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.
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.
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
In the video above, I share from an 1898 (or earlier) inexpensive edition of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a’ Kempis. It’s one of those books that looks as if it could have been valuable (just because it’s old and if it was in better shape), but it’s actually a cheap copy. This site on Chicago history notes the publisher of my book, Donohue, Henneberry, & Co., as purveyors of “inexpensive and unauthorized copies of popular books,” mostly fiction. I think my copy is from their set of cloth bound books, 50 in the series, sold at 75¢ each.
Most of the video is my unpolished reading from the book with a couple comments.
C.S. Lewis: November 29 is the author’s birthday. He was born in Belfast, 1898. In his chronicle of Lewis, Colin Duriez notes a meeting of Tolkien, Charlies Williams, Dr. Robert “Humphrey” Harvard, Owen Barfield, and Lewis on Nov. 23, 1944. Tolkien said the conversation was “most amusing and highly contentious.” Barfield, he said, could meet Lewis head on during a rousing argument, “interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s.”
Intellectuals: Philosopher Roger Scruton talks with Hamza Yusuf about the natural bent of intellectuals toward leftism and what should just as naturally draw them out of it. That’s the first part of the linked recording. They go on to speak of many other topics, including the King James Bible, English grammar, and Islamic society.
I found the above video on YouTube, and as you can see it’s entitled, “There’s no way Tolkien was speaking English here.”
This is fascinating. If you’ve read biographies of Tolkien, you’ll have read about the fact that his speech in conversation tended to be garbled. (He’s said to have blamed it on an injury to his tongue, though that’s disputed.) The most famous recording of his voice, where he reads short excerpts from The Lord of the Rings, is not hard to understand — and that isn’t surprising, since everyone agreed that when he was lecturing he was always loud and clear.
But here we hear him casually enthusing about one of his favorite topics — trees, and he’s babbling away pretty incomprehensibly.
I’ve made great strides with the InDesign software I’m struggling with, but the last few intractable problems still defy… tracting. And I don’t have a book to review tonight.
So I offer the video above, from a podcast called “Order of Man” (about which I know naught, but I found nothing objectionable when I watched). It’s about an hour, and it features an interview with Andrew Klavan about his latest novel, The House of Love and Death (which you really ought to read). He also discusses his journey to faith.
“Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint; preserve my life from dread of the enemy. Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked, from the throng of evildoers, who whet their tongues like swords, who aim bitter words like arrows, shooting from ambush at the blameless, shooting at him suddenly and without fear.” (Ps. 64:1-4 ESV)
The occupation of Gaza was a burr, not a territorial benefit. In the decades following the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis moved themselves to the West Bank, to the ancient provinces of Judea and Samaria, the historical home of the Jewish people, where they formed the “settlements” that have caused such controversy. But Jews do not hear the same mystic chords of memory from Gaza, and so efforts to settle them in Gaza to create geopolitical “facts on the ground” never really took root. By the early 2000s, 8,500 Israelis had moved to 21 tiny settlements, in a situation so dangerous that those 8,500 Jewish Gazans had to be guarded by 24,000 Israeli soldiers.
Novels: Author Richard Russo “discovered that what really interested readers were his stories about growing up with an often-absent father in a declining upstate New York manufacturing community filled with struggling but memorable characters whom some might call ‘deplorables.’”
Let’s see. Where am I? I did a Zoom interview with a student from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay this morning. Some kind of history class assignment. She was supposed to speak with a more impressive Viking reenactor, but had to settle for me due to a glitch in the system. It was nice. She was an intelligent young person. Gave me hope.
I’m trying to figure out Adobe Indesign (not Light Desk, as I erroneously termed it last night; I saw the I and D logo in my mind, and they looked like an L and a D, so I vamped). I was referred to a YouTube video for an introduction, but that created as much confusion as it cleared up for me. I bought a book, which I shall try out this evening. I intend to learn this irrational, user-unfriendly mouse maze of an app, or die in the attempt.
Packed for my trip to Brainerd tomorrow. Paid my bills a day early, because I’m flexible that way. Walked to the post office for stamps.
But what shall I blog about? I think, on consideration, that I still have things to say about Story as a key to the universe, as if I didn’t overtalk my intelligence in my previous post on the subject.
Dale Nelson, in commenting on that post, noted that our Lord, when He came to earth, did not come as a philosopher, but as a storyteller. This is an excellent point, one I wish I’d thought of.
So I’ll double down. When God chose to reveal Himself to us in written form, He did not give us a book of systematic theology (I’ve often wished He had, but oddly He did not consult me). Instead, He told us a story.
Wouldn’t it have been a relief if the Bible had begun with The Book of Epistemology? We could have a Book of Trinitarian Doctrine, and a Book of Soteriology, and it would all end up with a Book of Eschatology.
The Quran is kind of like that, as best I understand it, based on my limited examination of the book, though it’s not very organized. The Quran is essentially a book of doctrines and commands. It’s not what you’d call a gripping narrative.
The Bible we’ve been given, however, is a narrative. God chose to tell what is essentially a story. There’s other elements in there – poetry, and law, and wisdom literature, etc. But it’s all set within an epic dramatic narrative. The world is created, Man is created, Man falls, Man runs berserk, God begins calling out a series of individuals, then a family, then a nation, through whom He will – gradually – reveal His purposes for redemption. Finally the Hero – God Himself in human form – appears and – through great sacrifice – undoes the Fall, conquers death and the devil. Finally, we’re given a glimpse of Christ’s ultimate triumph and the eucatastrophe.
A lot of church schism and religious war could have been avoided if we’d had a divine book of unambiguous theology instead of the Bible we got. But God hasn’t chosen to reveal Himself that way, either in His written Word or in His incarnate Word. He seems to prefer stories. And stories tend to be so… ambivalent. The better the story, the harder it is to explain.
During my recent long road trips, I decided to splurge on a couple audio books. Both were by Andrew Klavan – books I’d read before but wanted to revisit. My Minot book was The Truth and the Beauty, Klavan’s manifesto of art-oriented theology. My Green Bay book was The Great Good Thing, his spiritual autobiography.
I found The Great Good Thing easier to grasp. It’s a straight memoir, with its lessons fairly obvious. Great story, too.
But The Truth and Beauty, though fascinating and inspiring, eludes me at some points. Even after two readings, I still have a hard time articulating what the point of the book is. It’s mostly about how the Romantic poets followed their perceptions of beauty, which led them (in some cases not very far) towards the truth of Christianity in a world gone apostate.
But I can’t grasp the nub. I can’t tell you what Klavan is trying to say we need to learn from the Romantic poets.
And it occurs to me that’s the whole mystery of the thing.
Great art generally can’t be reduced to a formula or a moral. It leads you to a place where you confront an idea that is a Person. And persons can’t be defined – not within the limits of human reason. (God can define it all, I have no doubt.)
It’s a little like Zen, where you sit around and meditate until you “get” some irrational concept. I reject Zen, and I reject the irrational too. But the Buddhists have an inkling of some truth there.
Stories can lead us to an encounter with God. Reason can too. But neither the story nor reason automatically produce faith. The faith comes from an encounter with Jesus Christ. That encounter is a miracle; St. Paul knew, and the theologians have agreed, that it’s nothing either our imagination or our reason can produce. It comes from outside. It’s something you receive.
And you can’t always put it into words. You can only tell stories about it.
The harassment was passed down; the rumor was set into circulation among my colleagues. That was the worst. You can defend yourself against an attack, but there’s nothing you can do against libel. Every day I prepared myself for anything, including death. But I couldn’t cope with this perfidy. No preparation made it bearable. Libel stuffs you with filth; you suffocate because you can’t defend yourself. . . .
Since now I really had to make sure I came to work, but no longer had an office, and since my friend could no longer let me into hers, I stood in the stairwell, unable to decide what to do. I climbed up and down the stairs a few times and suddenly I was again my mother’s child, because I HAD A HANDKERCHIEF. I placed it on one of the stairs between the second and third floors, carefully smoothed it out and sat down. I rested my thick dictionaries on my knee and translated the descriptions of hydraulic machines. I was a staircase wit and my office was a handkerchief.
