Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Digital Barbarism,’ by Mark Helprin

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For modernity, ceaselessly mercurial, is nothing more than obsolescence yet to occur. To put one’s faith in or devote one’s attentions to it is to chase after a vapor.

Back when I was toiling through library school, one of the topics we were supposed to study was Copyright. The material they gave us to read was pretty uniformly partisan – on the side of the Creative Commons and against Copyright (or at least its extension). Much was made of the tyranny of Disney (though Disney generally holds trademarks rather than copyrights, but it’s all Intellectual Property). As a holder of copyrights myself, I found such material a little troubling, but I had no established principles on the topic in general (I hadn’t even known it was a topic), so – as I recall – I accommodated myself to the crowd, and wrote something about how copyright might be necessary for a while, but the free flow of information meant copyrights ought to end as early as reasonably possible.

Meanwhile, Mark Helprin, one of our greatest living authors, wrote (as he tells us) an op-ed for the New York Times. He thought an article about Copyright would be innocuous. He argued for its extension, so that a writer’s heirs can enjoy the fruits of their parent’s work just like the heirs of businessmen. He was astonished to discover that he had unleashed a firestorm of online comments from copyright abolitionists, who understood him to be arguing for everlasting copyright. This roused his fighting spirit, and so he came to write Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

The book is quite long. It probably could have been shorter, but Helprin clearly warmed to his topic as he labored. He regards the anti-copyright movement as a branch of Marxism, its general war against property. The world has no lack of people (generally without productive ability of their own) who believe that property is theft, and that if the greedy owners would just fork over, all the world’s problems would be fixed. Creators, it is assumed, will just continue toiling away for the love of creation itself.

As far as I can learn, Helprin’s fears haven’t come true. Copyright continues in force, and its opponents seem to be a small (if loud-voiced) group. He must also be gratified by the current resurgence in the purchase of paper books, something he does not foresee in this work.

Digital Barbarism is full of Helprin’s vivid prose, which is always worth reading. I did weary of the argument somewhat after a while, though.

Non-fiction, Reading, Reviews

‘The Saga of the Sworn Brothers’

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A scene from Ravnsborg in Missouri, which sadly no longer exists. The man addressing the feast is not a skald, but Sam Shoults, the owner of the place. But you get the idea.

I have apparently survived my first Viking weekend of the “summer season.” It’s not quite summer yet, of course, as was made abundantly clear by events. The skies were overcast, the breeze (though fortunately light) was a-chill. I don’t wear my fine woolen tunic a lot, as Viking reenactment in the country is mostly a warm-weather activity, but I was glad of it this weekend. The crowds at the Fantasy of the Lakes Renaissance Festival in Lindstrom, MN were not large, but that’s hardly the fault of the organizers, who did their best. Oddly enough, my book sales were better on Saturday (the colder day) than on Sunday.

Instead of reading from my Kindle in my abundant free moments, I chose to bring along my current volume of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I had a long saga to read, and one I’d read before – at least in the variant recorded in Flatey Book. The version printed in this edition is compiled from four source texts, including some variant passages, which are clearly marked.

This one is The Saga of the Sworn Brothers, quite a famous saga. It seems to be based on a skaldic poem by a man who you may recall if you’ve read my novel The Baldur Game – the poet Thormod Kolbrunarskald (Coal-Brow’s Skald). (I’ve blogged about the Flatey Book version before in this space). The poem, of which this saga preserves passages, celebrates the achievements of Thormod’s friend and sworn brother, Thorgeir Havarsson. Sworn brotherhood was a serious matter in Viking society – once the oath was sworn, each brother was honor-bound to avenge the other’s death. Judging by the poem, and the saga built on it, Thormod was likely from the git-go to be called on to do just that – because Thorgeir seems to have been a complete psychopath. Thormod says of him that he never knew fear – not even bothering to call for help while clinging for life to nothing but a clump of angelica at the brink of a cliff.

The saga is episodic, as sagas tend to be, but it follows the two friends as they carom from one adventure to another, casually killing men and getting outlawed here and there on the way. In time they part company. Thorgeir (the psychopath) enters the household of King (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson, but leaves him eventually to meet his fate. Thormod, when he learns of Thorgeir’s death (at the hands of several killers, of course), sets out to get revenge, a quest that will take him as far as Greenland. Later he enters Saint Olaf’s service in his own right. He is a prominent figure in the legends of Olaf’s death at Stiklestad. His death from an arrow wound after the battle takes place here (as well as in Flatey Book, which I’d forgotten) in a barley barn. I made it a cattle byre in The Baldur Game – Snorri’s Heimskringla does not specify what kind of building it was.

Another difference from Heimskringla is Thormod’s famous last words. In Heimskringla, he pulls an arrowhead out of his chest, looks at it, and says, “The king has fed us well – I am fat at the heart-roots.” Then he dies. He does not say that in this version, but dies in the midst of the last line of a poem he composes on the spot, which is finished by Olaf’s brother Harald (later King Harald Hardrada). This reinforces my guess, which I employ in The Baldur Game, that Harald must have been present at Thormod’s death, and would have been the source of the story.

(The veracity of the “heart-roots” line is also questionable due to the fact that the same line occurs in other sagas, notably when Leif Eriksson’s brother Thorvald is dying after a fight with Native Americans in Vinland.)

The Saga of the Sworn Brothers is an intriguing one, notable for being based on the recollections of a man who’s fairly honest about himself and his dead friend. The sworn brothers are not high heroes, but reckless, feckless youths who do as much harm as good in the world. Thormod’s death in Saint Olaf’s service is regarded as a grace. (The saga writer is not shy about inserting little moral homilies here and there.)

The Sworn Brothers is an intriguing – and valuable – saga.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Kingdom of Cain,’ by Andrew Klavan

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The legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.

The novelist Andrew Klavan has morphed himself (in between writing marvelous mystery stories) into a philosopher of art in recent years. His book The Truth and Beauty examined the English Romantic poets, linking their artistic strivings to the search for God. I loved that book, but had trouble understanding its ultimate point. This led me to do some theorizing of my own (I’ve posted some of my thoughts on this blog). Klavan’s latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, suggests to me that I’ve been generally on the right track.

Andrew Klavan has often mentioned wryly that one of his great fears, when he became a Christian, was that he’d become a Christian writer – the kind of writer who tells stories about a little girl who prays that God will help her find her bunny rabbit, and God obliges. Instead, he has made his uneasy way working at his proper craft, writing the kind of stories he cares about and suffering the criticism of those readers who want bunny stories.

So this book begins as a sort of apologia for realistic (even earthy) Christian fiction – an issue that matters to me as well, in my humble way. Can depictions of the darkness of life – the ugly things that evil, twisted men do to each other and to the innocent – serve to glorify God?

Klavan thinks they can.

He starts out with the ancient, original murder – that of Cain upon Abel. He describes how the spirit of Cain has passed down through history to find full expression in post-Christian thinkers and psychologists – men like Nietzsche and Freud – and de Sade. How Dostoevsky pondered such ideas, found them wanting, and brought forth brilliant, moral works of art – Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. He describes the crimes of a nondescript Wisconsin psychopath named Ed Gien, whose hideous career inspired “Psycho,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” and a score of inferior knock-offs.

Then he ponders the mysteries of creation, the fall of Man, and redemption. The book ends in a vision of what the author considers possibly the greatest work of human art – Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” an achievement that contemplates what Christians consider the greatest crime of all time – the greatest crime possible – and transforms it into sublime beauty.

Here, he suggests, is an answer to the mystery of Theodicy, the question how a good God could permit evil. The answer, Klavan suggests, cannot be parsed in logic or spoken in words. Only Beauty, a gleam of light from Heaven received by the soul, can provide answers for those who have eyes to see.

But read The Kingdom of Cain for yourself. I’m certainly going to read it again. I experienced genuine physical thrills as I followed its line of thought.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Rage Against God,’ by Peter Hitchens

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If atheists or anti-theists have the good fortune to live in a society still governed by religious belief, or even its afterglow, they may feel free from absolute moral bonds, while those around them are not. This is a tremendous liberation for anyone who is even slightly selfish. And what clever person is not imaginatively and cunningly selfish?

The Hitchens brothers, Peter and (the late) Christopher, both famed journalists, were divided not only by temperament (Peter says they’d never actually been close), but by their attitudes to God. Their childhood home practiced no religion at all, and both brothers enthusiastically embraced atheism. But Peter changed his mind and joined the Church of England as an adult, a decision Christopher found inconceivable. Christopher wrote a bestselling book called God Is Not Great, arguing that religion was the root of most of the world’s evil, and Peter responded with the book I’m reviewing now – The Rage Against God.

There’s an element of spiritual pilgrimage narrative in this book, in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions and C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Then it proceeds to a well-informed critique (offered from the perspective of a former fellow traveler) of the whole modern social construct of the West, based on the ruins of Communism, which stand on the ruins of Christendom.

Peter Hitchens tells us that his first boyhood faith was British patriotism, swelled by pride in his country’s clean victory over the evil Germans in World War II. In time he would learn that that victory was not as clean as he’d been taught, and that faith died.

Then he embraced Communism. But a few years in Moscow as a journalist, observing the actual workings of that tottering monument to arrogant incompetence, disillusioned him with prejudice.

And so, with time, he came to reexamine the religious faith he’d rejected, pro forma, without a hearing. He noted that, in contrast to his brother’s rejection of the greatness of God, our present culture is based on an even less plausible premise – that Man is great. If there’s little evidence for the first, there’s no evidence at all for the second. He surveys the wrecks that surrounds us, and offers some melancholy hope, or at least a call to courage.

He also spends considerable time refuting Christopher’s argument that the Russian Soviet failure was not a failure of atheism, because Russian Communism was essentially a religion.

I can hardly deny that I found The Rage Against God a congenial read, confirming opinions I already held dear – though the author’s criticisms of the neo-cons and their nation-building wars stung a little in my own case.

To be fair, I suppose I ought to read Christopher’s book too, but I expect I won’t. It’s not as if the arguments against God are unfamiliar or hard to find – while a book like this offers – I think – fresh ideas for the majority of our contemporaries.

Fiction, Non-fiction

Amazon’s House of David Entertains, Could Repel Some

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When I first saw that Amazon was releasing a series on the life of David, I thought I should watch it to let you know how bad it is. Those are our expectations in 2025, aren’t they? Having watched four out of eight episodes, I can say it’s a good, solid show, but being also a biblical show means it will likely push some viewers away, because many Christians want biblical stories just so. When dramatizing a biblical story, writers have to make creative decisions that will naturally appear to deviate from the text because the Bible wasn’t written for full dramatization.

The first episode will provoke Bible-lovers more than the next three. In fact, I saw an interview with Michael Iskander, who depicts David very well, and he said his mother raised the question of biblical accuracy daily. The series attempts to head off such complaints by opening with a notice about creative liberties and historical accuracy. It essentially says we can’t all agree on every detail when telling stories like this.

Season one of House of David covers 1 Samuel 15-17, introducing King Saul at the time he fails to obey the Lord in completely destroying the Amalekites and framing the season in terms of David’s battle with Goliath. That framing is one of the things that sounds off. A child asks us, “Can one stone change the course of history?” Well, the stone wasn’t the one who changed things.

David is introduced as a disfavored son of Jesse, disfavored because his mother was an outcast and not married to Jesse, whose first wife must have died at some point. I got the impression this woman, Nitzevet, had married Jesse, but calling David a bastard would contradict that. Presenting David as an outcast comes from Jewish tradition, which says David describes his upbringing in Psalm 69. “I have become a stranger to my brothers” is one description (v 8). But David being a bastard or Jesse being shunned by his community for having a dishonored concubine is not the traditional view.

As many characters are introduced in the first episode so is a lion who threatens Jesse’s land. The beast is a divisive point between father and son; Jesse says he handled it before, but it has returned (because there’s only ever one evil lion) and David defiantly decides to handle it himself. Why do the heroes always have to rebel against their parents to begin their path to greatness? Can we be done with this cliché?

In this part of the narrative, the writers introduce an odd maxim that is not repeated beyond this first episode (at least for the first half). Jesse is teaching his family about Moses and Joshua and God’s command to “be strong and courageous.” He summarizes that command as “Fear is the enemy. Fear is the thief.” This is what David repeats when he seeks out the lion, and it just sounds secular. Why doesn’t he say something like, “Be strong and courageous for the Lord will given your enemies into your hands”? David, Jesse, Jonathan, and Samuel are depicted as the most expressively faithful characters in these episodes, so why can’t David something about confidence in God instead a parody of the famous line from Dune.

I do appreciate how attractive Michal is–I have sympathy for her. I’ll be surprised if seasons two depicts how David’s womanizing and wife-collecting hurts her. They’ll probably gloss over that part. I also appreciate everything they do with Jonathan. He’s the solid, righteous one in the royal family, though Michal appears to be equally devout.

There’s also a bit of drama involving the Philistines that is utterly cliché, but we shall not speak of it.

I’ve enjoyed the series so far. I’ll let you know what I think of the rest of it soon.

Photo by Lukáš Kačaliak on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reviews

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.