John D. MacDonald, who had a business degree, occasionally strayed from conventional mystery scenarios to write a business story. I don’t think Barrier Island was a publishing blockbuster, but MacDonald had the clout to get it published, and it’s effective.
Our hero is Wade Rowley, a real estate broker on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He has a partner, Bern Gibbs. Bern is an old friend, but their different business styles (and willingness to skirt legalities) are beginning to strain their association. Wade is especially concerned about a recent deal Bern took them into with Tucker Loomis, a swashbuckling local property developer. Bern assisted Tucker with land purchases for an extravagant new development on a barrier island. But now the government is seizing the island for environmental protection, and Tucker is suing for lost profits. Wade has a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Tuck Loomis must have known the island was fragile and unstable. He probably leveraged his assets to buy up the land cheap so he could profit big from the government settlement.
Wade goes to visit one of the “property owners” listed in the development records, and discovers that the man is both poor and a Loomis employee. So he goes to a friend in the government and gives him the information, just in case the whole thing blows up on them. When Bern finds out about that, they get in a fight and agree to dissolve their partnership.
But that’s all before a murder happens.
Barrier Island was John D. MacDonald’s last novel, published in 1986. It reflects the author’s long-standing concern for environmental preservation, as well as (I suspect) the influence of the “Dynasty”-style prime time soap operas that were popular at the time. There was the same fascination here with the lifestyles and peccadillos of the rich, but at its heart the story is a morality tale. All the main characters are fully fleshed out, and even when we don’t like them. we’re permitted to observe their motivations, which are not always base.
Barrier Island wasn’t John D. MacDonald at the top of his game, but he was incapable of writing a bad story. Cautions for adult situations.
Former NY Times editorial page editor James Bennet has a long essay in The Economist about his experience at the Gray Lady. He focuses on efforts to diversify the printed opinions and the fierce opposition that effort got from reporters and readers. In short, the Times staff is making itself comfortable in a handbasket on the road to an undisclosed location. (via The World and Everything in It)
During the first meeting of the Times board of directors that I attended, in 2016, [executive editor Dean] Baquet and I hosted a joint question-and-answer session. At one point, Baquet, musing about how the Times was changing, observed that one of the newsroom’s cultural critics had become the paper’s best political-opinion columnist. Taking this musing one step further, I then noted that this raised an obvious question: why did the paper still have an Opinion department separate from the newsroom, with its own editor reporting directly to the publisher? If the newsroom was publishing the best opinion journalism at the paper – if it was publishing opinion at all – why did the Times maintain a separate department that falsely claimed to have a monopoly on such journalism?
Everyone laughed. But I meant it, and I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too). The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.
The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism. Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news. But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases.
The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics. Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion. It became a running joke. Every few months, some poor editor in the newsroom or Opinion would be tasked with writing up guidelines that would distinguish the newsroom’s opinion journalists from those of Opinion, and every time they would ultimately throw up their hands.
I remember how shaken A.G. Sulzberger was one day when he was cornered by a cultural critic who had got wind that such guardrails might be put in place. The critic insisted he was an opinion writer, just like anyone in the Opinion department, and he would not be reined in. He wasn’t. (I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)
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.
Gisli, his wife Aud, and their foster-daughter from Dasent’s 1866 translation. The weird headdress is (I believe) based on a much later Icelandic folk costume.
Today, we return to the world of the sagas as I report on Gisli Sursson’s Saga from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. It’s one of the more popular sagas, though the manuscript versions we have (there are three) exhibit a fair number of textual problems.
The story begins, as so many sagas do, with the hero’s ancestors in Norway. One of those ancestors, also named Gisli, borrows a sword from a thrall (how did a thrall get a sword? Outside of one of my novels, I mean?). He refuses to return the sword, he and the thrall kill each other, and the sword ends up broken. The shards are kept, and are later forged into a spearhead. But the metal carries the thrall’s curse.
The family relocates to Iceland, where Gisli is born. He grows up to be a tall man and a great warrior. But he finds himself in a classic honor dilemma – his sister’s husband kills his wife’s brother (who is also his best friend), and Gisli is torn between loyalties (Note: this line has been edited, thanks to a correction by Matt McKendrick). He finally kills his sister’s husband, in his bed, with the cursed spear.
This is an odd element in the saga for me, because I’ve often read that a murder at night was considered shameful murder among the Norse. However, in this translation, it’s explained that if the weapon is left in the body, that mitigates the crime.
In any case, eventually the truth comes out, and Gisli is outlawed. He manages, with the help of a couple rich friends and (especially) his wife, to avoid the avengers for many years – surviving second longest of any Icelandic outlaw, after Grettir the Strong. His last stand is legendary, and his killers go home without honor.
Gisli’s Saga has a high reputation among Icelanders, though there are elements that make it hard for the modern reader to appreciate. Part of the trouble is moral. Gisli (and he’s not alone among saga heroes) has a sense of humor that looks pretty cruel to us. In particular, on two occasions he switches clothes with a thrall to confuse avengers – in one case getting the thrall killed. In both cases, the thralls are described as very stupid – to the original saga readers, the killing of a stupid thrall seemed a triviality.
Another problem is story gaps. At one point, we’re told that Gisli drops his sword as he’s fleeing his enemies. Later on, he has it again. How that happens is not explained. Twice Gisli receives leg wounds under identical circumstances, but they lead to nothing.
What sets the saga apart for the modern reader, I think, is the prominence of Gisli’s wife Aud in the plot. That’s especially remarkable considering that Gisli killed her brother. Aud is utterly faithful, even refusing a large bribe to betray him, and he acknowledges at one point that he wouldn’t have lasted so long without her help.
Gisli Sursson’s Saga is an important outlaw saga, but I don’t think it’ll ever be one of my favorites.
She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.
Revisited another Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald, because they never do get old. Darker Than Amber is one of the best, I think. The story works out as dark as the title promises, but that makes the moments of grace shine all the brighter.
Trav and his friend, the economist Meyer, are fishing under a bridge in Marathon, Florida when somebody drops a girl, wired to a cement block, off the deck above. Trav being Trav, he leaps into the water immediately, managing to get her back to the surface in time to save her life with artificial respiration.
She turns out to be a beautiful young woman named Vangie, but she’s no innocent damsel in distress. She’s a prostitute who worked her way up to a very nasty con game in which they not only robbed, but murdered, selected men. Because she experienced a moment of sympathy for one victim, her partners decided to kill her. But she’s “case-hardened,” as Travis puts it, and in the end she can’t be saved, either morally or physically. After a second murder attempt succeeds, Trav makes up his mind to balance the scales for her.
I first encountered Darker Than Amber in its movie adaptation, on TV (I reviewed that film here). The book, needless to say, is a lot better. What is portrayed as an extended, improbable slug-fest between Rod Taylor and William Smith in the film is in the book a very neat gaslighting sting that works, not perfectly, but well enough to satisfy the reader.
Darker Than Amber was published in 1966 and shows its age, but that’s part of its value, it seems to me. Trav’s sexual mores will satisfy neither today’s conservatives nor liberals, but they weren’t remarkable for his time – except perhaps for his admission that he can work up no attraction whatever to Vangie’s shopworn charms.
There’s a scene where a black character delivers a little lecture about civil rights. It must have sounded sophisticated at the time, but it too hasn’t aged well.
Still, that’s how the world looked in those days. The best thing about the book, as always, is Trav himself – he picks up the Philip Marlowe tradition of opening up to the reader about his inner life. But he takes it further. And the reader can’t help liking his self-deprecating manner.
Highly recommended. Cautions for mature subject matter.
“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is the most fully theological of the popular Christmas hymns, and hence my favorite.
I prefer Sissel’s rendition, but her live performance with the Heretic Tabernacle Choir is truncated to two verses. So I looked for something with more.
This version from Celtic Woman is a tad glitzy for my taste, but they do several verses and do not “improve” the lyrics to suit our times. On that basis I share it with you.
Her sweater was all warm and cozy With a scene that was Christmasy poesy. The sermon so sweet Almost put her to sleep For she sat in the pew somewhat dozy.
Editor Sam O’Neil has been stoking the fires for limericks on Sunday for a while now, and today being Christmas Eve, I chipped in with the limerick above. #LimerickSunday
It’s Christmas Eve. This Christmas carol was written in the 14th century to a medieval German folk tune. It’s in the vein of songs that teach doctrine. The video above weaves another song, In Dulci Jubilo (“In sweet rejoicing”), and the fun they have with it recommended it above other recordings.
“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them” (Luke 2:20 ESV).
1 Good Christian men, rejoice, With heart, and soul, and voice; Give ye heed to what we say: Jesus Christ is born today; Ox and ass before him bow, And he is in the manger now. Christ is born today! Christ is born today!
2 Good Christian men, rejoice, With heart, and soul, and voice; Now ye hear of endless bliss: Jesus Christ was born for this! He hath oped the heav’nly door, And man is blessed evermore. Christ was born for this! Christ was born for this!
3 Good Christian men, rejoice, With heart, and soul, and voice; Now ye need not fear the grave: Jesus Christ was born to save! Calls you one and calls you all To gain his everlasting hall. Christ was born to save!
Heap on more wood! the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will, We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.
Letters:J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and illustrated letters to his boys as Father Christmas. They were originally published in 1976, the third anniversary of his death. Here’s the start of the one from 1925, copied from BritishHeritage.com.
My dear boys,
I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both.
Domestic and religious rite
Gave honour to the holy night;
On Christmas Eve the bells were rung;
On Christmas Eve the mass was sung:
Historic Peace: Here’s a review of Tom Holland’s Pax, a history of the Roman Empire. It covers from the end of Nero to Hadrian, about 70 years. “He is the rare breed of serious historian who is fluent in the material, confident in his interpretations, and able to write with a novelistic flourish. Honestly, all 400+ pages of Pax are just so fun to read.“
Hadrian’s Wall: Speaking of Emperor Hadrian, the 200-year-old sycamore tree that stood to the side of Hadrian’s Wall between two hillocks was cut down in September by vandals, but the tree is not lost. “The National Trust confirmed that the seeds from the 200-year-old tree are expected to be able to grow new trees.” And the stump will likely grow again too.
The heir, with roses in his shoes,
That night might village partner choose;
The Lord, underogating, share
The vulgar game of ‘post and pair’.
C.S. Lewis: A 1946 Christmas sermon for pagans by the author of The Abolition of Man. “When something is wrong, Lewis suggests, the post-Christian Englishperson points to the Government or the education system or to God or whatever as the problem. Rarely does a post-Christian carry around a sense that they might be at fault.”
England was merry England, when
Old Christmas brought his sports again.
‘Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale;
‘Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man’s heart through half the year.
Thou Mother of the Prince of Peace, Poor, simple, and of low estate! That Strife should vanish, Battle cease, O why should this thy soul elate? Sweet Music’s loudest note, the Poet’s story,— Did’st thou ne’er love to hear of Fame and Glory?
From “A Christmas Carol,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Despite being unqualified to make such a pronouncement, I doubt Coleridge’s “A Christmas Carol” is a very good poem. The verse is clunky, and I worry that the theme boils down to something John Lennon would approve, but perhaps it’s a good theme for this year. Would we rather glory in war or in the Prince of Peace?
Coleridge wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1799, after he had taken up Unitarianism officially, and it was set to music many years later when the English were reviving the singing of carols. The words do seem to call for a tune with four lines and a couplet in each verse.
“Joy rose within her, like a summer’s morn; Peace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born.”
The world doesn’t understand peace; many believers don’t either. We are too worldly. We don’t follow Christ in making peace as much as possible, and we don’t understand the necessity of being prepared for war. In the poem, the shepherds come to Mary and she rejoices in their tale. Then, the poet steps in to ask her why she should rejoice in the Prince of Peace (note the verse above).
She responds, “War is a ruffian, all with guilt defiled, / That from the aged Father tears his Child!” Strife and Battle break the world and waste everything. “A murderous fiend, by fiends adored, / He kills the Sire and starves the Son.” Yes, yes, but this is personification. War isn’t a person; it’s a description of things people do. We fight each other for power, money, and fame. The Roman founders saw they needed women to be a successful colony, but instead of appealing to their Sabine neighbors, they fought them and took their women. Who taught them to take the path of war instead of the path of peace? No one. It would have been a natural choice for anyone.
I suspect Coleridge was like many who want peace as the absence of war, but the Prince of Peace says he gives a different peace, a peace that follows from seeking the Kingdom of Heaven first. It isn’t one we earn per se. It’s one that follows us, like goodness and mercy. The Lord may put us in a troubled time, and we may even be called to fight for the peace we want to see, but the Lord gives us a peace in knowing his kingdom has no end.
Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:7 ESV)
