I was looking for a video about the Battle of Hafrsfjord for tonight’s post, but everything I found was longer than I wanted. But the film above is interesting. It’s not about Hafrsfjord, but about the Battle of Nesjar (1016), which I described in my novel, The Elder King. Erling Skjalgsson gets a mention.
The theme of my life just now seems to be homecoming. I went back to the first college I attended last weekend. And tonight I’m going to my home town, Kenyon, Minnesota, to speak to the Sons of Norway lodge (and hopefully sell some books).
I’m not lecturing in Viking costume this time. I’ll be giving a presentation on my trip to Norway this summer, emphasizing the historical sites I visited. I’ll concentrate especially on the battle of Hafrsfjord.
On the unlikely chance that you can be there (I should have announced this yesterday or earlier) the meeting will be held at First Lutheran Church in Kenyon at 5:30 p.m.
Salvesen Hall at Waldorf University. In my day, the library was on the ground floor at the left end, and in the cellar below.
So I did it. I went back to the college of which (out of the three I attended) I have the fondest memories, Waldorf College (now University) in Forest City, Iowa. It was Homecoming weekend, and they had an “authors’ fair” featuring four published authors who’d attended the school. I was the oldest of the lot, the Historical Footnote, you might say.
It turned out to be a fairly small affair, with maybe thirty people in attendance. The venue was a room in the new library (which looked pretty swanky to an old book gnome who used to toil in the former digs in the cellar of Salvesen Hall). We sat at a table at the front, and each of us got to do a 15-minute reading. Then there was a general Q&A session, and a time for bookselling. I read Chapter 15 of The Year of the Warrior, where Erling Skjalgsson meets Olaf Trygvesson as their ice-covered ships pass in the Boknafjord.
Two of my fellow authors were quite young, the third middle-aged but a recent graduate of the school’s Creative Writing program. That put me in the odd (to me) position of being the Grizzled Professional. A lot of the questions were directed to me as the one with the most experience of the publishing business. Although – as I took pains to point out – most of my experience is from another age and no longer applicable, except in spirit.
I hope I didn’t act like too much of an ass. Everybody was nice to me, but this is Iowa so that tells you nothing.
I sold a fair number of books for the size of the crowd, and received a handsome purple insulated cup with the school logo, from which I am drinking now, as a gift. Also an alumni sticker for my car.
The weather was glorious – bright sun and temperatures in the upper 70s, very clement for Iowa in late October. I hadn’t been back to Waldorf for decades (Christiania College in Wolf Time was modeled on it), and I was a little disoriented. First of all, the place looks smaller now than it did when I was 18. And they’ve changed a fair number of things. New buildings have been built, a reflecting pool has been dug by the Campus Center, and I had some trouble at first getting my bearings. Also, certain things are gone now, such as the World War II-era temporary classrooms where I studied Norwegian (I think I parked in that space, though I may be a few yards off).
I wanted to take time to do a walk-around, but didn’t get around to it. And it doesn’t really matter – it’s not the same school. It’s owned by new people and has a whole different mission. I came as the Ghost of Christmas Past, and I exited stage right when my scene was done.
Above, something I’ve never seen before – a clip of John D. MacDonald giving a speech. He reminisces on his struggling years as a writer. The advice here is still good in terms of a writer’s attitude, but happily we don’t have to worry about the condition of returned manuscripts anymore. Say what you like about digital publishing, but you can’t deny the pages are always just as pristine, however many times you send them out. Any blemishes are likely to be grammatical, and your own stinking fault.
One thing I’ve rarely done in my long but obscure career as a writer is give a public reading of my work. I’ve done a few signings – generally a harrowing and not very rewarding experience, but only a few readings. Which is odd when you think of it, because I’m good at that. Radio and acting experience, as I’ve mentioned more often than necessary.
But I’m going to be doing a reading on Saturday. It’s Homecoming time at Waldorf University, Forest City, Iowa, one of my several alma maters. Waldorf is special to me, because it was the first college I attended. They’re doing an authors’ forum, featuring several Waldorf graduates who write books. I’ll be one of them. I’m supposed to do a 15-minute reading, and then there’ll be a question-and-answer period, and we’ll have the chance to sell our books.
Consequently, I won’t be blogging on Friday, since I’ll be traveling that day. We appreciate your patience, and thank you for flying Brandywine Books.
Reading:Where do you like to read? A hammock, a couch, an overstuffed chair? At a desk, on a bench, or while walking somewhere? The chair in the photo above would suit me well for firmness and lighting.
I feel I can’t read in half of my house without falling asleep, and while it would be easy to blame my age now, I don’t think that has been the reason for my fatigue or maybe mental laziness before now. I am a poor, distracted, uncompelled reader for the most part. No one will learn of my literary habits in the coming years and find in them a pattern to follow.
Historic Novels: Some books are not comfort reads. Gina Dalfonzo says she had trouble sleeping after reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. It’s a novel about Lucrezia de’ Medici, the wife of Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, who died at age 16, and is remembered mainly as the subject of Robert Browning’s, “My Last Duchess.”
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Saith the Duke with every indication that he suspected his Duchess of infidelity or perhaps, more vaguely, unworthiness.
The Future Library. Photo credit: traveldailymedia.com
I read every issue of “Viking,” the magazine of the Sons of Norway fraternal organization, of which I’ve been a humble member for longer than I care to contemplate. Often it contains interesting articles. Occasionally there’s even a picture of me, standing on the edge of some SON lodge activity, oblivious. And sometimes it gives me reason to laugh – though rarely on purpose.
The current, October, issue of “Viking” gave me a chuckle. Its cover article is called “Norway’s Secret Library,” and it describes a project called “The Future Library” (Framtidsbiblioteket) in Oslo.
The whole operation is complex and grandiose, but I’ll try to get the gist of it down here – if I can grasp it myself. It started with a Scottish artist named Katie Paterson. She came up with the idea for a library that would contain books by prominent writers that neither she nor anybody alive would ever live to read… for some reason.
A grove of 1,000 spruce trees were planted in a forest in Oslo in 2014. In 2114, those trees will be cut down and turned into paper, on which will be printed books written specially for the project by famous contemporary authors who participate by invitation. (Margaret Atwood got the first invitation. Imagine my surprise.) The Future Library itself has (if I understand the article correctly) been built from the trees initially felled to clear the area for this project. And I guess the building is going to just sit there for the next century, waiting like a time capsule.
You realize what’s happening here, don’t you? Mortality is catching up with my generation. Boomers. And they’re remembering how they treated the authors of the past. How they called for all the classics to be thrown out and burned, to make way for the Now, the With It, the Relevant. (“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”)
And they’re terrified future generations will treat them the way they treated the classics.
So they’re building themselves a pyramid. “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.” (Shelley wrote that, as you’ll know if you were educated before the Revolution.)
If these authors truly believed they’d produced literature for the ages, they’d trust posterity to recognize their achievement.
The Victorians admired Lord Bulwyer-Lytton, and considered Arthur Conan Doyle an insignificant scribbler of low-brow popular fiction. Today we laugh at Bulwer-Lytton, and scholarly works are devoted to Doyle.
That’s what I’m counting on for my own books. Posthumous posterity.
Artist and illustrator N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), trained by the famous Howard Pyle and painter of the Brandywine School, produced illustrations for many Scribner’s Classics editions such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Lastof the Mohicans and The Yearling.
Best of: Ted Gioia offers his paid subscribers his reviews of the 50 best works of non-realist fiction (sci-fi, alt-history, fantasy, and more). Read the list for free (part one of five so far). The reviews are behind the paid wall.
In this short span, he wrote his breakthrough story cycle, The Martian Chronicles, a book that signified a start to the genre’s inclusion in mainstream literature; published the celebrated science-fiction collection The Illustrated Man; followed up with the underrated collection of mixed fiction (fantasy and contemporary realist prose), The Golden Apples of the Sun; wrote his magnum opus, Fahrenheit 451; and began work on the screenplay for Moby-Dick for director John Huston.
Cleopatra: His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm Crested the world. His voice was propertied As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in ’t; an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above The element they lived in. In his livery Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket.
Dolabella: Cleopatra—
C: Think you there was, or might be, such a man As this I dreamt of?
I mentioned recently that I’d had a book review accepted by a scholarly journal. The book reviewed was Sigrid Undset, Reader of Hearts, by Fr. Aidan Nichols. You can now read the review here, on the Davenant Institute’s Ad Fontes journal site.
An illustration by Gustaf Tenggren for “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” (1923)
I think it says a lot about my tremendous personal modesty that, on the rare occasions when I learn something I didn’t know about Scandinavian history and culture, I share it here in public, in front of our FBI surveillance team and everybody, instead of concealing it. And I did learn something new today, in the August issue of the Sons of Norway’s Viking Magazine.
Even better, there’s an Inkling connection. An adversarial connection, but a connection nonetheless.
I fell deeply under the spell of Dwarfs—the old bright-hooded, snowy-bearded dwarfs we had in those days before Arthur Rackham sublimed, or Walt Disney vulgarized, the earthmen.
He wrote, further, in a 1939 letter to his friend A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, “Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad.”
Tolkien, it is reliably reported, rebuffed offers from Disney for film rights to the Lord of the Rings, based on similar feelings.
According to “The Art of Trolls,” an article by Rowdy Geirsson in the August Viking Magazine, the fault for this “vulgarization” of dwarfs lies solidly on the head of a Swedish artist, Gustaf Tenggren (1896-1970). Tenggren made his name as an artist in his native Sweden, becoming known for illustrations of fantastical subjects, becoming the featured artist for “Bland tomter och troll,” an annual publication devoted to fairy stories. In 1936 he went to work for Disney Studios, becoming their chief conceptual artist. It was in this capacity that he designed the characters for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” as well as later productions like “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia” and “Bambi.”
Judging by his Swedish work (an example is posted above), I would guess that Lewis would have been equally displeased by Tenggren’s earlier dwarfs, considering them “sublimed” in the Rackham style. (Though Arthur Rackham was an artist whose Wagnerian work he cherished.)
There’s something in Lewis’ and Tolkien’s criticism, of course, and it’s grown more apparent with the years. Animation is subject to fashions over time. I believe I read somewhere that when “Snow White” first came out, critics admired Disney’s dwarfs but found the “human” characters rather bland. Today the human characters look far better than the dwarfs, who possess a rubbery quality that’s gone out of style. (I personally particularly dislike the works of Fleischer Studios. Except for Popeye. I likes me Popeye.)
It’s a rule that we Norwegians have understood for many centuries – you can never go wrong blaming the Swedes.
Above is the trailer for the 1995 Norwegian film production of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, directed by Liv Ullman. As you’ll see from the link, it’s prohibitively expensive on Amazon, so I don’t expect I’ll be getting it on DVD. I do have the VHS version, but my machine isn’t hooked up so I can’t watch it.
I was, frankly, not entirely happy with the movie version. Liv Ullman was probably the least suitable director in the world; wholly unsympathetic to the author’s intentions. One could come away from watching it with the impression that Kristin and Erlend lived happily ever after, precisely not the point of the exercise.
But Sigrid Undset is on my mind tonight, because I just got an article about her accepted by a journal. My first draft was returned for improvements, which is of course kind of a bummer, but we professionals soldier on. I sent in a second draft, and they told me my prose was so good that they could go ahead and publish it without running it through the usual editorial processing.
No matter where they are in the world, when someone refers to the Queen, they almost always mean Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
This photo of the young queen hangs in Nottingham’s Council House (Lee Haywood/Flickr).
C.S. Lewis watched Elizabeth’s coronation on TV and wrote this in a letter:
. . . the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. . . .
The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if he said, “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.”
Celebrities: “But over time, it seemed, the fallen leaders managed to accrue immense social power without true proximity. They cultivated an image of spiritual importance while distancing themselves from embodied, in-person means of knowing and being known.” Gina Dalfonzo reviews Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church by Katelyn Beaty.
A Writer’s Regrets: A.N. Wilson, who has published over 40 novels and other books, has released a memoir. He “says that he cannot believe that the ‘young fogey’ of the 1970s and 1980s, dapper, elegantly suited, was him. He describes himself as thrustingly ambitious, full of himself and unfaithful not only to his wife but to his own better nature.”
Stolen Books:Joel Miller has a roundup of stolen book news, such as the Gospel manuscript that was taken during WWI and how Bibles were a common stolen good when he worked at a bookstore in California.
“Growing up, I often heard that the medieval church used to chain up Bibles so average people couldn’t read it. It’s a common myth. The reality is that illiteracy was the norm, average people had better things to do than read, and books were only chained to keep clerics, monks, and visiting scholars from stealing valuable property—or reading in the latrine.”
Religious History:“. . . the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong.”
Photo: 7-Up Building, Portland, Oregon. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
