Lavonne Neff says that despite the slow burn on J.K. Rowling’s new novel, The Casual Vacancy, the story builds out of what she believes is a “profoundly biblical worldview.” The story is one of a small English town, clearly described as post-Christian, and when the most Christian man around dies, a large body of characters step up to reveal themselves as the hypocrites they are. Neff says the story is bleak, but possibly noteworthy.
Leif Eriksson: Not a man on a mission
A very bad old picture of Leif Eriksson, posted here for your derision.
Today, as you’ve doubtless gathered from all the parades and celebrations in your neighborhood, is Leif Eriksson Day in the United States. Its date was chosen, not to commemorate the actual calendar date of Leif’s landing in Newfoundland (a friend tells me it seems to have happened in September on the basis of internal evidence in the saga), but in order to sneak in a couple days before Columbus Day and steal some of the Genoan’s thunder. Which the international Italian Conspiracy managed to thwart this year by arranging to have Columbus Day officially celebrated yesterday.
One aspect of Leif’s story which you used to hear about a lot, but much less nowadays, is his efforts as a missionary. According to Eirik’s Saga, one of the two classic saga accounts of the Vinland (America) voyages, Leif spent time at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson in Norway, where the king “bestowed great honor on him” (note what I said about such Icelandic visits to the court in yesterday’s post), and asked him “Are you intending to sail to Greenland this summer?”
“Yes,” replied Leif, “if you approve.”
“I think it would be a good idea,” said the king. “You are to go there with a mission from me, to preach Christianity in Greenland.” (The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, trans. by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, 1965, Penguin Books.)
This Leif did, to the great annoyance of his father Erik the Red, because Thjodhild, Erik’s wife and Leif’s mother, refused to cohabit with her husband after her conversion (this is questionable behavior under canon law, I believe, as it directly contradicts the teaching of St. Paul. I’m sure Father Ailill would have advised her otherwise). In the 19th and 20th centuries, when Christianity was more popular than it is now, many Leif enthusiasts looked on his voyage to Vinland as an extension of this mission, making him the first missionary to America. However, the sagas say nothing of that, nor of any attempt on his part to preach the gospel to the Skraelings (Indians).
In any case, scholars today are pretty sure the Olaf Trygvesson mission never happened. The story seems to have been introduced into the saga manuscripts fairly late. Early sources say that Olaf converted “five lands” to Christianity, but later writings credit him with “six lands.” The sixth land is Greenland, which the earlier writers hadn’t heard about, probably because it never happened.
I don’t think many historians seriously doubt that Leif was a Christian himself. The family gossip about religious conflict in his family has the ring of truth to it, and archaeologists have excavated a small church at his farm that matches the saga description of one Thjodhild built. But he wasn’t a government employee.
If you’ve read my Viking novels, you know that that was the Viking way.
More Angels in Movies
Joel Miller, author of Lifted by Angels: The Presence and Power of Our Heavenly Guides and Guardians
Hollywood doesn’t understand frighteningly awesome angels because they don’t believe in a frighteningly awesome God. They see God mostly like Odin from Marvel’s Thor, wouldn’t you say? But as Joel says, the industry based in Los Angeles needs to overcome their biases at least once.
When Was the Last Time You Were Called Ignorant?
Mark Liberman tells us, “When you read or hear in the mass media that ‘Only X% of Americans know Y’, don’t believe it without checking the references — it’s probably false even as a report of the survey statistics.” He cites a few sources and gives an incredible example of the answers marked wrong for an open-ended question about former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. (via Alan Jacobs)
On this point, here’s a survey that appears to be done the right way, asking clear questions about religious practice and affiliation. It concludes that though many say they pray every day and have other spiritual or religious habits or experiences, “One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.” I wonder how much of this is a popular resistance to labeling one’s beliefs either out of a selfish desire to appear smart (like the voter who says he is undecided because he wants to appear to give both sides a fair hearing) or a belief that one cannot claim a label while not accepting absolutely everything ever claimed by someone of that label.
Laxdaela Saga
One of the pleasures of owning a Kindle, for the Viking enthusiast, is the ability it gives you to own a whole saga library and carry it around with you in a small package. One of the sagas I keep snug in my device is the marvelous Laxdæla Saga. In preparation for my trip to Høstfest in Minot, I thought I’d re-read it, because it’s a remarkable work, full of points of interest.
I should have remembered this, but Laxdæla Saga includes a proverb we still use today: “…Trefill saw that better was one crow in the hand than two in the wood.” I don’t know if this is the source of the English saying, but it wouldn’t surprise me. There’s another proverb I like too, less well known: “The counsel of fools is the more dangerous, the more of them there are.”
Laxdæla is often called a woman’s saga, because the central character is a woman, and a lot of business centers on women’s clothing and ornaments. I guess many scholars think it was written by a woman, and I’ll admit that’s not out of the question.
That central female character is Gudrun Osvifsdatter, a woman of remarkable beauty and force of personality, who gets married several times—to almost every eligible man around except for the one she loves. Although, as you’d expect in a saga, the story starts a couple generations before her birth, and continues through her old age, it’s her tragic love for a man named Kjartan Olafsson that forms the center of the story (you may remember them and their family from a brief appearance in my novel West Oversea).
It might be called a love story, but it’s a love story in the old style, born in a world where romantic love was not considered the jewel of life and a justification for most any kind of behavior, but was instead seen as a sort of madness which interferes with the normal business (and peace) of the family and community. Continue reading Laxdaela Saga
University Teaching Can Be Torture
Language Professor Andrew Piper writes about university teaching: “I have seen some pretty shocking stuff. The record so far was one instructor who would rewrite his lecture notes on the board in illegible handwriting and read them aloud as he wrote while facing the board. Not only was he talking…really…slowly, he was facing the wrong way! The idea of knowledge ‘transfer’ in this case seems distorted beyond all recognition.”
BTW, Alan Jacobs has praised this writer, saying “*Book Was There* may be the single smartest thing I’ve read about how book history connects to book future. Seriously.” Read more praise about the book to which this blog is tied here.
In which I crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women
Kelsey Patton, who has some slight interest in the matter, has posted this YouTube video of my epic battle with her new husband in Minot:
In other ego-building news, this link will take you to the Amazon page for Troll Valley, where the latest reader review goes like this:
Most Expensive Book I Ever Bought
Lars, I bought a Kindle so I could read your books. I have loved all of them since finding Warrior in (of all places) a grocery store. Please write more.
Thank you, Joseph J. McConnell. I’ll try to make it a worthwhile investment for you.
Viking funerals–not what you think
This is the statue of Leif Eriksson outside the Minnesota state capitol. It is a very bad statue. That thing in his right hand? It’s supposed to be a ship’s tiller. It looks nothing like a ship’s tiller.
In the complete absence of clever ideas for blog posts tonight, I think I’ll break with my personal tradition and actually announce something I’ll be doing ahead of time. Next weekend (Oct. 12-14), I and my Viking henchmen plan to be in Norway, Michigan for the Leif Erikson Festival. The opening ceremonies Friday evening, we are reliably informed, will include a Viking funeral, complete with the launch of a burning “ship” onto a lake. (Apparently they’ve gotten permission from the natural resources people to do this.) So far they have not asked for volunteers to ride the ship, and I’m definitely keeping my hands in my pockets.
The image of a Viking funeral ship sailing out to sea in flames is super-glued to the public imagination, thanks to movies like “The Vikings” and “S.O.B.” (“Beau Geste,” I should note, got it right, keeping the pyre on land.) In fact, the only scenes of such funerals we find in Norse sources come (as far as I’m aware) from the Eddas, where it happens among the gods in Asgard, and in a legendary story from the early chapters of the Ynglingasaga in Heimskringla—purely folklore, days-long-gone stuff. Never in the historical sagas is anyone sent off that way, nor do we have a description of such a thing from eyewitnesses. Ibn Fadlan (on whose writings Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, the source of the movie “The Thirteenth Warrior,” is based), describes the Russ in Russia burning a chieftain in his ship on land, something which comports with archaeological evidence. At other times and in other places, people were simply inhumed in ships or boats, providing wonderful opportunities for later archaeologists, the most spectacular being the Oseberg and Gokstad ship graves in Norway.
Of course, if anybody ever did send a ship out to sea in flames, it would be unlikely to be found by archaeologists. So we can’t prove it didn’t happen. All I can say is that most scholars consider it fairly improbable.
Let’s face it—a burning sail isn’t likely to take a ship very far. And a ship without a living man at the helm will probably go somewhere you don’t want it to go.
If you’d like any further cherished illusions shattered, I’m your go-to guy.
Link sausage, 10-3-12
Oh bother. That network that shows re-runs of Burn Notice has moved NUMB3RS into that Wednesday night slot. So I’m supposed to watch Judd Hirsch instead of Gabrielle Anwar? I don’t think so. Sure, I’ve seen every episode three or four times, but frankly I prefer that NUMB3R.
From Fox News, we get word that an English dialect has died.
In a remote fishing town on the tip of Scotland’s Black Isle, the last native speaker of the Cromarty dialect has died, taking with him another little piece of the English linguistic mosaic.
Scottish academics said Wednesday that Bobby Hogg, who passed away last week at age 92, was the last person fluent in the dialect once common in the seaside town of Cromarty, about 175 miles (280 kilometers) north of Scottish capital Edinburgh.
And finally, Andrew Klavan posts a clever trailer for a book for women, on how to understand men.
Come to think of it, why is this a problem? Isn’t the complex supposed to comprehend the simple?
For your spectation
I forgot to mention that I have a new article up at The American Spectator Online today. Political Non-Science.