During this time, he had prepared his own lengthy speech, a philippic the equal of Cato’s addresses against Carthage. Everything about her was fake and phony. She was a cheat and a liar and a bad woman. She was a threat to goodness, and, inasmuch as silicone was made from sand, she was a menace to the continued existence of the world’s beaches.
[Disclaimer: The book under consideration here, City of Angles, was referred to me by a friend, and I received a free review copy from the author.]
Billy Rosenberg is a struggling Hollywood writer. On the strength of one successful novel he moved to California to work in the movies. But his career is struggling. He’s painfully aware, in a town where presentation is everything, of the impression he makes with his cheap shoes and rattletrap car.
So he’s surprised when beautiful, surgically-enhanced actress Vincenza Morgan (originally Kelli Haines of Eagan, Minnesota) sits down at his table in a coffee shop and talks to him. Vincenza is, in fact, scared. Her career had seemed about to take off, thanks to an indie film she just helped produce. She’d gotten A-list star Tom Selva to star in it, thanks to their mutual membership in the International Church of Life (think Scientology), the most powerful force in town. Everything looked great, until she opened her car trunk and found Selva’s corpse stuffed inside.
She knew she ought to call the police, but she was on her way to an audition, and the First and Greatest Law of Hollywood is you never blow off an audition; being dead would only be a marginal excuse. And now she thinks she’s being tailed by agents of the Church in a van. She could really use a place to stay tonight…
City of Angles is a comedy of manners – but it’s dark comedy, and the manners are Hollywood manners. The chief thing one learns in this story is that nobody ever says what they mean. Candor is kryptonite. One honest word might undermine the whole town and slide it into the ocean. The plot works out happily, though – depending on what you mean by “happily.” Which leaves the reader with things to consider.
I’m a sucker for a Hollywood tale – I’ve felt the city’s attraction but am very far from having the nerve to challenge it face to face. So I enjoyed City of Angles, which was expertly written and packed with sharp innuendo. [One technical error I noted was that the author places Burnsville High School in Eagan, Minnesota rather than in Burnsville where it belongs both in logic and fact. I can only assume that locations have been changed to protect the innocent.]
In the second book of the Joe Boyd series, An Inconvenient Death, Joe, a police detective in the town of Culpepper, is camping with his family (apparently he’s a workaholic, and this is a good development). While his son is walking their new puppy, the dog locates a buried human skeleton. Although Joe calls the discovery in, he manages to convince his superior officer to let him continue his vacation, leaving his younger subordinate Hank to start the investigation on his own.
Hank proves to be very competent. Based on what remains of the clothing, along with a high school class ring found nearby, he manages to pinpoint the likely victim – a boy who worked in a local convenience store and vanished in 1988.
Meanwhile, in a writers’ group that meets at a local church, a couple female members are annoyed by one of the male members. He’s socially awkward and “creepy,” and he keeps bringing in pages from his work in progress – a book about how three high school boys murder a convenience store worker and hide his body in the woods.
G. K. Chesterton once said (I quote from memory), “There are two meanings to the word ‘good.’ If a man were to shoot his grandmother from a distance of 500 yards, I would call him a good shot. I would not necessarily call him a good man.”
There are two kinds of good book — a book that is morally good, or a book that is good in terms of the writing craft. An Inconvenient Death is morally good. Salutary virtues are praised and nobody uses a word harsher than “crap.” Even more admirably, it deals in a genuinely Christian way with the awkward issue of scandal in the church.
It is not, however, good in terms of writing. The author, like so many young authors, overwrites. He informs us what people are thinking and feeling without letting them reveal those thoughts and emotions through gesture and dialogue. He sometimes doubles his dialogue – first recounting a conversation, and then having that conversation repeated to another character in detail (this bores the reader). He tells us how people greet each other at the beginnings of conversations (also boring and unnecessary). There are grammar mistakes from time to time too.
Also, the suspense could have been ratcheted up considerably.
So, my bottom line is, I appreciate the effort to write a clean, uplifting mystery, but An Inconvenient Death wasn’t very well written.
I suppose this will happen more and more as I grow old and fuzzy-brained, and the list of books I’ve read stretches longer than the unabridged dictionary. I picked up a set of the first three books in the Father Tom series for Kindle, only realizing toward the end of the first volume, The Penitent Priest, that I’d already read it. And reviewed it here. And forgotten it completely.
The Amazon page says this is a revised edition, so maybe the changes were extensive enough to mitigate my embarrassment. I note that my main concern with the book the first time through was the number of coincidences in the plot. I felt the same way this time, but it didn’t bother me as much. Perhaps that’s one of the problems they addressed in the revision.
In any case, Father Tom Greer is a Catholic priest in Pennsylvania. He came to his vocation late in life, following the murder of his wife in Myerton, the town where they lived. The crime has never been solved. Shortly thereafter Tom cut all local ties and left town, eventually attending seminary, getting ordained, and being put to work as an archivist.
But now (the book is narrated in the present tense, something I dislike on principle. Though I can’t say it actually decreased my enjoyment any) the archbishop has assigned him to fill in for the priest at St. Clare’s Church in Myerton. Then one day, in the confessional, someone tells Tom something that makes him believe they witnessed his wife’s murder, and might even be responsible. Then he gets a look at his late wife’s laptop, which a friend has been holding, and learns from her e-mails that she had a stalker. But when he tells the police detective in charge of the case, she says that’s not enough for her to take action on.
This encounter is complicated by the fact that the detective turns out to be a former girlfriend of Tom’s, one he nearly married before he met his wife.
What I liked about this book – the prose is excellent. The dialogue is natural, smart, and engaging. The characters are believable.
What I disliked (though not as much as on my first reading) — the number of coincidences in the plot. They interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief.
Still, considering that this is a “clean” novel, without profanity or sex and with excellent moral values, I was very impressed with The Penitent Priest. Our hyper-Protestant readers may not consider a Catholic novel a “Christian” work, but I think most any Christian can read this book and appreciate its values and even (for the most part) its theology.
So I recommend it, all things considered. I enjoyed reading The Penitent Priest. I think the authors have talent and good instincts.
That same evening that Egil left home, Skallagrim had his horse saddled, then rode away from home when everyone else went to bed. He was carrying a fairly large chest on his knees, and had an iron cauldron under his arm when he left. People have claimed ever since that he put either or both of them in the Krumskelda marsh, with a great slab of stone on top.
Skallagrim came home in the middle of the night, went to his bed, and lay down, still wearing his clothes. At daybreak next morning, when everybody was getting dressed, Skallagrim was sitting on the edge of the bed, dead, and so stiff that they could neither straighten him out nor lift him no matter how they tried.
If you ask a saga fan which is the best saga, they’re likely to say either Egil’s or Njal’s Saga. In my case, it usually depends on which one I’ve read last. Both sagas excel in one quality you don’t expect in a medieval book – complex, layered characterization. In some ways they’re like modern novels.
But they don’t start out like novels. A novel writer tries to start with a bang, to engage the reader in the conflict from page one. Icelandic sagas are localized stories written for a localized audience. The first thing the Icelandic reader wanted to know was where the action would occur, and where in the matrix of interrelationships around him the story falls. So we start Egil’s Saga with the tale of Egil’s grandfather Thorolf, who supported King Harald Fairhair’s conquest of Norway, then fell out of favor and was finally killed by the king Then we see how Egil’s father Skallagrim relocates to Iceland (getting his vengeance along the way), and stakes his claim as one of the early settlers. Finally Egil himself appears – big and strong, ugly and soon bald, but wicked smart and the greatest of all skaldic poets.
Egil goes out as a Viking – what else could he do? – and also tries to claim his inheritance in Norway, becoming a mortal enemy to King Eirik Bloodaxe, whose son he murders. He fights as a mercenary in England (on the English side) and has the kind of set-piece side-adventures that tend to show up in sagas.
Eventually, we come to the dramatic climax of the saga – amazingly, not a battle or even a duel. It’s an act of headstrong audacity. Shipwrecked on the coast of Northumbria, Egil learns that Eirik Bloodaxe is the new king of the country. Instead of putting on a hooded cloak and making tracks, Egil heads straight for York, to beard the king in his den. Supported by his best friend, the king’s man Arinbjorn, Egil offers Eirik a proposition. In return for his life, he will compose a poem for the king so brilliant and memorable that it will secure his fame forever. When he succeeds (brilliantly), Eirik is left with no choice. To kill Egil now would shame him forever.
Make no mistake – Egil is a bad man. He’s a thief, a slave-taker, a cold-blooded killer. He cherishes his hatreds and dabbles in magic. And he doesn’t mellow as he gets older; only weakness makes him a little safer to be around.
Yet there’s pathos there as well. His poetry provides a glimpse into his heart as he mourns the friends and family he’s lost, and the injustices he’s suffered. He’s as faithful a friend as he is dangerous as an enemy. And his courage is mind-boggling. Possibly pathological (there are many theories about brain and psychological disorders he may have suffered from).
I was pretty effusive in my praise of the translation of the Vinland sagas in the collection I’m now reading, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I must admit I was less happy with this translation (by a different translator). I thought it erred a bit on the side of literalism, suffering the awkwardness that literal translation entails. (Stylistically, I prefer the Penguin edition.) I also noted a couple textual oddities I hadn’t remarked on before. One is name spelling. Some of the choices seem to me odd – Hakon for Håkon, for instance – it gives English reader the wrong impression about pronunciation. And Kari for Kåri – a Norwegian acquaintance once complained to me about using that spelling in The Year of the Warrior, as in modern Norwegian Kari is a woman’s name (I changed the spelling in the next volume). The orthography is oddly mixed – they use double quotation marks in the American style, but English spelling, as in “harbour.” A lot of characters’ nicknames are rendered in novel ways; I’m not sure that adds to the value of the thing.
What we have here, I think, is a scholarly translation. I still recommend the collection for its completeness, if you can afford it. But you can get Egil’s Saga in a perfectly adequate translation for much less.
The third of postmodernism’s triumvirate of stooges, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), focuses his indignation on common sense because it carries “the tyranny of goodwill, the obligation to think ‘in common’ with others, the domination of a pedagogical model, and most importantly—the exclusion of stupidity.”
If like me you’ve read Francis Schaeffer and Allan Bloom, and if you’ve pondered C.S. Lewis’s “The Poison of Subjectivism,” you’re aware that the central intellectual battle of our time rages around Reason. Does reason give us a window on reality, something conccrete on which we can fully rest our weight, or is everything “subjective”; is one person’s world entirely different from another’s? Is thinking worth anything, or must passion rule all things?
My friend Mark Goldblatt, novelist, columnist, and educator, provides a useful guide in his recent book, I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism. The book offers a short historical overview of how the Enlightenment came to enshrine Reason, and then how a rising tide of Subjectivism gradually infiltrated our institutions of higher education, turning the culture of the mind into streams of thought that must ultimately run dry.
He examines Critical Race Theory, showing how it employs Subjectivist philosophy to exalt feeling over fact, turning the quest for knowledge into a quest for raw power (because once reason is dead, we can’t have a discussion. All that’s left is a shouting match. And after shouting come fists). He goes on to outline how the Me-Too movement corrupted its honorable ideals by abandoning objective standards of justice, and how more and more people, in the spirit of transgenderist dogmatism, are now destroying their own bodies.
He ends by suggesting some means by which our schools of liberal arts, having become divinity schools of Woke religion, might be amputated and allowed to wither, before they can poison the whole body.
This book is only six months old, but it might possibly already be too late. The schools of the STEM disciplines, in which the author places much hope, seem to be already in the process of corruption, embracing Woke mathematics and physics (Want to fly in an airplane designed according to Woke math principles? You first; I’ll wait).
Still, I Feel, Therefore I Am is a worthwhile introduction for the thoughtful reader desiring some points of reference in the churning sea of Relativist culture. I enjoyed it and recommend it. Cautions for some rough language.
He was overcome by the poignancy of the situation. Here was a girl who had frankly admitted that in her opinion he was Prince Charming galloping up on his white horse and would have liked nothing better than to be folded in his embrace and hugged till her ribs squeaked, and here was he all eagerness to do the folding and hugging, and no chance of business resulting because the honour of the Bodkins said it mustn’t. Beat that for irony, he thought as he rubbed his shin. It was the sort of thing Thomas Hardy would have got a three-volume novel out of.
Having intensely enjoyed, and positively reviewed, The Luck of the Bodkins the other day, I thought I might as well go right ahead and review the sequel, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin. (Monty also figures largely in a previous book, Heavy Weather, a Blandings story. I’ll have to be getting on to that one too, though it will be out of sequence.)
PG & MB redresses one of the few niggling problems that exist with TLOtB, otherwise a near-perfect confection. The sensitive reader can’t avoid the nagging sense that in getting engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, All England field hockey player, Monty has made a blunder. Monty is much like Bertie Wooster – except that he wants to be married – and one can hear Jeeves saying, if Bertie had ever found himself handcuffed to La Butterwick, “The young lady is undoubtedly healthy and vigorous, sir. But might I suggest that a person with her record of breaking multiple engagements might conceivably be a touch too volatile in temperament for the establishment of a felicitous domestic partnership?”
In short, the reader wants Monty to be happy, and under Gertrude’s thumb he’s likely to sink to the level of a third-rate power. Monty requires a woman a little more cheerful. A little more trusting. A woman less subservient to the commands of her blighted, vegetarian father.
So when Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin opens, one year to the day from the close of the previous novel –
[At this point I need to break off and blather a moment about the question of time in Wodehouse. The Luck of the Bodkins was published in 1935, and somewhere in the last couple pages it’s mentioned that Prohibition was recently repealed in the US. Monty’s deal with Gertrude’s father calls for him to hold a paying job for one year before they can be married. At the beginning of PG & MB, we’re told that that year has now passed. But PG & MB was published in 1972, nearly forty years later. One of its first pages mentions TV studio audiences. In the dreary world you and I inhabit, there was no point in history at which the first thing could have been separated by a single year from the second. But this is Wodehouse world, that foretaste of Paradise in which time exists only for the purposes of the story, and the world never changes much.]
So, as I was saying, this book starts one year after we left off. Monty has been toiling away, doing unspecified tasks, as a technical advisor at Superba-Llewellyn Studios in Hollywood. His secretary, Sandy Miller, has fallen head-over-espadrilles in love with him, but she knows his heart belongs to Gertrude. And now, he announces, he’s headed back to England to claim his bride.
However, when he arrives, Monty finds old Mr. Butterwick unwilling to close the deal. He has learned, he tells Monty, that Monty acquired his job with Superba-Llewellyn through blackmail (which is true), and so it doesn’t count. Monty finally persuades the old blighter to give him one more year.
Then Sandy shows up, to his surprise. She’s in England with her boss, Ivor Llewellyn, who has taken a country house for an extended sojourn. He has done this at the bidding of his imperious wife Grayce, who wants him to write a history of his studio. In fact, he needs a secretary to help him with the book. The perfect job for Monty!
The action switches to the country house at that point, and comes to focus on a valuable pearl necklace currently belonging to Grayce, a gift from Ivor. Ivor confesses to Monty that, because Grayce has him on a strict budget, he pawned the necklace some time back and replaced it with cultured pearls. Now their daughter is getting married, and the necklace is supposed to go to her. Ivor will pay Monty handsomely to steal the necklace and drop it in the water somewhere. They are unaware that there are three actual jewel thieves also staying in the house, plotting to relieve him of the job.
In terms of classic Wodehouse prose, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin stands equal to any other work in his corpus, despite the fact that he was over 90 when it was published. Plot-wise, I’d have to say he’d slipped a little. The book seems to wrap up prematurely, with a lot of possible plot twists passed over. There are long stretches where Monty really has no problems at all, and just seems unaware of it.
Still, a very amusing book, and it’s great to see Monty settle with a suitable girl.
One morning Karlsefni’s men saw something shiny above a clearing in the trees, and they called out. It moved and proved to be a one-legged creature which darted down to where the ship lay tied. Thorvald, Eirik the Red’s son, was at the helm and the one-legged man shot an arrow into his intestine. Thorvald drew the arrow out and spoke: “Fat paunch that was. We’ve found a land of fine resources, though we’ll hardly enjoy much of them.” Thorvald died from the wound shortly after. The one-legged man then ran off back north. They pursued him and caught glimpses of him now and then. He then fled into a cove and they turned back. (Eirik the Red’s Saga)
I hope I don’t cause any embarrassment when I publicly thank my friend (and our frequent commenter) Dale Nelson, formerly of Mayville State University in North Dakota, for these books. Along with his wife Dorothea, Dale has gifted me – entirely to my surprise – with the full, boxed set of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. It’s published by Leifur Eiriksson Publishing in Reykjavik, and is a collection of brand-new scholarly translations, carefully selected and edited by a team of scholars.
When you read the title, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, you’ll probably assume, as I did, that this is a collection of all the Icelandic sagas. Once I’d read the introductions (there are several) I realized that that would involve a very large collection indeed. It would have to include legendary sagas of pre-historic legends, as well as later sagas about bishops, saints and courtly love. What the editors here mean by “the sagas of Icelanders” is in fact the classic sagas – the tales of the Icelandic settlers, heroes, and feuding in the Viking Age.
Just my meat, in fact. I have a good number of saga translations in my library already, but this collection gives me a set of uniformly high-quality translations living up to the latest standards of criticism. I’m delighted to have it.
In this post I’ll review the first two translations in the first volume – Eirik the Red’s Saga and The Saga of the Greenlanders.
These two sagas are (as the editors freely confess) not the best, considered purely as texts. What we have is two different accounts based on the same original events, but developed into two highly divergent narratives. (This is embarrassing, I must admit, for someone like me who spends a lot of time defending the use of sagas as historical sources. But nobody’s saying the saga texts didn’t suffer alteration with time – only that they contain useful information, which certainly remains true even of the Vinland sagas. We’ve got an archaeological dig in Newfoundland to prove it.)
Generalizing a great deal, I can say that Eirik the Red’s Saga (I should mention that the editors here have chosen a different manuscript source from most previous translations, so this version is a little different from other published editions) describes Leif Eiriksson discovering Vinland (America) by accident, blown off course in a storm while sailing to Greenland from Norway. Later the focus switches to Thorfinn Karlsefni the Icelander, and his wife Gudrid.
The Saga of the Greenlanders, on the other hand, attributes the first sighting of land in Vinland to Bjarni Herjolfsson, who is similarly blown off course, but never touches land. Leif later buys his ship and makes a voyage of exploration, followed by two of his brothers, and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and finally his sanguine sister Freydis.
When I was young, most historians considered The Saga of the Greenlanders earlier and more reliable than Eirik the Red’s Saga. Today I’m given to understand that historians consider both of them useful in parts. Both, it must be admitted, are also garbled in places, and contain preposterous elements.
What they have in common, it seems to me, is the fact that the story of Vinland is in a way secondary. The discovery is recounted, not primarily for its importance as a watershed historical event, but as a family achievement.
What lies behind both versions (it seems to this reader) is the fact that it was written by, and for, the descendants of the married couple Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid the Far-Traveled. Both narratives mention (as briefly as possible) the fact that Gudrid was descended from slaves. This was embarrassing in that culture – though pretty common in Icelandic society, many of whose Norse pioneers had married slave women. Great pains are taken in both versions to explain to the reader that, in spite of her low birth, Gudrid was recognized as a remarkable person very early in her life. Then we are told of her many adventures, culminating in her pilgrimage to Rome late in life and her death as an anchoress, a highly respected woman.
This professional translator finds no fault in the translation here. I’m not qualified to judge how well the Icelandic text is interpreted, but I know a clunky translation when I see one, and these two are very good, very smooth. I might also mention that the physical volumes are sturdily bound in signatures between handsome leather-covered boards, and the text, printed on heavy, acid-free paper, is in a highly readable font.
(One point that amused me is that, though the publisher uses Icelandic spelling in calling itself Leifur Eiriksson Publishing, the translators chose to use the more familiar form of “Leif” in the text.)
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders is an expensive set, but if you can afford it, I recommend it highly.
‘…Why not take a chance? You would like Hollywood, you know. Everybody does. Girdled by the everlasting hills, bathed in eternal sunshine. Honest, it kind of gets to you. What I mean, there’s something going on there all the time. Malibu. Catalina. Aqua Caliente. And if you aren’t getting divorced yourself, there’s always one of your friends is, and that gives you something to chat about in the long evenings. And it isn’t half such a crazy place as they make out. I know two-three people in Hollywood that are part sane.’
Monty Bodkin, hero of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins, is a fairly unassuming chap. Decent looking, and rich to boot. All he wants is to marry Gertrude Butterwick, stalwart member of the All England Women’s Field Hockey team. But Gertrude, for all her charms, has a lamentable inclination to jealousy. While they were at Cannes, she noticed Monty appreciating the on-screen beauty of movie star Lotus Blossom, and she promptly broke their engagement. Now she’s about to board the ship SS Atlantic, steaming off to America with her teammates.
So Monty books passage himself. On the same ship, as luck (and the plot) would have it, sails none other but Lotus “Lottie” Blossom herself, along with her fiancé, Monty’s old school chum Ambrose Tennyson, whom Lottie’s boss, movie tycoon Ivor Llewellyn (also aboard), has hired as a screen writer (under the misapprehension that he’s the Tennyson who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). Ivor is suffering internal torments, having been commanded by his masterful wife to smuggle a pearl necklace into New York for her. Also aboard is Ambrose’s brother Reggie, off to take an unwanted job in Canada on the orders of his family. He’d rather marry Ivor’s assistant Mabel, but can’t afford it.
So what we’ve got is three young couples, two of whom are desperately trying, as fortunes alter, to find angles by which to manipulate Ivor into giving the guy a cushy Hollywood job. Except for Monty, who neither wants nor needs a job, but Gertrude’s father expects him to hold one as a demonstration of character. As all this intrigue swirls around the dyspeptic movie tycoon, everyone’s calculations are advanced and frustrated, in turn, by Albert Peasemarch, the well-meaning but not terribly bright room steward, sort of a Jeeves without the intellect.
I first read The Luck of the Bodkins back in the 1970s, and remembered it as one of my favorites. I am pleased to report that age has not dimmed, nor custom staled, its infinite variety. This particular novel is especially rich in Wodehouse Girls – those mercurial, impulsive, implacable creatures who rule their men absolutely and are clearly well on their ways to becoming those formidable Aunts who infest Bertie Wooster’s adventures. Lottie Blossom is a prime example, and one of my personal favorites.
Highly, highly recommended. I laughed out loud, at frequent intervals.
I usually top a book review with a picture of the book’s cover, but the Kindle version of the book I’m dealing with tonight is a generic free book design. So instead, I present you a picture of the gigantic statue of Frithiof the Bold that overlooks the Sognefjord in Norway. I’ve seen it, but only from a distance, as I cruised in a ship on the fjord. This statue was erected by none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who was a huge fan of Frithiof’s Saga, which I’ll be reviewing tonight. I figured it had been a while since I’d reviewed a saga, and Frithiof’s, though a legendary one, has many points of interest, not least for its reception in fairly modern times. I’ve written about it before, a number of years ago, but I have more to say now. I read The Story of Frithiof the Bold in Eirikr Magnusson’s and William Morris’ classic translation.
Frithiof (or Fridtjof, there are variable spellings) is the son of a minor Viking chieftain. His family lives on one side of the Sognefjord in Norway, while King Beri lives on the other. The king and Frithiof’s father are good friends, but their sons don’t get along. Frithiof is (of course) tall, handsome, strong, and bold – everything a Viking should be. The king’s sons seem capable enough, but Frithiof always outshines them, and they hate him for it. Their sister Ingibiorg, however, likes Frithiof very well, and they make personal vows to each other. At one point, when the king and the brothers are away, Frithiof dallies with Ingibiorg in the god Baldur’s sacred precincts, where such carryings-on are forbidden.
So when King Beri dies, the kings’ sons send Frithiof on a diplomatic mission, to collect tribute in Orkney. While he’s gone, they burn down his farm and marry Ingibiorg off to old King Ring of Ringerike in eastern Norway.
After many adventures, Frithiof comes to serve (under an alias) in King Ring’s court. In that capacity, he becomes the king’s protector. He gets the chance to kill him, but resists the temptation. This leads ultimately to that rarest of elements in a saga – a happy ending.
If you’d lived most anywhere in western Europe in the early to mid-19th Century, you’d have probably been familiar with Frithiof’s Saga. It went viral while most of the sagas were still largely unknown. This was because a Swedish poet, Esaias Tegnér, discovered it and translated it in verse form. His poem was in turn translated into many other languages. Readers responded to its heroic tone, and also to its (apparent) elements of forgiveness and reconciliation. These made it more accessible to the Victorian, Christian reader than such sagas as Njal’s or Egil’s.
My own reading (even in Magnusson’s and Morris’ very Victorian translation) suggests that this interpretation is not entirely correct. Frithiof is admirable, indeed, in not killing the king who had married the girl he loved. But for the saga audience, his virtue lies not so much in forgiveness and finding a peaceful solution (the name Frithiof actually means “peace-thief”), but in his living up to the ethos of his culture, at some personal cost. Frithiof’s enemies are Ingibiorg’s brothers, not King Ring, who has acted honorably throughout. On top of that, he was a good and brave king, deserving of honor. Frithiof has sworn oaths to protect Ring, so protect him he does. His treatment of Ingibiorg’s brothers will be rather different. They’ve treated him treacherously, and can expect little mercy from him.
Reading The Story of Frithiof the Bold from my own perspective, as a lifelong student of Erling Skjalgsson of Sola, I discovered certain parallels to Erling’s own saga, as preserved in Heimskringla. They’re intriguing and (I must admit) a little troubling.
For instance, at one point Frithiof is offered the title of king, but refuses it because none of his ancestors were kings. Erling does that very thing, as you may recall from The Year of the Warrior. (Though Frithiof does accept a kingship at the end of the story.) Also, there’s an objection to Frithiof’s marrying Ingibiorg, because he doesn’t have high enough rank. Similar, again, to Erling’s story. Also, the line from the poem Bjarkamál, “Breast to breast the eagles will claw each other,” is quoted in both tales.
Then we’re told that Frithiof eventually came to rule Hordaland, the homeland of Erling’s own family. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Frithiof was one of Erling’s ancestors. It may well be that Snorri had Frithiof in mind when he wrote about Erling.
The Story of Frithiof the Bold is worth reading, though I’m not a great fan of the antique diction Magnusson and Morris employ. (I have to admit, though, that that gimmick allows them to use actual Old Norse words as archaisms from time to time.) Certainly, as in the 19th Century, it remains one of the most accessible saga tales.
“I don’t know. It’s a college in Minnesota. One of the boys I met on my trip to France is going there.”
“Minnesota,” he repeated, incredulous. “Please pass me a scone.”
“I’d like to see more of the world,” she said.
The exchange above is from a conversation between Tubby Dubonnet, hero of Shelter from the Storm, fourth book in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series, and one of his daughters. It’s typical of the droll quality of the dialogue in these books, though I mainly chose it because it’s a rare reference to Minnesota and a Norwegian-American school.
By the way, it’s “St. Olaf,” not “St. Olaf’s.” A typically Catholic mistake.
Anyway, in Shelter From the Storm, a Texas outlaw named LaRue has hired some local criminals in New Orleans to help him crack a bank safe deposit vault during Mardi Gras, when he figures no one will be paying a lot of attention. (He is correct in this.)
What he doesn’t expect is rain – not just ordinary rain, but a torrential monsoon that cancels parades and floods the streets and knocks out power in the city. When things go wrong, LaRue has a tendency to shoot people. One of the people he shoots happens to be a new legal client of Tubby Dubonnet’s, and Tubby takes that seriously. He can’t call the police because the phones are out and they’re kind of busy rescuing people, but he’ll chase the miscreants on his own. Even if it means neglecting the new girlfriend he’s met.
If that seems a little over the top, well, Tubby can surprise you sometimes. He’s a fairly lazy fellow, but he has spirit. These books are rich in quirky characters – a little too quirky for my taste sometimes, though amusing.
As I’ve said before, I don’t love the Tubby Dubonnet books, but I don’t hate them either. I have a fairly low threshold for quirkiness, and New Orleans isn’t really my kind of town.
I must also complain that Shelter from the Storm ended with a sort of a cliff-hanger, which is an offense in my code.
