Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 1

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This is a partial review. The book I’ve been reading is one of the longer sagas in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and (as I’ve said before) my reading time has been limited lately. But I’m about half way through with this one, so I thought I’d do what I’ve done with some other longer works in the past. This is an incremental review, my thoughts on what I’ve read so far. The saga under consideration is The Saga of Grettir the Strong, one of the great classics.

I’ve read Grettir’s Saga at least three times before, so the material is familiar. But my response this time is a little different from previous ones. Perhaps it’s this translation, which is more literal than most. I’m not generally a booster of literal translating, but possibly it’s conveying some nuances I’ve missed in the past. In any case, I find I have less sympathy for the hero this time around.

The Icelandic sagas are classic stories of violence on the frontier, stories that anticipate the American Western. One of the standard themes of the Westerns is, “What do we do with violent men, who are valuable but expensive?” We want the gunfighter to come in and clean up the town, but then we’d prefer him to ride off into the sunset and bother somebody else.

Grettir Asmundarsson is often referred to in the saga as “an accomplished man.” But the only accomplishments of his (aside from composing poetry) that we observe are fighting and lifting heavy objects. His family and friends support him (cautiously) because of his value in a brawl, but his impulse control seems poor, and he shows little indication of ever being domesticated, or wanting to be.

In fact, he shows all the signs of PTSD. He’s quick to react violently, he’s suspicious and socializes poorly, and he suffers night terrors. In the saga, this weakness is explained by a nightmarish fight with a revenant, what I called a “walker-again” in my novels – the Scandinavian ghost that’s kind of like a vampire or zombie. Grettir’s nightmarish fight with Glam, the ghost, is portrayed as an experience of such overwhelming horror that even our bold hero can’t undergo it without emotional scars (though he does, needless to say, “kill” the ghost.) What happened to the real-life Grettir we’ll never know, but fighting monsters is a pretty good metaphor for a traumatic experience in combat.

And that’s about all I can really say in Grettir’s defense. The rare occasions in the saga where he appears sympathetically are the most fantastic and implausible – like the ghost-fight, or his rescuing of a houseful of defenseless women from rapist berserkers. These are saga set pieces, the kind of episodes that show up again and again in sagas to keep things lively. I doubt they actually happened in the man’s life.

What I do believe is the stories of his murders, which generally seem to be acts of impulse and overkill.

More on Grettir tomorrow.

Music

‘Les Bicyclettes de Belsize’

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Yet another reviewless night. My reading has been sharply curtailed, and it looks to be thus for a while, due to a pile of work (some of which I’m even getting paid for. So I’ve got that going for me). Today was also my annual appointment with my thoughtful Tax Professional, always an ordeal. People as poor as I am shouldn’t have such complicated taxes (multiple tiny income streams are to blame). I’m pretty sure I’d vote for a flat tax.

So I post music again. The song above, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, is outside my usual, Norwegian-oriented repertoire. It’s just a song I’ve loved ever since it came out, during my college days. I did not know, and have only recently learned, that it’s the theme for a short film. I watched the film on YouTube, but I’m not going to link to it here, because I suspect it’s copyrighted and will soon be pulled. Furthermore, I found it kind of disappointing. It’s a short musical with but one memorable song.

I must have been misled by my own mood when I first heard the song; I always assumed the film would be bittersweet. It’s not. It’s dumb and cheerful, a rather banal story about young people dressed in what we used to call “mod” clothes. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl are separated. Boy and girl find each other again. That’s about it.

In spite of the French title, it’s an English movie and an English song. If you’d like to hear the English-language version, Engelbert Humperdinck had a pretty big hit with it. It’s easily located.

The singer here is Mireille Mathieu, a French artist I’m amazed I never heard of. Incredible voice. According to Wikipedia, she’s a devout Roman Catholic and stands fully 5 feet tall.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine

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Tonight, another mystery classic. I was familiar with the name of the author, S. S. Van Dine, but I knew his Philo Vance character only through old movies (William Powell was the first to play him). Raymond Chandler called Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and now that I’ve read The Bishop Murder Case, I can’t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).

Philo Vance, New York City esthete and amateur detective, is called upon by the district attorney (who has apparently decided, after a couple of cases, that he can’t operate without the young twit’s help) to visit the home of the mathematician Prof. Dillard. In an archery range next to the house, a young friend of the family has been found killed by an arrow. Suspicion immediately falls on another young male friend, a rival for the affections of the professor’s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, they all realize that this was part of a cold-blooded plan. When other murders, all with Mother Goose themes, follow, it comes down to breaking alibis and analyzing personalities – just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.

What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn’t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as “’Sit down, Pyne,’ said Vance, with peremptory kindness.” (What does “peremptory kindness” mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.

Secondly, Vance relies heavily on very simplistic Freudian psychology, which has not aged well. The author goes so far as to affirm that extreme (even cruel) cynicism is a sign of mental health, because it eases repressions(!).

By this time in history, we’re used to seeing amateur sleuths in fiction working in cooperation with the official police, but the kind of slavish devotion the police in this book show to Philo Vance – to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations – is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I’ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney’s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member.  Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus doesn’t exist in Philo Vance’s world.

There’s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he’s an Ibsen fan).

The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting – and perhaps revealing – case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th century. He was also a cocaine addict and a German sympathizer during World War I. When his career foundered, he took up writing mysteries, despite the fact that he despised the genre. In an exquisite irony of fate, his books proved popular, and he came to depend on them for a living. Applying a little Freudian psychology of my own, I wonder how much his self-hatred contributed to the generally acknowledged deterioration of his work over time. (And it wasn’t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case is any indication.)

In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case. It dragged on and on, annoying me increasingly as I read. Recommended only if you want to fill a hole in your education in Golden Age mystery stories.

Music

Sunday Singing: Stand Up, My Soul; Shake Off Your Fears

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Today’s hymn is another from the great Isaac Watts. “Stand Up, My Soul; Shake Off Your Fears” was written in 1707 and paired in some hymnals with the traditional German tune “Mendon.”

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal 5:1 ESV)

1 Stand up, my soul; shake off your fears,
and gird the gospel armor on;
march to the gates of endless joy,
where your great Captain Savior’s gone.

2 Hell and your sins resist your course;
but hell and sin are vanquished foes:
your Jesus nailed them to the cross,
and sang the triumph when he rose.

3 Then let my soul march boldly on,
press forward to the heav’nly gate;
there peace and joy eternal reign,
and glitt’ring robes for conqu’rors wait.

4 There shall I wear a starry crown,
and triumph in almighty grace;
while all the armies of the skies
join in my glorious Leader’s praise.

Uncategorized

American Sports and Were All Balls Made from Pigskins

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It’s been a while since we posted something on sports, despite the clamoring of our many readers. When I meet people on the street, in the diner, on the subway, or in a hansom cab, they often recognize me from the blog, and after soliciting my investment in their creative livelihood or some sure deal they’ve hit upon, they ask me when Lars or I will compose another fun feature about the fascinating world of sports.

Eager readers, today’s your day. On this very screen, I intend to answer your burning queries on the topic of Amercian sports. Who’s Connor Bedard, you ask? What’s jazz got to do with Utah? Is Ty Cobb really the most hated man in baseball? Please. Let’s take up the serious questions, shall we?

What’s the oldest organized sport made in America? That would be Lacrosse, which Iroquois were seen playing by French missionaries in the 1600s. Players would pass a deer-skinned ball with sticks, some of which had deer-gut for netting. This game may be almost a thousand years old. It was organized as a sport in the 17th century.

Asking for the oldest organized sport puts certain parameters on the question. If we backed off the idea of organization and asked what the oldest sport made in America is, that would be surfing. Though Captain James Cook first brought the idea of wave riding to the English-speaking world in 1778 when he saw Tahitian surfers, Polynesians had been surfing for centuries then. With Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959, Hawaii’s history is grafted into America’s history, making surfing a old American sport. (Is that a stretch? I don’t know. Let’s move on.)

Football has roots in the Roman Empire, which should be enough of an explanation for why men would be thinking about it daily, but what we call football in the States was refined in England and civilized by American patriots. Football has been a word to describe kicking around a bloated pig’s bladder since the 14th century. The first college football game was between Princeton and Rutgers in November 1869. They first played on Rutgers’s field in New Brunswick, New Jersey and the game was a lot like soccer. A few days later, they played at Princeton by Princeton’s rules. That set a trend until 1876 when Walter Camp, a Yale man, would begin to revise the game into one we would recognize today.

The word pigskin was used to name leather made from a pig’s hide by 1855, according to records, and was slang for “a saddle.” By 1894, it became slang for “a football” too.

To close out, let me point you to Ted Kluck’s article on Sports Illustrated closing its doors for good.

It’s been years since I’ve received Sports Illustrated, and I kind of put it away, emotionally, when I started writing for its competitor, ESPN the Magazine, in the early 2000s. Both magazines really haven’t been any good for a decade, with most of SI’s online “stories” reading like long tweets. 

Photo by Rob Worsnop/Flickr

Goofing, Uncategorized

Blood won’t tell

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Yet another reviewless night. I am currently reading a book that’s turned out to be just plain sclerotic. But it’s sort of a classic, so I’ll finish it and give it a review – though not one the author would care for, were he still alive. So you’ve got that to look forward to. As for tonight… free association blogging, I guess.

Looking to the right of my keyboard, I behold an object that’s been with me since my father died, in 2000. It’s a souvenir shop item, a porcelain coaster emblazoned with the Walker family crest.

Which is a joke.

In looking around the net for an illustration, I found a lot of sources happy to sell me family coat of arms merchandise. But they’re not all in agreement as to what the Walker coat of arms looks like. This doesn’t mean they’re making it up as they go. It’s because there are in fact several Walker families in Britain, not necessarily related to each other, and they have different crests. I found the one pictured above on Amazon, and it looks relatively – though not exactly – like the one on my coaster.

All these diverse Walker crests have one salient feature in common – they’ve got nothing whatever to do with my family.

My family, as I’ve told you more than is probably excusable, is Scandinavian on all sides, and my paternal great-grandfather (whose name you wouldn’t be able to pronounce) joined his brother, who’d emigrated before him, in commandeering the name Walker.

A name they couldn’t even pronounce, as Norwegians have trouble with the letter “W.”

So having any object with a Walker coat of arms on it is only excusable as an act of whimsy. I’d be ashamed to think anyone thought I took it seriously.

My real family heritage is, like all family heritages, mixed. In the genealogical research I’ve done, I’ve found long lines of people who thought they’d had a good year if they made it through the winter without any children dying. Farmers and fishermen, and the occasional sailor, scraping out an existence on the northern fringe of Europe. Lots of cold winters in my heritage.

The most socially prominent ancestor I’ve documented was a lensmann (bailiff), a little like a local sheriff. There’s some mention of descent from some rich guy, but I’ve never followed that line back. And (as I’ve mentioned before) a couple of my ancestors earned a footnote in the history of Haugean Pietism in Norway.

I know people who can trace their ancestry back to Charlemagne. That’s less impressive, though, when we note that historians say pretty much every European alive is descended from that virile monarch. We Scandinavians may not share in that entirely, being on the periphery of the gene pool and somewhat isolated, but I figure I can confidently assume descent from King Harald Fairhair, who is said to have had (at least) a dozen sons.

The historical practical joke that really bids pomp take physic (Shakespeare reference) is that genealogy is a game of converging cones. You’ve got the cone of your ancestors, who double in number with each generation as you go back in time – two parents, four grandparents, etc. Meanwhile you’ve got the demographic population cone, which goes exactly the opposite way – the population of the world (or Europe, in this case) decreases with every generation going back. At some point in the past, you’ve got more ancestors than there are people in the gene pool. How is that possible? Well, many of them do double, or triple or quadruple, duty. You’re descended from them in multiple lines.

It’s at that point that one’s proud genetic heritage gets absorbed, as in some pantheist afterlife, into a great, undifferentiated mass. Any talk of “the best  blood” is nonsense. We’ve all got the same blood. Go far enough back, and that uniformity encompasses all continents and racial groups.

If we seek distinction, blood is a pretty poor path to follow. Character is better. Truth and faith are best of all.

Music, Religion

A theology of Broadway

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I’m fairly sure I’m losing my mind. You read about it often in artists’ biographies – at the end of their lives they descend into some kind of mania, growing obsessed with astrology or spiritualism or organic food or bitcoin or something. “He was always a little oversensitive, a little unstable,” friends will report. “But at the end he seemed to lose all touch with reality.”

Of course, in the cases of many of those artists, that fatal condition had something to do with syphilis or alcoholism or drugs. And last time I checked, I don’t have a problem with any of those. No, my descent into unreason can only be blamed on my home-grown neuroses and manifold phobias.

All the verbiage above constitutes my quaint method of introducing an idea I’ve conceived, one that’s just silly enough to embarrass me. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

What if the Kingdom of God is a musical comedy?

You may recall my recent theological speculations. In one line of thinking, I posited the theory that the created universe is a Story.

In another, I suggested the universe is Music.

And I asked myself, “Is there any way to fuse those two ideas into a single, Grand Unified Theory?

And then it hit me. What if the universe is a Musical Comedy? That would be perfect! (The argument works for ballet and opera too, I suppose, but I’m a little lowbrow for those metaphors.)

I’m not a major fan of the musical stage – though I once played Mordred in an amateur production of Camelot, and was, it goes without saying, brilliant. But I’ve seen a fair number of the older, classic productions – The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, etc. They can be pretty enjoyable.

But one thing that always troubled me was the moment – so common in musicals – when people are conversing in a normal way, and then somebody suddenly bursts into song, and a few moments later the whole crowd is singing and dancing in intricate choreography. (I embedded a clip of that sort above, a scene from the Marx Brothers’ film, “A Night at the Opera,” featuring Allan Jones with Harpo and Chico.)

I always had trouble with that moment. There are points – occasionally – in real life when people do burst spontaneously into song. Back when I was in a musical group, my friends and I sometimes even did it in harmony. But nobody ever started a chorus line.

But what if the problem isn’t with the musicals, but with the fallen world?

How often have you experienced a sublime moment in life, when your feelings surpassed mere words? When only song and dance would really have been sufficient to adequately celebrate what was going on?

Maybe that was what the world was meant to be like. Maybe Adam and Eve were doing taps and high kicks in the Garden of Eden (perhaps with animals backing them up, as in an old Disney film). Maybe that’s one of the things we lost at the Fall, and we enjoy musicals now because we’re longing for our unfallen state?

It’s just a theory, of course. But let me add this kicker, which I consider weighty indeed –

The American musical comedy was invented, in part, by P. G. Wodehouse. That would make Wodehouse a kind of prophet.

And that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

Authors, Religion

Owen Barfield

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I was casting about (nice English idiomatic expression, that) for a subject tonight, and it crossed my mind that Owen Barfield was the longest-lived of the original Inklings, and he traveled extensively in his later years, lecturing in the US. There must be footage of him around somewhere.

And behold, the video above surfaced on YouTube. It’s the great Lewis promoter Clyde Kilby with Barfield, in a location which I take to be the Marion Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. They chat a bit about his friendship with Lewis, and then we get to see just the beginning of one of Barfield’s lectures.

I forget which book about the Inklings it came from, but I was interested to learn that Barfield was an enthusiastic dancer all his life (or as long as he was able, I suppose). Everyone who’s read Surprised by Joy knows he was an Anthroposophist, but he also joined the Church of England later on.

Goofing, Religion

‘Cabrini.’ Also, elves.

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First of all, I want to share the movie trailer above. It’s for “Cabrini,” a film directed by the director of “Sounds of Freedom.” Lukas Behnken, son of my old college roommate Dixey Behnken, was unit production manager and line producer for this film (he was also, if you recall, director of the excellent “Mully” movie, a few years back). Dixey himself appears for a microsecond here, as an extra.

Looks good. (I mean the film, not Dixey, who of course has always been a living gargoyle.)

Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside Lars Walker’s head?

Of course you don’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway.

Yesterday morning, I was thinking about an experience I’ve had occasionally in my life and times – one you may have had too.

On a number of occasions, I’ve found information in a book that I wanted (for one reason or another) to remember, in case I needed it again. But when I did need it again, and looked in the book, it wasn’t there. In one particular case, I remember going through the book page by page, and still not finding it.

Of course, there are reasonable explanations. I might have remembered the right information, but assigned it to the wrong book. Or I could have remembered the information wrong.

But I choose not to believe those facile explanations. I think the truth is much simpler.

I blame the Underground Folk.

If you’ve read my novels, you know about the Underground Folk. They’re the Scandinavian elves, but they don’t like to be called by that name. You call them the U.F. (as above), or the Hidden Folk or the Good Neighbors, or some circumlocution like that.

In the classic novel, Troll Valley, we learned that they continue their activities in modern times. Their great purpose – their calling from God according to Miss Margit, the hero’s fairy godmother – is to change history. Real events include all those wonders and miracles and magic that we read about in the legends, but then the Underground Folk come in and remove most of the evidence. That way, most of the proof of the supernatural is gone, and people are left to believe or not based on reason and the calling of the Holy Spirit, not unanswerable manifestations of the supernatural.

I think what happened to me with those books was that the Underground Folk sneaked in and changed the text (this scenario actually plays a part in my work in progress, The Baldur Game).

And why would supernatural beings change the content of books just to mess with me? What divine purpose would that serve?

I say, sometimes even elves just play practical jokes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fire, Burn!’ by John Dickson Carr

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I’ve read a little John Dickson Carr in my time – mostly short stories. An American who set his stories primarily in England, Carr is most famous for his characters Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. He was one of the foremost mystery writers of his time, but I’ve always found his work a trifle dull, like most of the “Cozy” subgenre.

I’d never heard of his character Inspector John Cheviot before. A web search told me little about him. I get the impression Cheviot is the hero of at least one other book, and that both involve time travel as well as murder. I would like to know more about the underlying science fictional rationale for the time jump, because while this book, Fire, Burn!, was intriguing, I have questions.

At the beginning of the book, Inspector Cheviot gets into a London cab in the mid-1950s, and suddenly finds himself riding in a hansom cab in the late 1820s. He’s not exactly an intruder in the past – he seems to be a well-known figure in London Society – not always in a positive way. One of his scandalous activities is applying to be part of the newly organized London Metropolitan Police – the very first iteration of Scotland Yard. His application to be their new Superintendent is shocking, as Yard detectives are definitely not supposed to be gentlemen. They are essentially thugs, thieves set to catch thieves, and the population despises them.

But Cheviot – still conscious of being a 20th Century man – is galvanized. He’s long been a student of Yard history, and he’s often dreamed of the things he could have accomplished there with his modern knowledge and investigative techniques.

He soon gets a chance to show what he can do. Sent (rather contemptuously) to investigate the theft of bird seed from exotic bird cages belonging to a prominent society lady, he witnesses a young woman’s murder. The woman is shot to death, but he hears no gunshot, and no one seemed to be in a position to fire the fatal bullet.

On a personal level, Cheviot finds himself already in a relationship with a beautiful, passionate woman. He also makes a deadly enemy – an arrogant and cruel military officer who challenges him to a duel.

Where Fire, Burn! really excelled as a novel (in this reader’s opinion) was in its vivid recreation of early 19th Century London. The author had clearly done a lot of research, and the descriptions were highly convincing.

The mystery was also pretty good. The solution was clever, and I didn’t see it coming – though I thought I did. The book moved a little slowly (by the debased standards of this present age), and the female characters seemed a little stylized, the kind of languid females who are always getting the vapors in old dramas. Nevertheless, all in all, I rate Fire, Burn! high as an original historical mystery.

I do wish we were given some clue as to how Cheviot travels through time, though. Is it a dream? A rift in the Third Dimension? No clue is offered, and the book ends very abruptly.