Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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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.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Writing

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1920s. Photo public domain.

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.

Authors, Writing

Tolkien on world-building

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Just found this fascinating excerpt from an old TV interview with J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s easy to understand how people complained that he often spoke rapidly and was hard to understand — the subtitles are very welcome. He always attributed the slurred speech to an old tongue injury.

The interviewer seems a tad clueless, not only about Tolkien’s mythopoeic philosophy (which is understandable) but about the basic Christian worldview.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Authors, Reading

From Undset to Valhalla

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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.

Authors, Reviews

Theatrical review: ‘Further Up and Further In’

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I had a great experience Saturday afternoon (before all the shock of the events in Pennsylvania). Max McLean was in town with the Fellowship for the Performing Arts production of “Further Up and Further In.” A friend of a friend had bought a block of tickets, they had a seat free, and my friend arranged for me to get in.

“Further Up and Further In” is a splendid example of a one-man show. The performance time (about an hour and 20 minutes) rushed by.

I’d seen McLean’s work before, having bought the DVD of “The Most Reluctant Convert.” I thought it an impressive low-budget production, though McLean seemed a little rubber-faced in the role of Lewis. I suspected that the stage was his true medium, and was gratified to be proved right.

I read an article years ago that said that if you only know Sir Laurence Olivier from the movies, you have no idea what a genius he was. He was directed to subdue his reactions and his gestures for the more intimate environment of film. But some spark (the author said) was lost.

McLean doesn’t seem to have subdued his performance greatly for the movie, but on stage this approach is highly effective. The dramatic scenario here is that we’re having a conversation with Lewis in his study in the year 1950, but of course it’s not really like that. Lewis would never have gesticulated as McLean does – these exertions are for the audience in the upper decks. (Also, Jack Lewis would have been smoking constantly, which does not happen in this play.) What we actually have here is a long sermon – but it’s a brilliant sermon, cut-and-pasted from Lewis’ articles, books, and letters. It’s all vivid and exciting, and the stage furniture – desk, wing-backed chair and drinks cabinet – sits before a large rear projection screen that displays images illustrating the narrative.

The text deals with problems of faith such as how we can believe in God at all, and how to deal with the problem of pain. It ends with Lewis speculating on ultimate things, on the end of the world (he quotes heavily from the sermon, “The Weight of Glory”) and the wonders of Heaven.

If “Further Up and Further In” comes to your town, I highly recommend going to see it. I had an exhilarating time.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Poetry

Travels to Worlds Unknown (Maybe Fictious)

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It’s been a full week and will continue to be so for rest of the month. I feel a deadline pressing upon me, so let me move quickly to these links.

Poetry: “While Observing A Summer Storm” by Joshua Alan Sturgill. “these I take as pathfinders and guides”

Art: Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) painted moody mythological scenes, like Isle of the Dead (which you’ve likely seen whether you knew what it was).

Chariots of Fire: The story of Eric Liddell’s race in the classic movie Chariots of Fire took place at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The Scottish runner won gold in the 400-meter, breaking Olympic and world records with 47.6 seconds. World’s Paul Butler talked about it on Friday’s podcast of The World and Everything in It. I listened to a tape of the movie soundtrack during my fruitful, cassette-tape-buying years. Here’s a nice tribute to the movie and music.

The Facts Fudged: Bill Steigerwald talks about the work he put into his book dividing fact from fiction in John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. “Taking on the great Steinbeck and challenging the existing narrative about his iconic book was no big deal. I was used to being an outsider, whether it was when covering a KKK cross-burning or attending a conference of public transit officials. The process of reporting and researching Steinbeck’s travels and book was no different from what I had done in a hundred big Sunday newspaper features, just a lot bigger and on my own dime.”

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

Authors, Reading, Writing

Borges on the magic of English

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I need to read some Jorge Luis Borges. Pretty much all I know of him, I like. But I’ve only read one or two of his stories, and those in school. Pure laziness on my part – or a fear of finding myself out of my intellectual depth.

Anyway, this Argentine author has astonishing things to say about the English language in this little clip. He expresses an idea I first encountered years ago in Writer’s Digest magazine. It was in an article also written by a writer who used English as a second language. People learning English often – and very understandably – complain about the size of the vocabulary you need to learn. Which is fair enough. But, this author pointed out, once you’ve mastered it you’ve got an unparalleled instrument in your hands, like a huge organ with a hundred stops. You can get an infinity of subtle effects out of it.

Borges notes here that most every word in English has a light or a dark version, depending on whether you choose the Latin or the Germanic option. He also talks about combinations of verbs and prepositions, which I hadn’t been aware of before.

In my Erling books, I’ve tried to employ Germanic words as much as I could, for two reasons. First, when I was learning to write (I took a sort of correspondence course and studied Writer’s Digest religiously), I was instructed to generally choose the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) word. Anglo-Saxon words, they said, are punchier, stronger. They make your writing more vivid and active.

I took that advice, and still believe in it (though I’m sure there’s an element of cultural bias involved. In the 18th Century, writers aspired to sound Classical, and always opted for the Latin word). But I had a further reason for going Anglo-Saxon. I was writing about Vikings, and I wanted to evoke a northern, Germanic mood. I like to think my diction contributes to a sense of place and time.

How do I master this vast English vocabulary, you ask? Read. Read a lot. Read above your comprehension level (authors like Borges, for instance). If you read on Kindle, they’ve got a neat feature where you can highlight a word right on the page and get a definition as if by sorcery.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, The Press

Remembering War Heroes and Baseball

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Summer in America means baseball, even if you aren’t a fan. The clip above is an artistic moment from a great baseball film, The Natural. I saw a clip from a Japanese game yesterday that showed a right fielder rifle the ball to the catcher at home plate, getting a runner out. The speed of that throw was thrilling–a little like the pitching portrayed above.

What else is going on this week?

Memorials: This week we honored the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. Of the 2,403 Americans killed on D-Day, 20 of them were from Bedford, Virginia, a community of 3,200. Over 40 Bedford residents were serving during the war, most in the Virginia National Guard. Their fallen were subsequently called the Bedford Boys.

This Stars and Stripes report has a list of the names of those who participated in the invasion.

War Correspondents: There’s a bed-and-breakfast in Chateau Vouilly, France, 20 minutes from Omaha Beach, that once housed the reporters who wrote the stories of the Allied troops advance. In 1944, it was a good, out-of-the-way spot, not too far from the action—for at least two months.

Every night, the hostess served the press corp milk and cookies. “On the tougher days, Hamel served glasses of Calvados, the famed local spirit made from distilled apple and pear cider. Reporters called it the ‘breakfast of champions.'”

Reading: About what novel did author Robert Louis Stevenson say this, “Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me.”

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash

Authors, Writing

Death, Tolkien, and sagas

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I’m feeling better today, thanks for asking, so let’s think about death, shall we?

The short Tolkien clip above resonated with me. I forget where I saw it first – probably on Facebook, where I waste too much time.

I’m not sure what I’d have thought about that statement, that great books are all about death, before I started working on The Baldur Game (not to say I’m claiming it’s a great book). If you’ve been following the Erling Saga, you know that this will be the last book in the series. And that can only mean one thing. We’re going to be saying goodbye to at least one important character.

A weird, semi-intentional chronological harmony has followed my Erling books. The first novel, The Year of the Warrior, came out in 2000. That’s precisely 1,000 years after the events described, which culminate in the Battle of Svold, usually dated to the millennium year. That’s what the title means – the Latin numeral for 1,000 is M. And (according to one of my characters) M also stands for Miles, which is Latin for soldier or warrior.

The books have loosely kept pace with the millennial anniversaries since then. If I were following the pattern strictly, I’d have left The Baldur Game’s release to 2030, because it ends in 1030. But the book begins in 1024, and I figure that’s close enough for my purposes. It would be hubristic to assume I’ll still be alive in 2030. I won’t give you my precise age, but I’ll be a little surprised if I live that long. (Though it’s looking more likely as it approaches, which astonishes me.)

And yes, the book is about death. I realized that as I was constructing it. There are recurring images of the sea, of chaos, which in the Old Testament evoked death.

And of course Norse sagas are always about death. There may be numerous other themes – honor, love, freedom, loyalty – but in the end they’re about how the characters faced their deaths.

Like all men, I’ve mostly tried to avoid thinking about my own death – though I’ve made an effort to prepare for it as a Christian. But old age tends to concentrate the mind, as Dr. Johnson said about the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight.

One of the values of literature, I think (and I think Tolkien would agree) is that it prepares us to face the things that must be faced.

Maybe we authors can help ourselves too.

(And before you ask – my health is fine, as far as I know. My chief malady, from my youth, has been melancholy.)

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Writing

Two Hours with Ted Gioia

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Music and culture writer Ted Gioia talked on camera with David Perell of the podcast “How I Write” to talk about his life of reading and writing. I just watched it, and it’s marvelous.

Ted, who has been writing on Substack for three and a half years, shared the interview with a short excerpt about musicians getting inspiration from dreams. In the almost two-hour interview, he discusses becoming a well-read man over many years, reading books for content or style, chasing publishing trends, writing honestly for yourself first and then for readers, and how our worldview as well as social pressure presses us toward select kinds of inspiration.

It’s well worth your time. Many good thoughts were shared. You’ll note some that I didn’t, so feel free to comment on it here.