Category Archives: Non-fiction

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews, Writing

‘Orkneyinga Saga’

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This book review will, on closer examination, turn out to be a sort of bait-and-switch, a partial review embedded in an author’s journal post. I’m still plot-wrestling, and I continue in PAUSE mode, learning the geography and trying to figure out what happens next as I send Erling Skjalgsson home from England by way of the Orkneys (and possibly the Shetlands. Haven’t worked that out yet).

As I told you, I realized the other day that Erling’s journey home to Norway has to bring him into a confrontation with Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty of Orkney, who had a problematic relationship with King (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson, Erling’s enemy. Thorfinn had submitted to Olaf as his overlord, but he felt Olaf had broken their understanding by awarding part of the jarldom to his brother Brusi. He might very well be willing to listen to Erling’s suggestion that he transfer fealty to King Knut of Denmark/England.

However, I discovered a further complication. In reading the Penguin edition of Orkneyinga Saga, the saga of the earls (jarls) of Orkney, I was reminded that Thorfinn ruled not only the Orkneys and Shetland. He also ruled Caithness, the northeastern part of Scotland, an area heavily settled by Norwegians.

And Caithness brings us close to Moray, which was the home of Macbetha – whom I included, you’ll recall, under the name Macbetha, in my last Erling book, King of Rogaland. Macbetha, who wouldn’t have been king yet at this point, would almost certainly have been an enemy of Thorfinn’s. (Though I always think about Dorothy Dunnet’s novel, King Hereafter, which is based on the theory that Thorfinn and Macbeth were the same person. She notes that the annals telling about Macbeth never mention Thorfinnn, and Orkneyinga Saga never mentions Macbeth [well, it mentions an earlier King Macbeth, but he’s a different guy]. In the saga, Thorfinn does fight a mysterious Scottish king named Karl Hundarsson, whom some historians have identified as Macbeth.) Anyway, it would be impolite to my readers not to reunite them with Macbetha while we’re in the neighborhood.

So how will I work all this out? I’m thinking about it. I have some ideas.

In any case, I’ll review the portion of Orkneyinga Saga that I read. I confess I didn’t finish it (this time through), because it covers a lot of history much later than the period I’m dealing with. Some of it, I should note, is very intriguing, especially the conscientious objection of (Saint) Magnus Erlendsson during a raid on Wales, and his subsequent martyrdom.

But my concern was with the career of Jarl Thorfinn. Thorfinn is an intriguing character, bigger than life. Sometimes he’s sympathetic, sometimes emphatically not. His climactic conflict with his charismatic nephew, Rognvald Brusisson, involves some very nice plotting (indicating – probably – a fair amount of fictional embroidering) and dramatic irony. One also notes the appearance of the name “Tree-beard,” very likely where Tolkien found it. The saga also includes one of our sources for the disputed practice of the “Blood Eagle,” a cruel method of execution which showed up in the History Channel “Vikings” series. (I myself incline to the view that there never was such a practice, but that it came from the saga writers misunderstanding a poetic metaphor.)

Orkneyinga Saga is one of the most striking and vigorous of the sagas. It’s not up to Snorri Sturlusson’s literary standards, but it still packs a punch and lingers in the memory.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘In Forkbeard’s Wake,’ by Ben Nimmo

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Our friend Dan Nelson, in a comment, mentioned a book about sailing in King Svein Forkbeard’s wake, and I was reminded that I owned the book and ought to consult it on my current project. It’s a 2003 release called In Forkbeard’s Wake, by Ben Nimmo. I remembered it as a good book, and my review confirms that judgment.

Ben Nimmo is (or was, according to his bio) a British scuba instructor. He had written one previous book and – as far as I can tell – that’s the end of his output. That is a great pity – he’s an engaging writer. An internet search suggests that nowadays he’s involved in combatting online “disinformation.”

I can’t claim that I re-read In Forkbeard’s Wake in full – I only reviewed the parts dealing with the places I’m writing about in this book – Sweden and Denmark. Information on sailing conditions was especially useful to me.

But as a bonus, the book’s general pleasures were notable. Nimmo excels at describing landscape and weather. He relates well to the people he meets, who – except for government functionaries (occasionally) – are almost always friendly, interested, and accommodating. A sailing voyage, even in our day of satellite navigation, remains a risky project, especially when you’re sailing solo in a small boat. So there are some genuine thrills here too.

Ben Nimmo is a fine writer. I appreciated his wit, as in passages like this: “I’d also been warned that Danes have a real problem welcoming strangers; this, coming from a Norwegian, was a fine case of the pot calling the Ketill black.”

Anyway, In Forkbeard’s Wake is a first-rate sailing book, and I recommend it. Not available, alas, in electronic form.

Non-fiction

Stanford President Faked Scientific Research

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From our Trust the Science desk, respected scientific researchers have had their work called into question by evidence of data manipulation. Last month, the president of Stanford stepped down because the student newspaper asked an expert to review his published neurobiological papers to clear up allegations that had been raised years before. Pete Judo explains in this video.

On November 29, 2022, Theo Baker wrote in The Stanford Daily:

Silvia Bulfone-Paus, a prominent German researcher, was forced to step down as the director of the Borstel Institute in 2011 after image manipulation was found in several of her papers (Bulfone-Paus blamed two of her post-doc researchers). Carlo Croce, an Ohio State University professor, was beset with similar allegations in 2017 — an official review conducted by the university found earlier this year that he had not manipulated imagery himself, but the professor was disciplined over “management problems,” and two of his researchers, who were determined to have made the falsifications, were dismissed. And Gregg Semenza, a Nobel-prize-winning scientist, retracted 17 papers after allegations were made on PubPeer.

. . .

Scientific journals and institutions have historically been reluctant to investigate alleged misconduct, particularly by powerful scientists, experts say.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Canute the Great and the Rise of Danish Imperialism during the Viking Age,’ by Laurence M. Larson

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Image of Knut the Great from Liber Vitae, written in 1031, during Canute’s lifetime.

Had a pretty good weekend at the Antique Power Show at the Little Log House Pioneer Village, near Hastings, Minn. This is the third year my Viking group has been there – though nobody’s quite sure why we’re even around at a steam engine and tractor event. It amuses me that we have no apparent connection to the event theme, but people still like to see us there. The weather was cooler than we’ve been experiencing lately, and we were in the shade, so we didn’t suffer much from the sun smiting us by day nor the moon by night. And my book sales were good. But as always when I sit long hours on my Viking chest with no back support, I came home creaky. That’s the price you pay for staying alive into old age. By the way, it’s my 100th birthday today. Approximately. In round, subjective numbers. Close enough for freelance writing.

My work on The Baldur Game, the epic final volume of my Erling saga, continues apace. I’ve come to the part where Erling meets King Knut the Great of Denmark/England, and I figured I’d better bone up on that fellow’s life (did you know he was at least half Polish?). Having a weekend of Viking reenactment to fill, I pulled up my old Kindle version of Laurence M. Larson’s  Canute the Great and the Rise of Danish Imperialism during the Viking Age. I’ve reviewed it here before, but it’s more interesting (in spite of its age) than the other Knut biography I own.

Knut (or Canute, as it’s spelled here) is a fascinating character in English history, despite the fact that his complete failure to provide an heir with survival skills doomed his accomplishments to be overshadowed by those of other kings. Still, he started out as a disfavored son of King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark (who conquered England first, then died, leaving Canute with all the weary work to do over again), knocked about as a pirate for a while, and finally fought his way up (Conan-like) to the throne of a great kingdom. His union of Denmark with England, Scotland, Norway and bits of what is now Poland could arguably be called the first British Empire.

Scholarship has advanced quite a lot since Larson wrote this book (1912), but in my opinion it’s sometimes advanced in the wrong direction. So I generally like Larson’s saga-friendly approach. It does skew the narrative a bit, I think, though, since the author spends a lot of time on Norway and St. Olaf, probably just because the sagas have described that business more completely than the English chroniclers recorded other aspects of Canute’s reign. As the drunk who hunted for his car keys under a street lamp said, “I lost them over there, but the light’s better here.”

My main complaint is the author’s uncritical acceptance of the traditional view that Olaf was somehow the “legitimate” king of Norway, and that his opponents (like Erling Skjalgsson) were rebels, bought by Canute’s treacherous “bribes.” In fact they were defenders of the land’s organic constitution, and Olaf was the usurper trying to overturn the ancient laws. And giving gifts to supporters was what overlords did in those days. Olaf did it himself, as I plan to point out in my book.

But other than that, I liked Canute the Great and the Rise of Danish Imperialism during the Viking Age, and found it useful. I recommend it. It’s out of copyright and cheap. Watch out for OCR typos.

Non-fiction, Poetry, Publishing

County Highway, a New Magazine Delivered as Newspaper

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When I read on Twitter (X) that novelist and editor Walter Kirn, along with David Samuels, had created “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper,” I looked up the website, and when I saw it would be for sale at one of my town’s cute local stores, I decided to check it out.

County Highway is meant to represent the heart of America, a place with natural rhythms, relationships, and grassroots sense. It’s written by “actual human beings,” which is more than some websites can say. “We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs” or when Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison wrote of their country.

I enjoy the feel of reading this paper, which cheekily touts itself as “America’s only newspaper” and plans to publish six issues a year for a $50 subscription. Kirn’s front page piece is on his visit to The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana, a place where memorabilia, props, and junk attempt to preserve a moral history. Duncan Moench has a report on artificial intelligence and the imminent threat of corporate technocracy.

I was pulled in by a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), which says Kingsolver’s skill is clear and subject matter well chosen, but this “protest novel” in the form of Dicken’s David Copperfield is heavy on ranting, light on humanity. Other articles in this first issue include a lengthy piece that circles around Joshua Tree National Park, a front story on an American con man from last century, four pages on music, feature on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s falconry hobby, and a full page of legit classifieds: Wyoming cabins, bookstores, alpacas for breeding, and ‘shrooms.

I’ve enjoyed reading some of these, and there are a few more I’d like to get to. There’s a little poetry, a few wisecracks tucked in a small column, and attractive illustrations of a vintage sheen. The articles feel like those I’ve seen online and hoped to get back to, but often don’t. The Internet is ethereal; newspapers sit on the desk.

I may buy the next issue to try to balance what I read in the first, but I’m put off by the feel of the whole. Is it cynical? Maybe too secular? There’s a column about fugitives from someone who speaks positively about the Weather Underground. I believe he says he helped a couple of them back in the day. That’s like longing for time when your granddad would tell stories of fighting alongside Che Guevara. And then there’s this in a joke section: “Drag queen story hour — it’s what my pops used to call church on Sundays.” I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe I should untie my laces. (I wrote about the second issue also.)

Alt Culture: To balance the earthiness of America’s newspaper, let me point you to the new season of Doubletake from World News Group. This is a podcast of long features that can get complicated. Today’s episode is on what some people are doing in the Metaverse and a church trying to reach them.

Poetry: John Barr’s “Season of spores”:

“a bric-a-brac of fluke and ruff,
lavender cap, topiary puff.”

Photo by Wolfgang Frick on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry, Reading

Liberty Is a Growing Hunger, Like a Long Book

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What is liberty? Is it different from freedom?

Do Americans know more than the first verse of “America, the Beautiful,” specifically the second verse with the words:

“America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!”

In one simple line, we see the law, not as the source of our liberty, but as a tool for protecting it against those who would take it away. But what “it” is remains a question.

It’s that loosely defined something we can’t get enough of.

“More liberty begets desire of more;
The hunger still increases with the store.”

John Dryden

Fred Bauer has a piece on the different views of freedom we’ve had since the colonial days. We had Puritans’ “ordered liberty,” Quakers’ “reciprocal liberty,” Virginians’ “hegemonic liberty,” and Appalachians’ “natural liberty.” These are taken from David Hackett Fischer’s book, Albion’s Seed.

“Ethical concerns,” Bauer writes, “factor into the notion of freedom as ‘elbow room.’ Patrick Henry argued that the centralized Constitution would threaten both ‘the rights of conscience’ and ‘all pretensions to human rights and privileges.’ That ethical strand offers a counterpoint to arguments that American freedom is simply about material prosperity. The genealogy of freedom is more complicated.”

Moving on to the links, we face a new frontier for ethical freedom in the choices we make with our technology. In other words, if we can do it, should we? How is using AI as described below not plagiarism?

To repeat the July 13, 2023, tweet above for preservation, Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) says, “One of the major reasons I think we need to stand against AI as authors specifically is I suspect a lot of publishing house CEOs are looking at it and thinking ‘you know, why do we pay all these editors anyway?'”

She retweets Maureen Johnson (@maureenjohnson) from earlier that day, who says, “Authors: we need to stand up with the actors. AI is ALREADY HERE in our work. I just spoke to a Very Famous Author who has to remain nameless for legal reasons. They are held up in a contract negotiation because a Major Publisher wants to train AI on their work.”

I’d think training a computer to mimic a popular author’s work would fall within the bounds of plagiarism. If not that, fan fiction.

Running: In Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, Lauren Fleshman describes what she saw of a sport that interested in recognizing or catering to female athletes as the women they are. Nike, the shoe company, can be especially cruel.

Poetry: “Who Furrows? Who Follows?” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. Here’s the first stanza.

Who furrows? Who follows?
             The owl in the hollow
            The hawk in the meadow
           The jay in the hedgeapple tree
Who follows the farmer who furrows his fields?
Who furrows?  Who follows?
           We three.

Fiction: It may be common for online chat to express a desire for short novels, but do readers want them? Nathan Bransford talks about the dangers of writing shorter works. “When writers are grappling with bloated word counts, physical description tends to be the first to go. Tastes vary, but in my opinion, cutting too much physical description is almost always a mistake. We’re already in a physical description drought, please don’t make it worse!”

Trapped: In other news, 100 people were trapped for hours yesterday in Agatha Christie’s old home by a large tree that had fallen across the only access road. They hung out mostly in the tea room. One witness reported the staff were “doing a great job, they are giving us free tea’s and things. It’s a bit bleak.”

Photo by Priscilla Gyamfi on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Poetry

‘The Tale of Arnor, Poet of Jarls’

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The Viking hall at Ravnsborg, Knox City, MO. Photo by me.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed another saga in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Tonight’s saga is not a saga at all, but a tale, just two pages long. It’s a sort of parenthetical incident found originally in the Icelandic Morkinskinna saga manuscript. I can’t find any cheap collection you can buy that contains it, so you’ll have to take my word about it. Its title is The Tale of Arnor, the Poet of Earls.

“Earl,” of course, is a translation of “jarl.”

Arnor Jarlaskald is a figure known from the saga histories, and considered one of the great skalds of the 11th Century. This story doesn’t explain his nickname (he deals only with kings here), but we’re told elsewhere that he got it because he spent a lot of time with the jarls of the Orkneys and composed often for them. Otherwise he was a merchant.

This story is set during the time when King Magnus the Good (St. Olaf’s son) ruled jointly with King Harald Hardrada. (Harald had come back from Constantinople dripping with money, intending to depose his nephew Magnus and take over Norway. Intermediaries convinced them to do a deal – half of Harald’s fortune in exchange for half of Magnus’ kingdom. Though their time together wasn’t without tensions, they managed to keep the peace, and when Magnus died, it’s remarkable to note that nobody seems to have suggested that Harald murdered him. That’s the sort of thing Harald easily might have done, after all).

In the tale, Arnor arrives in the town (doesn’t say what town here; no doubt it’s explained in the larger context. Could have been Nidaros (Trondheim), but it might have been Tunsberg), having composed poems in honor of both kings. But he seems to have been told to wait, so he started to work tarring his ship. Then messengers came to summon him to court. He went directly, not even stopping to wash the tar off his hands.

He then goes into the hall, where both kings wait in their high seats. They ask Arnor whose poem he means to recite first. Arnor says he’ll start with Magnus, because “it is said that young men are impatient.”

Arnor begins the poem, and Harald (himself a poet) can’t resist interrupting to complain that it’s mostly about Arnor’s own journeys and dealings with the jarls. Magnus wants to hear more, and then the saga writer gives us excerpts from the original poem. Harald continues butting in with objections, but in the end he appears jealous. After hearing his own poem, he says, “My poem will soon fade away and be forgotten, while the drapa composed about King Magnus will be recited as long as there are people in the North.”

Which is true, because we have Magnus’ poem preserved here, while Harald’s is not.

In the end, Arnor is rewarded by Harald with a gold-inlaid spear, while Magnus gives him a gold ring and, later, a merchant ship and cargo.

This is a snippet, an anecdote without much of a plot. Its significance would seem to be in the insight it gives us into the characters of two very different kings. And probably an old man’s proud reminiscence of the days when he met celebrities.

Irrelevant details like Arnor’s dirty hands give a strong impression of verisimilitude. This sounds very much like a genuine memory, passed down only a few generations before being preserved on parchment.

Non-fiction, Religion

Ham Wasn’t Cursed, Nor Are All the Generations That Follow Him

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One of the books I’ve been reading this year is Carl F. Ellis Jr.’s Free at Last?: The Gospel in the African American Experience. It’s good history of African American movements and an exposition of the goals and promises they have held over the years. It’s a wealth of information and trivia that would make a great text for a semester course. The trivia mostly comes within the sixty-page glossary of people, places, and terms that may have been referred to in main text.

One of the terms explained in this glossary is the myth of the “curse of Ham.” It’s an idea I’ve known about for years, but I can’t remember how I first heard it. It came up several weeks ago on Twitter by one of those accounts that reads like a gateway drug to radicalization. It’s based on a few verses in Genesis 9, which read: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:24-25 KJV).

It’s a weird passage because of the unclear reason Noah is provoked to curse his grandson and bless two of his three sons. But you see when reading these two verses that Ham is not the one cursed. It’s Canaan, his son. The narrative at this point emphasizes Ham being Canaan’s father, and in the next chapter it spells out the Canaanite peoples and some of the cities they founded, including Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s easy to see the setup for the wrath God would pour on them when bringing Israel back to the promised land.

But the myth is that Noah’s curse was on the father, Ham, touching every one of his descendants in every generation. Ellis says those who paint Christianity as a white man’s religion use this as a proof. Some of them argue it’s a good reason for African Americans to convert to Islam, but aside from this being a foolish interpretation of Genesis, it comes from a ninth-century Muslim apologist.

Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and figure, and the Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father’s curse. He went away, followed by his sons, and they settled by the shore, where God increased and multiplied them. They were the blacks . . .

Ibn Qutaybah, Kitāb al-maʿārif, p. 26

That, friends, is not Biblical theology. It misreads the written word of God and imagines an explanation to fit some human conclusion. If Christian orthodoxy is anything, it’s bound to God’s word (let the reader understand). Ellis adds that this idea was used to justify slavery within White Christianity-ism (an idolatrous civil religion that uses the language and forms of Christianity for its own ends).

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

Vanity Is Common, Blasphemy Ever Green

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Fear and Vanity
incline us to imagine
we have caused a face
to turn away which merely
happened to look somewhere else.
 
----  ----  ----
Everyone thinks:
"I am the most important 
Person at present."
The same remember to add:
"Important, I mean, to me."

from “Marginalia” by W.H. Auden, City Without Walls and Other Poems

Mencken: “[Paul] Fussell credits Mencken’s series of ‘elegantly subversive’ Prejudices volumes with making him a genuine reader and eventually a writer. He reveled in Mencken’s ‘refreshing battle against complacent inhumanity and the morons’ – like any know-it-all aspiring young literary man.”

Comedy: Monty Python is irreverent and sometimes blasphemous, but now one of its productions is being accused of a different kind of blasphemy. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as T. S. Eliot opined, and that seems especially true of the progressive political class and its commissars among the creative types.”

Fantasy: Patrik Leo raves over Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair among others. See the whole trilogy here.

Also, Elliot Brooks talks about a few new fantasy novels.

Non-fiction: Bookstore tales. Here’s a “charming tale of an Italian book publicist and poet who ‘launched a [successful] crowdfunding campaign on Facebook to open a bookshop in a tiny village in the mountains.'”

Also, ten non-fiction recommendations from Kirkus Reviews.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Non-fiction, The Press

Salt, Light, Memory, and a Few Good Books

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In the current issue of World Magazine, veteran journalist Cal Thomas talks about the scant trust in new media and some of his experiences over fifty years. Here’s one.

One of my favorite stories about what maintaining integrity and “guarding your heart” in the Christian life can mean came, surprisingly enough, from the pornographer Larry Flynt. In 2007, Flynt was offering $1 million to anyone who could “out” a member of Congress or other public ­figure who was a “family values conservative” in rhetoric, but something quite different in private life. One day, Flynt rolled into Fox’s green room in New York in his wheelchair (he had been shot and paralyzed by a gunman in Georgia in 1978). After exchanging perfunctory greetings, he said to me, “I thought you’d be interested in something.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“We did an investigation of you.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Flynt said. “We didn’t find anything.”

I laughed. “Praise the Lord, a personal endorsement from Larry Flynt! You were just looking in the wrong place for my sins.”

Nostalgia: What do we make of the past? “A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence.”

Reading: Long-time editor and reviewer John Wilson offers a list of novels and books he’s looking forward to this summer, including the work of E.X. Ferrars and her Andrew Bassnet series, in which a retired botanist retires only to find he’s come across a murder.

The Soviet Man: In his book The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel “argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a ‘new Soviet person’ (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it, ‘The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born.'” What helped build this new person was a curious amalgamation: “Soviet Americanism.”

Anniversary: In Hong Kong, they will not forget what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. None of us should.

"Your heart is not the compass Christ saileth by." - Samuel Rutherford

From @SJMelniszyn /Twitter

Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.