from a metaphysics that we have abandoned as insufficiently subtle for our more enlightened times.”

(Photo of Eichmann trail by Israeli GPO photographer/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Road to Middle-Earth,’ by Tom Shippey

3 Comments

This was Tolkien’s major linguistic heresy. He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognize language ‘styles’, could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgments based on phonology. He said the sound of ‘cellar door’ was more beautiful than the sound of ‘beautiful’. He clearly believed that untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I bought Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth. I had read his Tolkien biography, Author of the Century, and generally enjoyed it. When I stopped to see my friend Dale Nelson recently, he praised TRTME as one of his most prized books. So I thought I’d give it a try.

And it is a fine work. A deep-diving overview of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ideas, work life, and achievements. But it may have been more of a book than this reader was qualified to handle.

I was pleased that the author seems to have moderated his comments about Augustinianism and Manicheanism, which (in my opinion) went too far in his Tolkien biography, where he actually labels C. S. Lewis a Manichean. What he’s actually talking about is our conception of evil – is it (as Augustine – and C. S. Lewis, whatever Shippey says – insisted) a lack, a corruption of the good, or does it have existence in itself? He seems to be convinced that if you believe the Augustinian view, you can’t really embody evil in a character. I’ve never accepted that – it’s enough to have a character submit to evil and live out its qualities.

My personal difficulty with the book, I’m afraid, was that I haven’t read enough of the post-Rings Tolkien material. I’ve read the Silmarillion, and several of the books involving single stories, but I couldn’t make it through the books of Lost Tales, and never even tried to read The History of Middle Earth. That means that a lot of the material Shippey deals with in the later chapters of this book was unknown, or only vaguely known, to me.

But if you’re a true Tolkien geek, I would say this is a book you absolutely ought to read. It’s been revised twice, and the author conscientiously corrects previous errors (mostly errors of ignorance).

Highly recommended, for its proper audience.

Bookselling, Non-fiction

On Bookselling and Encouraging a Desire for Books

Leave a comment

In his book on the bookselling business, Joseph Shaylor notes Dr. Johnson’s recommendation for sharing sales revenue among all participants in the year 1776, saying “the country bookseller selling a book published at twenty shillings” should retain 3 shillings 6 pence from the sale. No less than that is possible, the good doctor writes, because booksellers operate on paper-thin margins (ba-dum-ching). Writing in 1911, Shaylor notes the same was true during his career and makes this important business principle:

All retail establishments exist either to create a want or to supply one. This applies equally to a bookseller — either he must help to educate the public to be lovers of books, or he must simply exist to supply such books as an educated public requires. The former is to be desired, and the greater the inducements held out to encourage men and women of intellectual aptitude to be distributors of books the better it will be both for themselves and for the trade they represent.

— Shaylor, The Fascination of Books with Other Papers on Books & Bookselling

Perhaps even more than publishers, booksellers need to cultivate a market both of readers and people who appreciate owning books themselves. In that vein, David Kern, proprietor of Goldberry Books in Concord, NC, reviews The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. “As recently as 1993, 13,499 independently run bookshops were open across the country,” and yet historian Evan Friss states, “Americans have never really been readers.”

Last week for National Read-A-Book Day, a Philadelphia Barnes and Noble invited two dozen authors “to come down to the store, sit in the leather chair in the window display outfitted with a side table and lamp, and silently read a favorite book.” The store manager said her staff thought it a crazy idea, but the authors loved it.

Of course, all bookshops should be as attractive and picturesque as we imagine ourselves to be. Scrivener’s Books & Bookbinding in Buxton, Derbyshire fits the bill. Liv Clarke visited the other day and called it magical. The shop boasts five floors of books with a cellar housing “the smallest Victorian Museum in Buxton . . . found next to the buildings’ original stove.”