P.G. Wodehouse recommends a day of reading his own work.
Wodehouse is invoked in this post on antedating. “This sort of decisive antedating should remind us of the almost diametrical wrongness of a popular stereotype of scientists and humanists.”
P.G. Wodehouse’s language is as American as it is British.
When I wrote yesterday that my life was “full of Viking stuff again,” I neglected to tell the whole of the tale. I was also finishing up my reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun.
I find it difficult to get enough objective distance on this book to make any guess as to how the public at large will receive it. For me, and some of my friends, this book is a gift. All our lives we’ve heard of the young scholars Tolkien and Lewis sitting in their rooms at Oxford, reading Eddaic poems to each other in the original Icelandic (this was how the famous Inklings began). Yet in their published work, both men have surprisingly little to say on the matter. Tolkien gives us echoes in The Lord of the Rings, although those elements are generally as much Anglo-Saxon as Norse. And Lewis seems to have shed his passion for Northernness along with his atheism, as if he’d put aside childish things.
But here we have a genuinely Norse work from Tolkien himself. It’s not a translation. It’s an original poem, drawing on varied sources. The original poem he’s trying to refashion, found in the Codex Regius manuscript in Iceland (where she shares honors with the Flatey Book I mentioned yesterday), is interrupted in the middle by the loss of a whole signature of pages. There are other versions of the story extant, both prose and poetry, but they vary widely in quality and consistency. Tolkien determined to do his own version, in which he’d try to work out contradictions between the traditions.
The result was very pleasing to me. Tolkien has definite views about Old Norse Eddaic poetry, and in his view it’s a very different thing from the Anglo-Saxon kind he translated in Beowulf. Continue reading ‘The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
“To me, point of view is everything,” Ethan Canin tells Julie Buntin for Publishers Weekly. “I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation. As I write, I try to be the character.”
This process can be uncomfortable. “This book almost killed me,” Canin says. “I published my last book [the bestselling America America] in 2008, so that’s, what, seven or eight years ago, but I wasn’t working the whole time. Writing [A Doubter’s Almanac
] was actual agony. I remember going out to a bar with my closest friend in Iowa a couple of years ago and saying, ‘I’m going to have to give the money back. I can’t do it. It’s a huge, huge mess.’ ” This huge mess sits before us on the table, in ARC form, with its blockbuster cover and glowing blurb from Pat Conroy.
My life is suddenly full of Viking stuff again. I just got a commission to translate, not a book, but a brochure, for a Norwegian foundation devoted to the translation and publication of a complete edition of the Flatey Book, the largest and best preserved saga manuscript we have from Iceland, and incidentally one of the most beautiful medieval illuminated manuscripts in existence. The publishers are my old friends at Saga Bok publishers, with whom I’ve worked before. It gives me a wholly undeserved sense of importance to be involved in such a project at any level.
Also it occurred to me to share the movie trailer below, a soon-to-come Norwegian adventure film about the Birkebeiners, a legendary Norwegian rebel army that overthrew a king of questionable pedigree to replace him with another king of questionable pedigree. The new king was a baby whom two Birkebeiners (the name means “birchlegs,” because in the early phases they were sometimes so poor they had to wrap their legs in birch bark for lack of warmer leggings) rescued by carrying him over the mountains by ski.
The trailer, alas, is in Norwegian, but I think you can follow the sense of it. This isn’t strictly a Viking story, as it takes place in the 12th Century, after all the pillage and plunder stuff had been pretty much worked out.
Personally I’ve always been ambivalent about the Birkebeiners, because I like to imagine that one of my ancestors might have been a leader of the opposition party, the Baglers. But, like any modern Norwegian, I imagine I had ancestors on both sides.
I have no idea if there are plans to release this movie in English. I just do these things to frustrate you.
I so enjoyed Whispering Smith, which I reviewed here, that I picked up another Frank H. Spearman western, Laramie Holds the Range. It’s very much of a formula with Smith in terms of characters, but the plot is quite different.
The background of the story seems to be the Johnson County War, that long (1889 to 1893) Wyoming conflict between big ranchers and small ranchers (or, as the big ranchers called them, “rustlers”). The facts of that brutal struggle are relentlessly depressing to anyone looking for romance in the history of the real west, and its final resolution is entirely unsatisfactory. Therefore many writers have attempted over the years to re-cast it along more chivalric lines. Fine books have been written from the big ranchers’ side (The Virginian), and the small ranchers’ side (Shane). Author Spearman more or less splits the difference in Laramie Holds the Range. Its improbably named hero, Jim Laramie, avoids taking sides, seeing some wrong in both. But in a pinch he helps the small ranchers, because they’ve been dealt a bad hand and have been treated badly by the rich men.
Jim Laramie is the son of an early settler in the Falling Wall region, near the town of Sleepy Cat. The area is known as a nest of rustlers, but no one has ever seriously accused Jim of being one of them. Nevertheless, men working for “Barb” (not, I’m pretty sure, short for Barbara) Doubleday, the big rancher in those parts, tear down Jim’s fence one day. Jim travels to Sleepy Cat to confront Barb, fully aware it could mean his death, or both their deaths.
But he never sees him on that occasion. Instead he meets Kate Doubleday, Barb’s daughter, newly arrived from the east. She showed up unannounced one day, her father having been unaware of her existence, and since he didn’t kick her out she took up residence at his ranch. Jim is smitten with her immediately, and decides a) not to kill Barb for the time being, and b) to court Kate. This proves difficult, as she, based on her father’s opinion, considers him next thing to a rustler and an enemy. The story proceeds to tell how Jim overcomes killers, bad weather, and a cloud of lies to remain true to his friends, hang on to his land, and get the girl.
Great fun. Slightly old-fashioned writing, but Spearman knew how to build characters, and told an entertaining tale. Jim Laramie is essentially a taller version of Whispering Smith, but I’m perfectly OK with that.
I was a big fan of the “Daredevil” series that released last year on Netflix. It was more brutal than I’m used to, but the story ran deep. Tying up the series with Kingpin paraphrasing part of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is the kind of deep water I hope to find in most shows I watch. So when the next installment of this street-level view on the Marvel universe came out with “Jessica Jones,” I hoped to see something similar. But no. (The spoiler flag is on the field.)
“Jessica Jones” is not the story of a moral crusader. It’s the story of a survivor of emotional and sexual abuse. Granted, she’s a unique survivor of a unique type of abuse. Jessica (portrayed by Kristen Ritter) has super strength, endurance, and the ability to fly—brought on through a chemical exposure a bit like the first step Matt Murdock (Daredevil) took in his origin story. Her abuser is not only a master manipulator, like at least two other characters in the show, but a man who can control people’s minds for several hours at a time. Continue reading Jessica Jones: Don’t Fight Your Demons Alone
I knew better. But I was seduced.
OK, let me rephrase that.
I had decided, at the end of the last season of BBC’s Sherlock, to stop watching it. I’d liked the first season very much. The second season I liked quite a lot. The third season alienated me. The production went from being a detective show (featuring lively riffs on the original Conan Doyle stories) into being a soap opera about the friendship of two men. I was particularly irritated by the condescending attitude I thought I detected toward the original material. As if Doyle had been waiting for the 21st Century for someone to inform him what he’d really been writing about.
But then they offered a Christmas special, which aired last night on PBS, and they did it in period, set about 1895, with Holmes smoking a pipe again and Watson sporting a handlebar mustache. I couldn’t resist that, could I?
Well, I couldn’t. And I guess it’s just as well. It was only 90 minutes, and that was long enough to put me off the series permanently. Continue reading ‘Sherlock’ and the Case of the Jumped Shark
Many friends of The American Conservative offer their recommendations from their reading over the past year. Here are a just couple.
Bradley J. Birzer states, “Since Tolkien’s death in 1973, five books of his art have appeared, with Hammond and Scull having expertly editing three of them. This most recent, The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, is not only glorious but is also a vital corrective to the cinematic horrors and travesties created by Peter Jackson’s six films.”
Gene Callahan writes, “’Acedia’ is the Latin word for the deadly sin of ‘sloth.’ We often think of sloth as roughly synonymous with ‘laziness’ (thus the animal name), but in his powerful book Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire, R.J. Snell explains that this is only one aspect of how it was traditionally characterized.”
Michael Kelley writes about the one person who can cast the first stone of condemnation against us.
On a related note, Trevin Wax says, “It is puzzling to see one of the defining marks of a Christian’s identity quietly disappear from a church’s worship.” He refers to confession of sin, and though a corporate confession can encourage us to view God as perpetually frowning at our inability to measure up to his standard, the lack of corporate confession can encourage the opposite error, the belief that sin doesn’t matter.
John Hendryx says he had to warm up to use of corporate confessions, but now he cherishes them. “For most it makes the time of worship more authentic and joyful for it strikes a blow against self-righteousness and humbles us before God as we say what we know to be true of ourselves and the only Lord who saves us. It reminds us that we are not better than others and that it is only grace (an alien righteousness) which makes us what we are.”
That mirrors my experience with corporate confession of sin. Reading with those around me how I have not done what I should have done and did what I should not have done opens me up to the wonderful announcement that Christ Jesus has given me his righteousness and set me free from the power of sin. It’s liberating to hear out loud and in public, because in private it’s easy to pick up stones to throw at myself.
Andrew Lawler, at National Geographic, writes what I consider a very fine article about slavery in the Viking Age. For years I’ve been arguing against the current fashion for portraying the Vikings as peaceable but misunderstood businessmen. That’s both historically obtuse and insulting to a culture that took pride in its prowess with arms. I’m particularly annoyed by the trope that says, “Well, you know, most of them weren’t warriors but peaceable tradesmen.” I suppose you could say that, if you consider the slave trade a peaceable occupation.
“This was a slave economy,” said Neil Price, an archaeologist at Sweden’s Uppsala University who spoke at a recent meeting that brought together archaeologists who study slavery and colonization. “Slavery has received hardly any attention in the past 30 years, but now we have opportunities using archaeological tools to change this.”
Of course the Vikings were hardly alone in trading and keeping slaves. Other cultures that did much the same thing were… pretty much everybody.
I just get annoyed by the “peaceable tradesmen” line.
In other Viking news, there’s new Russian film that looks very intriguing:
This is an epic about Vladimir the Great, who made the Russians Christian. Like all great historical epics it’s probably stuffed with baloney, but it sure looks good. I can find some fault with the costumes, but this trailer just sings. It could be the good Viking movie we’ve waited for so long. Hope it comes out soon with English subtitles.