Our friend Grim at the Grim’s Hall blog has the honor of posting the first blog review of Troll Valley. And what he has to say about it is extremely intriguing:
There is a wider lesson to her example. A family home is like a broader human community in that it has rules that establish a way of life, and under that way of life a community is possible. We see in the early chapters how the traditions of Norwegian families at Yuletide sustained a broad community through hard work. It is at that feast that the mother first uses her power to force a change in the rules, in her interest and against the interests of others. It is by forcing continual alterations of the rules of life that she destroys the community within the house, so that finally no one can live with her at all.
Each of these rules is meant to represent moral progress, but each of them destroys the living community in which human kindness is possible.
Grim sees the book as a drama of modern ideas of societal reform in conflict with the old traditions, and traditional relationships, that actually bind society together.
I find this fascinating, because I honestly didn’t have that in mind when I wrote. I was thinking of politics vs. religion, not politics vs. tradition. But now that he mentions it, I can see that the lesson is there. What I did was try to represent factually the kind of changes that were going on in the first couple decades of the 20th Century, and the “lesson” grew kind of organically from the events.
This all pleases me immensely. I like being smarter than I intended.
I liked how you were willing to reveal some of the weaknesses of our pietistic Haugean tradition. Pietism is based on the idea that knowing Christ should change the way we live. But when the mother started focusing on specific changes as the answer to all of life’s problems instead of first building the foundation of knowing Christ, she created an onerous system that snuffed the life out of all who came under it’s influence.
I found it all summarized in her statement to Cole Younger, “We have abolished slavery and superstition. Soon we will abolish rum, and with it poverty and crime, and at last even war. We will pass on to our children a world illuminated by the lights of science, religion and morality, and then—who knows? Perhaps we will journey to the stars.” Throughout history, whenever Christianity has been imposed from the outside as an external standard of behavior, disaster has resulted.
I’ve noticed in many rural, generationally stable congregations that the focus shifts slowly from a heart religion in the first generation (Bestefar) to an external form in the second generation (Peter & Signe) to a rejection of form in the succeeding generations (Fred) unless there is a personal embracing of heart religion again.
Precisely. I believe the problems of the pietists (not Pietism) is the almost irresistible temptation to try to perpetuate the revival through law.
What struck me about Signe is that, in her zeal to “illuminate the world,” she somehow managed to overlook the whole issue of humankind’s fallen nature. She seemed to think that sin was something that seeped into the human heart from the outside; therefore, if we can get rid of the sin out there in the world, we don’t have to worry about the heart.
That I did consciously. I wanted to plot the trajectory over which evangelical Christianity became secular progressivism.