The Fellowship & Fairydust blog has posted the second part of its interview with our friend Dale Nelson. This portion concentrates on his work on Inklings scholarship:
So, much that keeps me interested in the Inklings is not just academic curiosity or opportunism but a concern for the moral imagination incarnated in our lives and homes; and these books are delightful to read. At the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings for the 14th time.
I should probably caution you that I’m about to talk about where I ate lunch. This troubles me, as I remember (vaguely) from my youth (long ago) that old people were always talking about where they ate lunch, and it was an incredible bore. I honestly make an effort not to be a bore, but genetics are against me.
I assure you, though, that the story does get bizarre. Not bizarre in a truly surprising way, but bizarre enough to write about on a day when I don’t have a book to review for you.
If you’re into middlebrow dining, you may be aware of the recent closures of many Red Lobster restaurants. It appears their attempt to drum up business by offering unlimited all-you-can-eat shrimp didn’t pay off in the long run. Shrimp does not, it would seem, provide an effective loss leader.
So they closed “my” Red Lobster in Golden Valley (yes, we have a suburb called Golden Valley near me). This has weighed heavily on my mind, because in my world Red Lobster constitutes pretty fine dining. I liked going there occasionally, when my wallet permitted. Me and my Amazon Fire, that’s a big date in my universe.
So today I drove to the RL closest to my location, way the heck up in Fridley (I think. Google Maps doesn’t actually tell you what town you’re in. Ever notice that?). It was almost identical to the Golden Valley place. Which is not, I suppose, surprising.
And I had the Wednesday special, and the waitress was polite, and I enjoyed it. Me and my Amazon Fire enjoying virtual face time.
As I left the restaurant, I dropped my Fire. I may have muttered some mild – but neither obscene nor blasphemous – expletive.
I picked it up and looked at it. One of the corners on the protective case I’d bought years ago had broken off. But that’s OK. It still has support on 3 corners and does not require replacement.
I came home, and went to work on my translating. A couple hours ago I took a short break and reclined on the couch. I opened my Android phone and happened to select the Amazon app.
The first thing I saw was an ad for protective covers for Kindle devices.
You know those horror movies, where people see obvious foreshadowings of impending, apocalyptic evil, and the characters ignore them, and you say, “Can’t you see it coming? Are you stupid?”
I think I understand those characters better now.
Reading on in Volume 2 of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one was fairly long – “Killer-Glum’s Saga”. (Also known as Viga-Glum’s Saga, which is just the same thing translated.)
I struggle to describe Killer-Glum’s Saga, as it really left no strong impression on me. Most great sagas feature some kind of powerful motivation for the main character – vengeance or a woman’s love or the righting of some great wrong. Killer-Glum has none of those things. He’s just a guy who goes through his life, and happens to have a talent for man-killing.
The saga writer seems to sense this lack, because he begins Glum’s tale with a trope borrowed from a thousand sagas, folk tales, and fairy tales: The hero starts out as his father’s least promising son, showing no initiative and often being taunted for his laziness. But when it comes down to cases, he proves extremely adept at fighting and killing, and before long he is the most powerful man in his district. We are told that he maintained this power for an unusual length of time. But eventually his enemies get the best of him, and he loses his property and has to move elsewhere. In the end he is converted to Christianity and dies in old age.
There are many incidents here, and a hundred characters to try to keep track of, but not much of a central narrative line. The situation is not improved by the fact that the text is somewhat corrupt.
One interesting scene did strike me – at one point Glum’s son kills a man, and Glum wants that fact not to be known. So he compliments a thrall on doing the killing, repeating the praise so may times that the stupid thrall begins believing it himself. Early medieval brainwashing.
My final evaluation is that Killer-Glum’s Saga is not one to read if you’re new to saga reading. This one is for the saga buffs; it demands a little effort.
I’m sorry, I’m going to borrow material from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien again. Just one more anecdote, I promise you. I think it’s too good to keep to myself – but then I’m a pathetic name-dropper (when I have a name to drop, which is rarely).
Anyway, here’s an story Tolkien relates in a January 9, 1965 letter to his son Michael:
An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves…. It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: ‘it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before’. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude; and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her….
Robert Graves was, of course, the author of I, Claudius and various other stuff. Tolkien doesn’t seem to have respected him much, but I’ve omitted his personal comments.
And it’s happy Friday to you again, dear Brandywinians. I hope my repeated posts about The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien this week haven’t bored you – I know Tolkien himself isn’t boring, but my own penchant for finding parallels to my work might easily have become tedious.
As an antidote, I’ll just finish the week out with a few choice quotations from some of the letters:
In reference to a pair of reviews of The Hobbit by C. S. Lewis, published in 1937:
Also I must respect his opinion, as I believed him to be the best living critic until he turned his attention to me, and no degree of friendship would make him say what he does not mean: he is the most uncompromisingly honest man I have met….
From the same letter:
The presence (even if only on the borders) of the terrible is, I believe, what gives this imagined world its verisimilitude. A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.
From 1941:
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.
1943:
Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men.
1944:
I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians.
1944:
The future is impenetrable especially to the wise; for what is really important is always hid from contemporaries, and the seeds of what is to be are quietly germinating in the dark in some forgotten corner….
1944:
…Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.
I think these will do for tonight. Have a blessed weekend!
Theologically (if the term is not too grandiose) I imagine the picture to be less dissonant from what some (including myself) believe to be the truth. But since I have deliberately written a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them, I will not now depart from that mode, and venture on theological disquisition for which I am not fitted. But I might say that if the tale is ‘about’ anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about ‘power.’ Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.
(Letter, Oct. 14, 1958, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Rhona Beare)
I’ll have to admit that I’ve always thought that The Lord of the Rings was about the temptations of Power, but Tolkien himself says, in more than one letter in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (which I continue to read), that the story is about death.
Sauron (if I remember correctly) is a Valar, an incarnate angelic being (fallen in his case). He is not the equivalent of Satan, but of a powerful lesser demon. A creature like he (again, if I understand it right) would ordinarily live till the end of the world. But Sauron, as a repeated rebel, has been “killed” and reborn more than once. He knows, or suspects, that if he’s killed again, he’s not coming back in Middle Earth – and he has no reason for hope where his spirit is going after that. He’s struggling to stay alive, even in the hellscape he’s made for himself in Mordor.
Smeagol has been enslaved by the One Ring, and was given (or suffered) extended life thereby – but the life the Ring imparts is not wholesome. Bilbo, who experiences the same thing, says he feels “stretched.” It’s an addiction too – as the pleasure decreases, the craving grows.
Aragorn, on the other hand, who was granted a very long life through his Numenorean blood, will voluntarily lay down his life before it runs out completely. This is regarded as a noble act (not, I’m confident, comparable in any way with assisted suicide).
The elves regard human death as a gift. It’s a mystery to them, but they envy it in a curious way.
These are matters worth pondering, for a man who, like me, is growing old. I can’t say that my whole Erling Saga is about death, but The Baldur Game certainly is. And I was aware of that before I read these letters.
I’m still working my way through The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s quite a long book (though not nearly as long as the 3 volumes of C. S. Lewis’ letters. But this collection makes no claim to being complete).
In any case, the business takes time. So I hope you’ll forgive my giving the book my “reading report” treatment. I suspect there’s enough interest in Tolkien’s work among our readers to warrant multiple posts.
What may strain your tolerance more is my selection of passages from the letters that I relate to my own writing. I’m keenly aware that, even standing on the shoulders of authors like Tolkien and Lewis, I’m shorter than they are. But as I obsess my way through the final stages of producing The Baldur Game, I snatch at any straw of reassurance I can find – or imagine I find.
Anyway, here’s a nice one, from a September 30, 1955 letter to a reader (friend?) named Hugh Brogan. Brogan had written with a criticism of the archaic prose style Tolkien used in The Two Towers. The professor never actually sent this letter, but dispatched a note instead, saying “it would be too long to debate.” But he kept the letter in his files.
He agrees with Brogan’s rejection of what they called “tushery” – the use of archaic words in literature to give an impression of antiquity – words like “tush,” “forsooth,” and “eftsoons.” Victorian writers liked to toss such morsels into their dialogue, but they’re now considered an affectation.
However, Tolkien insists that he does not employ tushery:
But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of the things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.
I jumped at this, because it relates to my own style (in my Viking books). I actually avoid archaic words, unless I can find no modern equivalent. (I’d love to use the word “leif” as an adjective, meaning “to wish to”, for instance. But I don’t think I ever have, because nobody knows the word anymore.)
I’ve actually chosen to simplify my word choices to achieve an antique effect in these books. The general modern writer’s rule, “Don’t use a Latin word when an Anglo-Saxon word will do,” is taken to an extreme. Rather than use a word derived from Latin or French, I’ll sometimes even invent a compound word (in the German fashion) made out of two simple English ones.
In addition, I make use of my knowledge of Norwegian. Norwegian sentences are often constructed differently from the English. I discovered that when I re-cast a sentence in Norwegian word order, I get an effect that “feels” like Old Norse.
I like to think it works. The most satisfying praise I ever got for my writing was back in the 1990s, when a reader told me he looked up from Erling’s Word and was surprised to find himself in the 20th Century.
I picked up the first version of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, getting it a bargain rate that day. You, if you want the book, will probably prefer to get the Revised and expanded edition, which has the further advantage of being cheaper (in the Kindle edition) than the one I’m reading (which, aside from containing fewer letters, features an unfortunate number of typos – “orcs” often comes out as “ores,” for instance.
It is, for me, a somewhat emotional read. Though I am not such a coxcomb as to compare my own work to The Professor’s, I can certainly identify – within my limits – with the agonies he went through getting the whole thing written down and published – a process that took something in the neighborhood of two decades. (He openly admits that he probably wouldn’t have finished it without the encouragement, or even the nagging, of C. S. Lewis.)
His publishing history, at least, is almost as complicated as mine. George Allen & Unwin published The Hobbit. They very much wanted a sequel, but when Tolkien went to work, his story expanded in an alarming way. His correspondence with them, over many years, focused on his frequent excuses why he hadn’t been able to do much work, because of obligations at Oxford. Which was no doubt true, especially during the war years. He was also working on the Silmarillion, and he seems to have come to consider that work the real center of the project, with the Lord of the Rings a more peripheral matter. Allen & Unwin were interested in the “Hobbit sequel,” and happy enough to discuss that, whenever it would be finished at last. When they decided against publishing the Silmarillion, Tolkien clearly took offense. When another publisher (Collins) made noises of interest, Tolkien actually tried to push Allen & Unwin away. He says in one letter to them:
My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion.
But Allen & Unwin didn’t want the Silmarillion (at that point). Then the Collins editor changed his mind, and Tolkien seems to have despaired, having gone from a strong to a weak negotiating position. Eventually Rayner Unwin, his former student, reopened communications, and Tolkien – visibly humbled – agreed at last to let Allen & Unwin publish it without the Silmarillion, and (against his preferences) in three volumes.
The rest is history.
I too know the experience of wrong-footing it with a publisher – without quite so happy an outcome. But I could identify, certainly. One feels so attached to one’s own books that it’s hard to distinguish literary criticism from personal slight. No matter how you try to be objective, it’s hard to keep feelings leashed. The situation is too subjective; there are no landmarks to go by. Especially if you’re slightly unstable – and what author was ever very stable? Publishers must lead frustrating lives and require thick skin, dealing with us. Some of them are rumored to drink, and it’s hard to blame them.
As for my own delayed work The Baldur Game, I’ve got all the notes from my readers now, and am doing (what I hope is) the final read-through. Still waiting for my cover art, which I’m confident will be a masterpiece, and well worth the wait.
I was reading this particular book, one of those free ones I pick up in promotions. The book had numerous flaws (such as you routinely find in self-published works), but it also showed signs of promise. Not enough research had been done on the historical period in which it was set, but the author seemed to do a good job establishing atmosphere. And I was interested in what would happen to the characters.
But I could not finish the book. I tried. I held out for about a third of its length, and then I had to give it up.
The main problem was punctuation. The author got punctuation wrong in various ways, but particularly in the area of quotation marks. Let me remind you of the rules:
“The rules for quotation marks in dialogue,” said the lecturer, “are as follows. First of all, you start all direct quotations with the aforementioned marks. If the speech involves more than one paragraph, the first paragraph will end with a simple period. The lack of ‘close quotes’ here signals to the reader that more of the same speech is coming up.
“Then you start the next paragraph, once again, with opening quotation marks,” he went on. “And when the speech is done, you finish with ‘close quotes’ to signal that fact.”
The author of this book did not understand these rules. In fact, he got them precisely backwards. It was like driving in a town where some trickster has turned all the street signs 90 degrees. In every patch of dialogue, I had to stop and figure out who was talking now. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to give up reading, even though the story interested me. The author was trying to make me do his work for him.
I don’t entirely blame him. No doubt he’s young and publicly educated, which means he’s been taught little about English. I salute the perseverance with which he must have struggled to do a job (writing a book) for which school had not prepared him in any way.
But it isn’t fair to the reader.
Punctuation has a bad reputation nowadays. It takes work to learn the rules. And rules are unpopular in their own right.
But like Chesterton’s Fence, rules exist for a reason. This author’s inability to deploy quotation marks in a useful way lost him, in my case, both a reader and a review.
This brings semicolons to mind. Semicolons aren’t as vital to comprehension as quotation marks, but they have their proper uses. They too are unpopular today. Many writers have sworn off them. They say that semicolons don’t do anything you can’t do with a period.
But that’s not true. As a reader with a history of reading aloud, radio announcing, and acting, I can tell you that a semicolon serves a subtle but useful purpose. A semicolon indicates a brief pause – perhaps a slight intake of breath — before the speaker goes on to a further – but related – thought.
A period indicates a full stop (indeed, they call them full stops in England). The speaker’s voice tone drops in a way that sounds final. A full breath may be taken.
For a writer, such distinctions can be very useful. I treasure my semicolons; you’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands.
At sunset Kristin was sitting up on the hill north of the manor.
She had never before seen the sky so red and gold. Above the opposite ridge stretched an enormous cloud; it was shaped like a bird’s wing, glowing from within like iron in the forge, and gleaming brightly like amber. Small golden shreds like feathers tore away and floated into the air. And far below, on the lake at the bottom of the valley, spread a mirror image of the sky and the cloud and the ridge. Down in the depths the radiant blaze was flaring upward, covering everything in sight.
Just a passage from my reading in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter today. I thought it was rather nice. I’m nearing the end of the second book, having watched Kristin’s half-smart husband gradually weave the rope that will hang him in the end – in terms of his ambitions, at least.
I’ve also, of course, been watching “Vikings: Valhalla.” And simple justice demands that I admit that it surprised me – I like it better than I expected. Though my expectations, as you probably guessed, were pretty low.
But the fact is that the writers and showrunners of “Vikings: Valhalla” seem to have made the decision to pull in their horns a bit. The “Vikings” series, especially in the later seasons, just went loopy. They let their freak flag fly, so to speak, to the point where it almost came loose from the flagpole. They produced the wildest fantasies and impossibilities and anachronisms, pinning them now and then to odd points of history or saga.
“Vikings: Valhalla” seems a little more controlled, at least as far as I’ve watched so far. Time is still compressed, but not as radically as it was in the first series. Instead of making the same man the attacker of both Lindisfarne (793 AD) and Paris (845), this story seems to be concentrating on the stories of Canute the Great, Saint Olaf, Harald Hardrada, and Leif Eriksson. In this series, all those men are involved in Canute’s conquest of England in 1016 – at which time the real-life Leif had already discovered America and had (I believe) settled down as chieftain of the Greenland Colony. And Harald Hardrada was an infant. Still, all these people could have conceivably met each other in real life.
Many of them show up in my Work In Progess, The Baldur Game. I doubt that Erling will show up here, for which I’m grateful.
The most audacious liberty taken is making Jarl Haakon a Strong Black Woman (and, of course, as is the custom in our times, she is the story’s great font of wisdom). Actually, she’s supposed to be Haakon’s widow, Estrid, who took his office over for him (women could not do that in real life – they could inherit a chieftainship, but needed to get a man to exercise it) and uses his name as her last name. The fact that the Vikings didn’t have last names in the sense we understand them seems to be outside the producers’ ken.
But the costumes (though not in the least authentic) are a little less radically imaginative than the ones in the previous series, and the haircuts are generally much better. I’m grateful for that.
As we age, we learn to be grateful for small mercies. And I’ve aged a decade watching these programs.