When she first heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, sixteen-year-old Elaine R. Engelson of Brooklyn was “amazed and ashamed” of her “weakness in facing a world crisis.” She wrote to the New York Times the next day that although she, like many others, had “felt the inevitability of war” for some time, “the thought of it actually having come upon us was sudden.” The horrifying events in Hawaii suddenly changed the rhythms of the teenager’s life. She had grown accustomed to countless airplanes flying overhead, but on December 8, the sound of an approaching plane produced a new sense of dread. Although “the world has not yet come to an end by any means,” she had the ominous feeling that “we are on the brink of a precipice overhanging a world of complete darkness.” What was at stake, she said, was something she and many Americans had not fully appreciated until then: “We are fighting to save the world from a fate worse than death.” For a stunned nation, it seemed impossible that the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been caught so unaware. Over twenty-four hundred Americans had died, and the navy had lost eight battleships…. Along with shock and anger came another reaction, shared by millions on both coasts. People wondered if Pearl Harbor was just a prelude to something far worse. In a Gallup poll taken shortly after December 7, 60 percent responded that it was “very likely” or “fairly likely” that the West Coast would be attacked in the next few weeks.
It has been my experience, as a Viking enthusiast, that historical biographies of great Vikings tend to be disappointing. A particularly sore memory is a biography of Canute the Great, some years back, that reduced a life of battle, intrigue, and conquest to the statistical analysis of personal names in old charters. The problem is sources, which in the Early Medieval Period (we used to call it The Dark Ages, precisely because of the scanty written record) tend to be spare even in relatively well-organized countries like France and England. For famous Scandinavians, the most accessible sources are the Icelandic sagas, which historians usually reject wholesale (in spite of the groundbreaking work of Torgrim Titlestad, available in a marvelously translated book called Viking Legacy).
In the case of Norway’s King Harald Hardrada, subject of Harald Hardrada: The Warrior’s Way by John Marsden, the situation is a little better. King Harald Sigurdsson lived his legendary life at the very end of the Viking Age, when things were getting a little better organized. On top of that, he had a wide-ranging career and often left discernable, discoverable tracks in local records.
I’ve often said that if there was ever a real-life Conan the Barbarian, it was Harald Sigurdsson, the tall and mighty half-brother of King Olaf Haraldsson, patron Saint of Norway. Carried wounded from the battlefield of Stiklestad, where Olaf died (Harald was 15 years old), he fled to Russia, where he served Prince Jaroslav as a mercenary. Then on to Constantinople, to join the fabled Varangian Guard, the emperor’s personal corps and bodyguard. After fighting all around the Mediterranean, he was imprisoned and escaped, participated in a rebellion, and personally blinded the deposed emperor. Then, having illegally sent treasure back to Russia for safekeeping for years, he fled the capitol and sailed back to Jaroslav. He married Jaroslav’s daughter, then returned to Norway, where he traded half his treasure to his nephew, Magnus the Good, for half the kingdom. Magnus’s death a few years thereafter left him as sole king. He spent most of his reign fighting wars with Denmark, until in 1066 he turned his eyes to England. In September of that year, he and his army were slaughtered by King Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge, after which the weakened English army went on to be beaten by William the Conqueror at Hastings a few weeks later.
That’s some life. It would be hard to make it dull, but there are historians who could do it.
Thankfully, John Marsden is not one of those.
I had trouble putting Harald Hardrada down. I knew the story well, of course, but Marsden does an excellent job of presenting it as a series of puzzles – he assumes the sagas unreliable, but he doesn’t dismiss them out of hand, especially when buttressed by contemporary skaldic poems. Sometimes he actually defends the saga writers against more skeptical historians. The narrative that emerges is worthy of the epic subject.
To top it all off, he even tells the story of Harald’s famous banner, “Land-ravager,” relating a legend I’ve already described on this blog, some time back, that an ancient scrap of silk on the Isle of Skye, known as “The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan,” belonging to the Clan McLeod, may plausibly be “Land-ravager” – there’s even scientific evidence. It’s that kind of touch that makes Marsden’s Harald Hardrada a treat for the Viking buff.
For some of our readers, this will be the book you’ve been waiting for.
Ian Stuart Sharpe has produced an eccentric but highly amusing little book for the Viking fancier. Old Norse for Modern Times is not a language course or a dictionary, but a fun collection of modern phrases rendered into the language of the Vikings. The utility of this book will probably be limited, but it is a lot of fun, especially for reenactors, saga nerds, and Viking buffs.
Ever want to say, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” in Old Norse?
“Gøra mun ed hom boð slike, es hann getr eigi hafnat.”
Since Hamlet was in fact an old Viking (or pre-Viking) himself, he might actually have said, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark:
“Eigi mun alt dælt I Danmǫrku.”
There’s also useful stuff for the contemporary berserker: “If I die in battle today, please delete my browser history.”
“Ef ek skylda falla i þessi orrustu, fyrirkom þú þá vefsǫgu minni.”
I must admit to some surprise in reading this book, in spite of all the knowledge I like to pretend I have. It generally takes more words to say stuff in Old Norse than in English – as a writer composing Viking dialogue, I’ve always thought of the Vikings as terse in speech. That’s probably just a function of English saga translations, it would appear.
A lot of us have pondered learning Old Norse at one time or another (I know I have, but I have trouble keeping track of just two languages). If you’re one of those people, Old Norse for Modern Times may serve as a good introduction.
Or you may want to read it just because it’s funny.
A recently released collection of essays from the University of Notre Dame Press on the work and thought of Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul and the West, makes this point, among others, as it aims to provide a fuller view of the man while in the process making the case for why not just his work, but indeed his counterintuitively Russian worldview, may be exactly what the West needs to survive.
Perhaps this painful situation is necessary to recover a higher order. It is an unpopular opinion held by Solzhenitsyn. It is, to the point of cliché, a profoundly “Russian” idea. As Joseph Pearce notes in his contribution to the collection, quoting an interview he conducted with Solzhenitsyn:
In the West there is a widespread feeling that this is masochism, that if we highly value suffering this is masochism. On the contrary, it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul.
In spite of the fact that I’ve never given any of his novels a rave review, Rick Dewhurst keeps alerting me to his new books. This argues a level of spiritual humility which I can only admire. I like his writing style, but I don’t think he’s ever found his real vehicle.
It wasn’t, frankly, what I expected. I was anticipating something along the lines of C. S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy. The plan here is somewhat different. These Confessions are a series of spiritual lessons, each headed by an experience (not related chronologically) from the author’s own life. Sometimes a miraculous one.
I don’t mean to disparage the book’s plan, but I would have enjoyed reading more about the life that produced such an intriguing writer. But it’s a capital mistake to judge a book by what you think it should be, rather than what the author chose to create.
I had some difficulty with the early chapters, which are the heaviest on the charismatic lessons. Rick is the pastor of a charismatic congregation in British Columbia. Although I myself spent time on the periphery of the charismatic movement back in the ‘70s, I have since joined a church that takes a skeptical attitude toward signs and wonders (though not denying their possibility). So I wasn’t entirely in sympathy with a lot of that part. But as I read on, I found more and more material that was profound and edifying for everyone.
I thought the writing a little discursive – the text could have been tightened up some. And the tone is sometimes unnecessarily apologetic. But Confessions of a Charismatic Christian was an edifying book from a seasoned pastor. Worth reading.
I gather family devotions is a challenge for everyone. I remember my parents pulling us together a couple times for what resembled the semblance of something like a worship service. It was awkward. I didn’t like it. My father-in-law regularly read from the Bible after supper, so that’s the pattern that drew me in.
Since we have homeschooled our kids from the beginning, my wife read through the Bible with them during the morning routine. That and my desire to read something that applied the Word, if not strictly devotional, is what steered me toward reading through Christian books instead of the Bible. We read a few of Jared C. Wilson’s books, at least a couple of Jerry Bridges’s. After using the Advent readings from our church, I was at a loss for what to start next. My wife suggested a few of the small books from our shelf, and that’s what got us into Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ.
This ain’t light reading. Wurmbrand is a Romanian minister from Bucharest who grew up atheist and came to faith through reading the Bible. He became an leader of the Underground Church after Communism began to strangle all of its citizens. What he and other believers suffered was demonic.
He writes like a missionary, as you would expect, and one of his principles provoked us to push back. He advocates winning people of influence first.
How was Norway won for Christ? By winning King Olaf. Russia first had the Gospel when its king, Vladimir, was won. Hungary was won by winning St. Stephen, its king. The same with Poland. In Africa, wehre the chief of the tribe has been won, the tribe follows. We setup missions to rank-and-life men who may become very fine Christians, but who have little influence and cannot change the state of things.
We must win rulers: political, economic, scientific, artistic personalities. They are the engineers of souls. They mold the souls of men. Winning them, you win the people they lead and influence.
Wurmbrand might have looked to the book of Daniel and asked whether Nebuchadnezzar’s repent and apparent faith did anything to turn Babylon around or the sympathy King Darius had for Daniel bore any fruit. Who was saved when Jonah preached to Ninevah? That nation was blessed by avoiding God’s wrath for a few generations, but when Nahum returned 150 years later, he said, “And all who look at you will shrink from you and say, ‘Wasted is Nineveh; who will grieve for her?'”
Certainly a people are blessed by Christian leaders. A society organized on biblical values is better overall than any other society, but it would not usher in faith for anyone by mere leadership. When civil leaders turn a country to Christ, it isn’t often by Christian means. The faithless see opportunity and take it by declaring themselves faithful.
God uses society and influence in ways we don’t often foresee. Remember how he has told us to care for widows and orphans. They aren’t the influential ones today, but they could be tomorrow. A common result would be that they seek Christ wherever they go and repeat the truth to a family or congregation, thereby keeping a few more people on the straight and narrow. Who can say this is an unambitious plan?
I’ve always had a mild fascination with Hollywood and Hollywood stories. A deal showed up on Carl Reiner’s memoir, My Anecdotal Life, so I picked it up. It was an amusing book, though it won’t mean as much to younger people as it does to Boomers like me.
The son of an immigrant Jewish watchmaker, Carl Reiner took acting lessons at his brother’s suggestion, and went on to enjoy a long and successful career as a comedian, writer, and producer. He’s best known for playing second banana to Syd Caesar on Your Show of Shows, being Mel Brooks’s straight man in the 2,000 Year Old Man routines, and creating and producing the Dick Van Dyke Show. He also did Broadway plays and movies (who knew he wrote a Broadway comedy pronounced the funniest thing he ever saw by no less an authority than Grouch Marx, which died thanks to a noncommittal Times review?).
According to Reiner himself, he had a stock of show biz stories he used to tell his friends, and they encouraged him to put them in a book, and this is it. It’s not presented in chronological order (which I consider a flaw), but they’re pretty good stories, especially in the cases where you know who the participants are.
My Anecdotal Life does fail in one of the pleasures most of us look for in show business stories – it’s short on dirt. We all know today what we all suspected from the beginning, that Hollywood is a nest of vipers that even regular vipers give a wide berth. But you’d never know it from this book. Except in the cases of a couple critics, Reiner doesn’t say anything at all if he can’t say something nice. He comes off as a pretty nice guy himself.
The writing was… okay. I would have expected a funny man to be more deft with words, but I suppose a lot of it was in the presentation in the original telling.
I was a little worried about politics, as Reiner was a well-known liberal. That element was pretty scarce until the very end, where he throws in a couple chapters related to his involvement with the anti-war movement in the Vietnam years, plus a touching anecdote about meeting Pres. Clinton. But it wasn’t too bad.
Not a bad book. Minimal rough language. The book shows its age in including the occasional sentiment that wouldn’t pass muster with the politically correct crowd today, especially regarding men and women.
Author Glynn Young reviews The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri, which speaks to the crumbling of some of our institutions and public trust. We cannot be everywhere, so we must trust those who represent us or our values to report to us what has occurred. If the day comes when we cannot trust anyone to tell us the truth about important matters, we will not be able to carry on as citizens.
Gurri’s book was first published in 2014 and updated in 2018. He isn’t talking about the events of this month or last summer.
“No,” Young explains, “the public is us, the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs. The age of information has taught us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and increasingly think of opposing views as those of the enemy.”
I feel a little badly about reviewing this book. It was not written by a professional, and does not pretend to literary quality. It’s aimed at a very small public. But I read it as a favor to someone, and I feel that calls for a review.
On a December morning in 1961, farmer Clarence Larson of rural Garvin, Minnesota called for a neighbor’s help. His wife was dead, her body wrapped around the power take-off of their tractor. He said she’d been helping him “elevate” some corn into a bin (a procedure employing an augur in a chute; I know it well) when she got caught in the mechanism. (This was not uncommon; I heard many stories of people losing arms in power take-offs when I was a kid, and I knew a guy whose brother was killed by one of them.) However, in this case, an unexplained injury to the back of the woman’s head, plus the condition of the body, along with the presence of a new insurance policy, aroused suspicions. The county, however, was unable to prove Clarence’s guilt to a jury, and he went free.
Clarence moved to Tracy, Minnesota, and remarried. In 1980, his new wife disappeared. She failed to show up for regular appointments, and left behind personal possessions to which she’d been attached. When people asked about her, Larson gave conflicting explanations. The county sheriff called in the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (which you may know from John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels), and even a psychic. But sufficient evidence was never found to convict Larson of murder.
Patricia Lubeck’s book, Victims of Foul Play, is a bald and artless chronological account of events. There can be no doubt that the author believes Larson got away with murder. But in the end, she leaves us with the same thing the authorities had to accept: the man was a clever murderer who managed to hide any really incriminating evidence.
Victims of Foul Play will be of interest to people interested in the local history of Lyon County, Minnesota. I can’t recommend it to anyone else. It is not well written.
Our polarized culture seems to offer two competing visions of engaging with the past. The defilement perspective views history as “at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peak at.” Its vision is limited to the now. What matters in this moment is all that matters, and it judges the past accordingly, throwing most in the ash heap.
Another perspective approaches the past as a unifying, idealized, almost sanitized, source of universal values and character traits. This produces a reverence for the past that is also locked into the present: “To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.”
Rather than either of these views, we should read history expecting to be challenged. Heroes, leaders, and all manner of influential people were no less human than we are. Their sins may have been egregious, but would we have made the same ones had we lived in their day?
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