May I share some quotes and marginalia from my old quotation book with you today?
Cervantes said in Don Quixote, “There are no proverbial sayings which are not true.”
To say, “a man has an axe to grind,” first appeared in print in “Essays from The Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe” by Charles Miner, published in 1811 in the Wilkesbarre Gleaner, a Pennsylvania newspaper.
Another phrase, that sounds out of fashion to me, is “to mix with brains.” English portrait painter John Opie was asked what he mixed his colors with. He answered, “I mix them with my brains, sir.”
During a debate, when one of Phocian the Good’s (402-320 BC) statements stirred up applause of the audience, he asked a nearby friend, “Have I inadvertently said some evil thing?”
Napoleon (1769-1821) has these words attributed to him (without sources):
“Imagination rules the world.” “I made all my generals out of mud.” “There are two levers for moving men–interest and fear.” “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” “Independence, like honor, is a rocky island without a beach.”
Greek general Aristides (530-468 BC) said, “The Athenians will not sell their liberties for all the gold either above or under ground.”
And, finally, the Stoics had this proverb, according to Plutarch: “The good man only is free; all bad men are slaves.”
Do all of those right true? They aren’t all proverbial, so we could cut them a bit of slack. What else do we have?
A ship with a creative crew would trade in Newport and ports new their haphazard wares, their slapdash and spares, for the loan on their ship had come due.
Live within your means, readers, and stay ahead of any judicious loans you take out. And now, on with the links.
2023 Books: Bookseller and podcaster David Kern offers “eight novels published in 2023 that I’ve been handing to people because they remind me why I love novels in the first place.”
And more recommendations, this time of the spy-thriller nature from John Wilson—”more than enough regional and global conflicts to keep spies and spymasters busy and readers turning the pages.”
Meekness! Humility! Gentleness! Patience! Kindness! It’s a revolting brew – when someone brings those things that are called fruits of the spirit into a cultural conflict on our enemy’s side, along with stoutheartedness. There are dangers for us there.
But the opportunities – they are so rich! Only convince your patient that those fruits of the spirit are not applicable, or not manly (if he is on the right) or are psychologically unhealthy and undermine the fight for justice (if he is on the left) and you’re home free.
Culture War: A judge rules out parts of an Iowa law. “The State Defendants have presented no evidence that student access to books depicting sex acts was creating any significant problems in the school setting, much less to the degree that would give rise to a ‘substantial and reasonable governmental interest’ justifying across-the-board removal.”
British Library:The British Library was attacked by hackers last October, and its digital resources are still offline, projected to take a year to rebuild and cost £6 million. (via Purfrock)
Shakespeare: Henry IV plays and adaptations. “More importantly, the greatest flaw of Chimes at Midnight is that Orson Welles sentimentalises Falstaff, removing much of his nasty side and turning him into a harmless fun-loving old man.”
British Post Office: A TV series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, tells the incredible true story of a massive scandal in the British postal service, one that accused hundreds of subpostmasters of financial mismanagement and avoided finding fault with the source, the computer system they all used.
“Having Jones and Dolan as our entry point to the human cost of such horrifying corporate skullduggery is the perfect choice. But there were many hundreds of people who found themselves being gaslit by a helpline, and the cast is massive, and excellent, throughout.”
Photo: Opposition, England. From the Detroit Publishing Co. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
One book I own that I wish was in perfect condition is a Rankin & Bass edition of The Hobbit (1977). It’s a coffee table book, perhaps designed to read with two or more children in and around your lap. The full text is included, so you won’t miss any details, except maybe those skewed by the illustrations.
I assume my parents bought this, and I don’t remember it being a gift to me. I just acquired it at the appropriate hour. My own children rough it up a good bit, as they have done with many books.
Some people can tell you their favorites easily. They seek them out often. Their favorite shirts are the ones they wear all the time. Their favorite meals they eat several times a year, or if that’s too expensive, at least annually for a birthday. I’m the type who doesn’t wear his favorite shirt so that it will last longer. I wear lesser shirts that can wear out. A favorite I’ll don for special occasions. It’s not the same for meals. I would eat favorite foods often, but I like many different things. Sure, that cake you made for my birthday was delicious. You made it last year too, and it was great. Maybe this year we make a different delicious cake.
So, like the speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 52, I don’t frequent my treasures often “for blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.”
“Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope, Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope.”
What links do we have today?
Shelby Steele: Author Shelby Steele and filmmaker Eli Steele discuss their ideas on power, race, and America with City Journal. “We have wealth; now we want innocence—that’s where power lies at the moment. So much of our politics and culture really come out of this struggle with innocence,” the author states. By innocence, he means the moral justification for authority and the exercise of power.
Book towns: Richard George William Pitt Booth MBE (1938-2019) said libraries couldn’t keep up with today’s publishing industry, and thus “the future of the book is in book towns,” such as the one he inspired in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Bloggers Sophie Pearce and Sophie Nadeau both visited and took photos for their travel sites.
Poets: Irish poet Maurice Scully died last year, “a true original in the world of Irish poetry, quietly and patiently doing things his own way for several decades.”
Photo: Newman’s Drug Store in New York, 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Me playing Viking in Norway, at the Hafrsfjord Festival in 2022, with the president of the Karmoy Viking Club.
The thought has been nagging at me of late that my personal author’s page, www.larswalker.com, hasn’t been updated much over the years, except for announcements of new book releases.
I felt particularly guilty about my “Vikings” page, since it contains an essay on my historical views which – while I haven’t changed those views much – has not kept up with trends in scholarship and popular opinion. I don’t lose much sleep over it, as I’ve always found most trends and popular opinions laughable. Still, I’ve neglected my readers.
So I offer the following update, which I’ll ask my revered webmaster to add to the old one:
WHAT ABOUT VIKINGS?
I included a short essay on the Vikings in this space when this site was first established. But the world moves on, and I find that piece (you can find it below this one) no longer addresses the current situation. My views have changed very little, but I think I need to explain them in a new light.
When I wrote the original essay, back before the turn of the century, the prevailing scholarly view of the Vikings (a view considered “revisionist” at the time) was that the violence of Viking culture had been exaggerated by monkish scribes, “prejudiced” because Vikings kept burning down their homes and enslaving or killing them (which strikes me, personally, as a reasonable excuse for a prejudice). The prevailing view in the late 20th Century was that the Vikings (viewed as a culture, rather than as participants in an activity, which was the original sense of the word) were primarily involved in trade, and that their occasional ventures into raiding (mostly in response to the inflexible attitudes of the vile Christians) were relatively rare and reasonably justified.
I thought this view nonsense. I noted that the purveyors of this theory tended to gloss over the fact that the Vikings’ first and foremost item of trade, at least in the first centuries, was human slaves. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t consider the slave trade a peaceful occupation.
But the other day I watched, for the second time, Robert Eggers’ 2022 film, “The Northman.” I can only conclude, based on that movie, that I’ve won the “peaceful Vikings” argument completely. Perhaps I’ve won it too well. Eggers’ Viking culture is thoroughly violent and brutal. Force is all that matters there, and the individual must either possess power or submit to it.
This view strikes me as just as unbalanced as the old one. It overlooks (as Prof. Jackson Crawford has noted) the importance in Viking culture of being a “drengr,” a man of honor and character. In the movie, for instance, the ball game of “knattleikr” is played by thralls (slaves), and fatalities are considered trivial, since thralls are cheap (note: they were not cheap). In the Icelandic sagas, however, free men play knattleikr themselves, in order to showcase their courage and skill.
This narrow view also overlooks the Vikings’ democratic tradition (emphasized in Viking Legacy, the book by Torgrim Titlestad which I translated). The Vikings in fact mistrusted raw power, and mitigated it through limiting their kings under the law, subjecting royal decisions to the “Thing” assemblies of free men. Viking society was far from egalitarian, but they revered law, cherishing it as fundamental to a functional society. They cared, in their own way, about freedom – for themselves, anyway. (This is the human norm, by the way – the concept of the brotherhood of Man came to us from Christianity, and has been internalized slowly, even among Christians.)
Why this radical change in popular views of the Viking Age? I think it rises from the political climate. Scholarly opinion in our time is the obsequious servant of politics. (Perhaps it always has been. The current academic fascination with intersectional power may be plain projection.)
For most of my lifetime, the North Star, the guiding principle, of this Political/Scholarly-Industrial Complex has been contempt for Western Civilization. When Vikings were viewed as outsiders to that civilization, scholars had to regard them positively. Now that they have come to be viewed, sometimes, as insiders, the original Dead White Males, they can be despised – when convenient.
The truth of the Vikings is that they were like everyone else. They lived the best way they knew how, according to their lights. (Snorri Sturlusson understood this in the 13th Century. Moderns are often less sophisticated.)
In my view, one major point that’s generally overlooked in our discussions of the Vikings is that the Viking Age was the Scandinavian Age of Conversion. When the Vikings first hit Lindisfarne in 793 AD, they were mostly heathen (though missionary activity had probably begun even then). By the (generally accepted) end of the Viking Era – the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 – the Danes and Norwegians were solidly Christian and the Swedes not far behind. One of the chief reasons for the end of Viking activity was a nascent internalization by Scandinavians of the Christian ethic – an ethic they still haven’t entirely embraced – like everyone else.
There’s another point too. That point – a major one, though intellectually disreputable – is the element of fun. When I fell in love with the Vikings as a boy, it was the image of a dragon ship under sail, headed off to adventure, that gripped me. An idea formed in my mind of a bold hero at the prow of such a ship, a free man sailing out to test his courage and seize his fortune. That image – in time – coupled with the historical figure of Erling Skjalgsson and gave birth to my series of historical fantasy novels, The Year of the Warrior, West Oversea, Hailstone Mountain, The Elder King, King of Rogaland, and The Baldur Game.
Robert Eggers’ movie contains not one moment of that kind of fun. I hope my Erling books do a better job.
I’d say most Americans who know anything about Charles Dickens know that he wrote A Christmas Carol and maybe something else, like TheOliver Twist and Shout. Something they won’t know (and I didn’t either) is that A Christmas Carol was only the first of Dickens’s Christmas tales, which he produced as the Christmas book market was changing with the publication of seasonal annuals.
Leaning again on Joseph Shaylor’s 1912 book on publishing and bookselling, A Christmas Carol was released a few days prior to Christmas Day 1843 for five shillings a copy. Due to his publisher’s waning faith, Dickens had to argue for this work to be its own book and agreed to pay all costs, his publisher receiving a commission. That wasn’t cheap. The original run of 6,000 books sold in a day, but Dickens earned only £250. Interest held for the following year, selling 15,000 copies and earning the author £726.
(For comparison, a solicitor’s clerk could earn 18-25 shillings/week, launderers 2 ½ shillings/day, female upholsters 9-11 shillings/week, and butlers £40-100/year. One pound is made of 20 shillings. Taken from The Dictionary of Victorian London)
By November 1844, Dickens had written The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, and it sold better than its famous predecessor. In 1845, Dickens released The Cricket on the Hearth, which reportedly sold twice as much as The Chimes did. Next, he released The Battle of Life in 1846, which doesn’t have a Christmas theme. No word on how well it was received, but Shaylor does describe it as the last of Dickens’s Christmas books “as it was found impossible to maintain the high standard that the first volumes had reached, and as the books were rather expensive.” The Spectator closed its 1846 review, saying, “The name of the writer, and the holyday disposition of people to spend their money, may circulate the book; but if this experiment upon the public be repeated, Mr. Dickens will find that a trade carried on without the requisite capital must come to a stop.”
Dickens took another swing at it with The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain in 1848. It reportedly sold 18,000 copies and made the author £800. (I wonder if he continued to bankroll their publication.)
Perhaps spurred by Dickens’s seeming success, William Makepeace Thackeray published Mrs. Perkins’s Ball with his own illustrations as an 1847 Christmas book, the same year Vanity Fair was released. He reportedly wrote a mock critical review of Mrs. Perkin’s Ball, ‘realizing’ midway through that he had written it himself. The success of this Christmas book encouraged him to release these titles in each of the following years: Our Street (1848), Doctor Birch (1849), Rebecca and Rowena (1850), and The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1851). The last book was advertised “to be ready on December 16, for the annual edification of Christmas parties” in illustrated editions for seven shillings, six pence, or without illustrations for five shillings.
“Grand Polka,” an illustration by Thackeray from Mrs. Perkins’s Ball (Wikimedia Commons Public Domain)
Wartime Christmas: Writing in 1915, Arthur Machen asks how we should handle celebrating Christmas during the Great War. “[W]e grown-ups, like the wealthy dealers, can look after ourselves in this matter of presents. It is the children that we should think of chiefly, and we should determine that no shadow of the war shall be allowed to spoil their Christmas.” He mentions puzzles at the end. I wonder what he would have thought of these marvelous wooden puzzles.
Utopia: Étienne Cabet and his 1840 Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria), “was so popular and affecting that it led hundreds of French citizens to leave their homes and journey to the United States to realize the egalitarian paradise he had described.” As it fell apart, the author blamed the women.
Feature Illustration: Kyd (Joseph Clayton Clarke), “Character Sketches from Charles Dickens,” Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
Giving books at Christmas has been a long tradition with readers. In the early 19th century, plenty of books sold in the weeks preceding Christmas, but none of them were published for the season. Often people bought attractively bound collections of essays, poems, or classic novels that they knew they would enjoy.
In one of his books on the industry, publisher Joseph Shaylor writes, “Between 1820 and 1830 there came into existence a series of Annuals which caused quite a revolution in the sale of books for Christmas.” British bookman Rudolf Ackermann came up with the idea, publishing Forget-Me-Not: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1823. They were published every year through 1848, having a circulation of 18,000 at the height of its popularity.
Another publisher released Friendship’s Offering in 1824, which found its way to America some years later as knockoff copies. Apparently, many volumes were hacked this way in America, even lesser works rebound and distributed under new popular titles (which sounds like clickbait to me). Friendship’s Offering may have published some higher quality literature than most. For example, Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s poem “The Armada” was printed in the 1833 edition. It ran until 1844.
Engraver Charles Heath launched multiple annuals, “such as the Picturesque Annual, in a guinea volume which contained engravings from the best landscape painters of the day,” and The Book of Beauty, edited by Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington and Irish novelist in her own right. Her social influence drew attention from many literary stars and would-be stars, including Disreali.
“The rise of the Annuals appears to have diffused a fashion for artistic and elegant pursuits, and helped to evolve a taste for literature and the fine arts. They were the principal publications of the year, and much time and consideration were given to their production.”
Booksellers have tried to inspire an Easter season of book-giving to no avail.
When it comes to translation choices, there’s not always a “right” choice, just the choice that seems best. How does literary intuition play into your work?
I rely a lot on intuition. It particularly kicks in when I’m reading the manuscript out loud. I’m listening for lots of things but particularly want to feel that there’s an ease to the reading and a rhythm to the writing. I know when they feel right but rarely know how to explain why they feel right.
Secular Morals: Seth Mandel writes the former director of Human Rights Watch “is what you’d get if Soviet ‘whataboutism’ were a person, a golem manifested by the chantings of Oberlin freshmen. . . . HRW and Amnesty International both had no idea how to handle a post-9/11 world because terrorism didn’t really fit into their worldview.”
Books: “Books are men of higher stature, And the only men that peak aloud for future times to hear.” – Elizabeth B. Browning, “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”
I look like this, according to legend, when I lecture.
From time to time, events in what’s laughingly known as my working life mean I have to alter my habits on this blog.
Or, to put it less pompously, I’ve got work (some of it even for money) that may – occasionally – keep me from posting here, without notice, for a while.
This Thursday, at 7:00 p.m., for instance, I’ll be speaking on Viking Legacy to Sagatun Lodge of the Sons of Norway, Brainerd, Minnesota. I think they meet at Trinity Lutheran Church, though such information is surprisingly difficult to learn from online sources. (The reason I don’t have the address myself is because someone’s generously taking me to dinner beforehand, and we’ll drive from there. But I think it’s Trinity Lutheran.)
I expect that if you’re in the area you’ll be welcome, even if you’re not a member of the lodge. Or Norwegian. Or all that good-looking.
What else am I doing? Oh yes, I have an agreement to write an article on the new Norwegian Nobel Laureate for Literature, Jon Fosse. It’s for a periodical which I will not name at this point, in case they don’t want to be publicly associated with me. But I have to read Fosse’s Septology, which is a very long book. I have no idea what I’ll blog about while I’m working my way through that unusual (but fascinating) work. We’ll see.
Also, I have to learn how to use Adobe Live Desk so I can produce a newsletter for the Valdres Samband’s (an organization of descendants of immigrants from the Norwegian region of Valdres) newsletter. Also a paying job.
And I have some translation to do for the Georg Sverdrup Society. They don’t pay money, but I think I go to Hell if I don’t deliver.
I’ve been loafing all summer, trying to drum up work, and now the stuff is falling on my head in the manner of Burt Bacharach’s raindrops. I just translated 11 pages of Norwegian for an author on a two-day deadline, and I got paid for that too.
And someday, like King Arthur, the script translation work may return from Avalon.
I meant to illustrate this little report with my own vivid, dramatic photography, but I forgot it takes an indeterminate amount of time to upload from my phone to Dropbox to Photobucket. So I’ll post the pictures whenever that’s accomplished, unless the passage of time should render them obsolete.
I have now completed what should become (unless the Lord or the festival organizers block me) the most intense couple of weeks in my annual schedule. Norsk Høstfest in Minot and the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay, it appears, generally run on adjacent weeks, which means a 9-hour (either way) drive to North Dakota and a 5-hour (either way) drive to Wisconsin on consecutive weekends. Which is a challenge for a man of my, shall we say, experience and maturity. Yesterday I spent mostly in bed, and I actually slept a lot – something that I don’t do much these days unless I’m physically played out. Today I did some catching up – unloading my car (for the last time this season), washing clothes (not for the last time this season – pay no attention to the rumors), and catching up on email. And now I report to you.
First of all, the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay was kind of awesome. I was highly impressed. We used to do it in Moorhead, Minn. at the Hjemkomst Viking Ship Museum. That was also great, but we outwore our welcome somehow. This festival involved the most serious reenactors I’ve encountered (in this country) and was very well organized. It’s assembled around a replica Viking house in the grindhus style, built by my friend Owen Christianson and his wife Elspeth.
The weather was cool and windy, with some light rain on Friday, the first day. Saturday was colder but clear. This was actually pretty good weather for a Viking encampment. One of the chronic problems of Viking reenacting in this country is that we usually do it at summer festivals, where the woolen clothing appropriate to Northern European conditions gets rather uncomfortable. But wool was just the thing this weekend.
We had a large assembly of reenactors, mostly craftspeople of one kind or another, eager to show off their skills. The group Telge Glima, from Sweden, was there to demonstrate Viking athletic games twice a day, and their shows were followed by blunt steel combat by our fighters.
Because of the specialized nature of the event, our visitors seemed, by and large, really interested in the festival’s topic. That meant they were eager to buy books, and I sold off my stock of Viking Legacy early the first afternoon. Next year I’ll know to bring more.
I was particularly gratified to hear Viking Legacy referenced in conversation by someone who wasn’t even aware of my connection to it. And one woman who examined my novels said she’d just been looking at them on Amazon. That’s something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before from a potential customer.
So I was pleased with the whole thing. Next time, I think I’ll schedule a third night in a motel rather than driving home the same night. I made it safely, but it was probably an imprudent journey for a man of my experience and… well, you know.
