As you may recall, I have a fondness for this “hymn” from Mel Gibson’s movie, “We Were Soldiers.” In spite of its faulty orthodoxy. So sue me.
Yesterday I drove down to Kenyon, my home town, for a memorial service at a country church. A motorcycle group in the area does an honor ride every year for local people killed in action. This one was at the grave of a young man I graduated high school with, who died in Vietnam at the age of 19.
Gordie and I moved in different social circles (he was popular). But my brothers and I spent an afternoon with him and some other guys one summer afternoon, it must be going on 60 years ago now. Just walking the railroad tracks, wandering the woods, messing around by the river. Nothing illegal or dangerous. Just an easy summer day for country boys. Could even have been Memorial Day, I suppose. The woods we wandered were “Monkey Valley,” as we called it, a small river valley I renamed “Troll Valley” for a couple of my novels.
Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day on which the Lord Christ sent the Comforter to dwell among us. This hymn, “O Breath of Life, Come Sweeping Through Us,” comes to use from the Irish woman Bessie Porter Head (1850-1936).
1. O Breath of life, come sweeping through us, revive your church with life and pow’r; O Breath of Life, come, cleanse, renew us, and fit your church to meet this hour.
2. O Wind of God, come bend us, break us, till humbly we confess our need; then in your tenderness remake us, revive, restore, for this we plead.
3. O Breath of love, come breathe within us, renewing thought and will and heart; come, Love of Christ, afresh to win us, revive your church in ev’ry part.
4. O Heart of Christ, once broken for us, ’tis there we find our strength and rest; our broken, contrite hearts now solace, and let your waiting church be blest.
5. Revive us, Lord! Is zeal abating while harvest fields are vast and white? Revive us, Lord, the world is waiting, equip your church to spread the light.
Patriotism is not a uniquely American fruit. It can be grown anywhere. It’s a fondness for the qualities, hopefully just the admirable qualities, of one’s own home.
Some time ago, I noted the fierce patriotic theme in the Korean series Mr. Sunshine as something Americans could identify with. They faced threats we did not and still live under a cloud that hasn’t quite reached us, but their fight for sovereignty, to live by their own laws as Koreans and not vassals to another country, still resonates with many Americans.
I’m looking at a translation of a 1000-year-old poem by Korean poet Yo Inlŏ, “Meditating on the Start of a New Era.”
“My candle burns a flame of jade,” he says with pride and describes combing his hair in a traditional fashion.
Would that we so might comb the State
Free of her follies and her greed!
That’s the perennial question. How do we guard our country against the natural self-aggrandizing of our leaders? Our solders didn’t die in battle and training for battle for the petty projects and personal wealth of our politicians. They died for that jade flame, for the well-being of their families and neighbors.
Our fathers’ God to Thee, Author of Liberty, To thee we sing, Long may our land be bright With Freedom’s holy light, Protect us by thy might Great God, our King.
Our glorious Land to-day, ‘Neath Education’s sway, Soars upward still. Its hills of learning fair, Whose bounties all may share, Behold them everywhere On vale and hill!
Jarl Haakon disposes of unwanted Christian priests, illustration by Eric Werenskiold for “Heimskringla.”
I am indebted for today’s blog topic to Greg Smith, who asked my opinion about an article by John Ehrett, posted yesterday at Mere Orthodoxy. The article is called “The End of Viking Vitalism,” and – in spite of my tendency to lord it over and ridicule anybody who expresses an opinion about the Vikings, especially in the religious area, I had to tell him that I agreed with it entirely. I might have even added (though I didn’t for some reason) that it in fact provoked some new thoughts in me.
In discussing the confrontation between Christian faith and heathenism, Ehrett cites both Neil Gaiman’s “Beowulf” film and Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles. He cites the following exchange from Cornwell:
“And I like the Danes,” I said. “You do? So why do you kill them?” “I like them,” I said, ignoring his question, “because they’re not frightened of life.” “They’re not Christians, you mean.” “They’re not Christians,” I agreed.[6]
For Uhtred (and Cornwell, clearly), Christianity is nothing but an ossified legalism: “the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws.”[7]
This is an issue I’ve attempted to address in my Erling novels. One of the more regrettable leftovers from the days of the Romantic Movement is the idea of heathens (or pagans, if you will) as happy nature children living innocent and uncomplicated lives, eating, drinking, and breeding without a care. Anyone who thinks that way should talk to a Christian convert from real paganism – a former animist in Africa, for instance. They’ll tell you that the world of the many gods is a world of darkness, fear, and blood. A world where cruel spirits take horrific revenge for the smallest transgressions of the taboos. It is with tremendous joy and relief that people receive the gospel in such an environment.
What Ehrett says that never occurred to me before is that the recent movie, “The Northman,” which I found a little disappointing, is much to be preferred on that score. It recognizes (even if unintentionally) the essential hopelessness of Amleth’s story. He is in no way free. The movie’s great strength is its realism, and that extends to the world of faith – to some extent.
Working on catching up with Alan Lee’s eccentric and entertaining Mackenzie August series of action mysteries. So I read a second one in a row, Bad Aim.
Mack, an intrepid private eye with very good hair, lives with his fiancée (technically his wife; it’s complicated) “Ronnie” in Roanoke, Virginia, with his toddler son (from a previous marriage), “Kix.” Also resident in their house is his father and his best friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal. Life is good for their odd little household. Mack’s friend, Liz Ferguson, a former federal agent and now a private eye, asks him to help her with a personal protection job. Her client is Roland Wallace, a rich, elderly man who fears that someone is trying to murder him. Poison has been found in his medications, so it’s not his imagination. Their job will be not only to protect him but to identify the killer – Roland says he wants to kill them himself.
Mack has no intention of helping anybody to kill anybody, but the mystery turns out satisfyingly complex. Only a few people have access to Roland’s house, and it’s hard to see what motive any of them might have. None of them seems in a position to profit from his death, or to have reason to hate him.
The story proceeds in the breezy manner characteristic of this series, Mack narrating and speaking in a light sort of variation on classic hard-boiled diction. I’ve disparaged the author’s attempts at erudition in the past, but I must admit he threw out a word – “Illeism,” which means speaking about oneself in the third person – that I had to look up. So he gets a point there.
Bad Aim is fun, and the references to Christianity are positive. The author seems to feel strongly about the rights of illegal immigrants, so I suppose he must be happy with our current open borders situation. And I thought the final showdown a little contrived. But other than that I have no objections to this amusing mystery.
I was looking for a video related to the Anglo-Saxons as a follow-up to yesterday’s book review. My initial idea was to see if I could find something good where some historian walks around on the ground, showing what some battlefield – Brunanburh or Edington or Stamford Bridge or whatever – looks like today. But I couldn’t find anything that pleased me.
It seems like taking the easy way out, to return again to Beowulf, which I’ve written about extensively over the years. But the deepest mines bear the richest treasures (as some great writer – me, I think – said), and I found something very nice indeed. A bit of Julian Glover’s performance of the poem.
Julian Glover (who is still alive, I’m delighted to learn) has been a successful character actor in England for a long time. I first saw him with Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg on the TV Avengers program back in the ‘60s. You’ve probably seen him somewhere yourself, in The Empire Strikes Back or as a Bond villain in For Your Eyes Only, or in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Never a leading man, he’s played mostly baddies, and he’s done very well at it.
Since the 1980s he’s had a very nice solo sideline doing an adaptation of Beowulf as a one-man show. His version incorporates lines in the original Anglo-Saxon language. The clip above is introduced by the late Sir John Gielgud.
I highly approve of this approach to the poem. I know a fellow who built himself a Viking farm in Missouri, and he told me years ago how a local high school teacher brought her class to spend the night in his hall, where they read Beowulf through. I’ll bet you they never forgot that experience.
What if a tech company created an A.I. so successfully it dominated the world market, making logistics of all kinds dependent on it? Traffic congestion and deadly accidents would be comparatively rare. Its input into every personal assistant device with a verbal interface that almost matched human interaction would make it the AI everyone used. Some would argue that it could take over the world and eliminate humanity, but few would take the fear seriously.
Then, what if that A.I. came to believe that Christianity’s explanation for the world and humanity was true?
Michael Svigel’s novella The AItheist takes us a few years into the future to a conversation between a theology professor-turned-atheist and a world-popular A.I. who worries his creator by professing Christian faith.
“I do doubt my atheism, to be totally honest. Faith is a hard addiction to break.” …
“You repeatedly liken religious faith to a drug that numbs reason and clouds judgement, and you say that it’s habit-forming, like a narcotic. … Perhaps it’s like a good drug that treats the malady of doubt.”
This fictionalized apologetic doesn’t have much story. It’s a simple framework for presenting two conflicting worldviews with the gimmick of separating emotion from one of them. The conversation is realistic, never straying into mere info dumping. It does have an arc, provoking questions that kept me hooked. I may have read this in a vulnerable moment, but I was crying at the end. That alone could mean it’s a good story.
As early as the late seventh century King Ine of Wessex (688-726) was moved to categorize numbers of armed men: ‘We call up to seven men thieves; from seven to thirty-five a band; above that it is an army.’
Anyone interested in the Viking Age is perforce going to be interested in the people we call the Anglo-Saxons. I recall that they intrigued me strangely when I discovered them in an encyclopedia at a very young age, before (as far as I can remember) I even knew about Vikings. The two cultures are sisters after all; many of the Anglo-Saxon tribes were Scandinavian in origin and only a few generations and geographic relocation separated them.
Paul Hill, author of The Anglo-Saxons at War 800-1066, is an accomplished historian and historical popularizer. He has produced here an excellent work targeted at those of us (like historical reenactors) who are interested in looking past generalizations and common assumptions to discover what we are able to know for sure (or can surmise) about warfare in the period. The trick is to separate known fact from guesses, and it seemed to me this book did a pretty good job of that.
The book includes an Introduction (a Survey of the Evidence); and chapters on Warfare, Violence and Society; Military Organization; Strategy and Tactics; Fortifications and Earthworks; Campaigns, Battles and Sieges; and Weapons, Armour and Accessories.
Now and then there are statements that contradict things I’m in the habit of telling people at reenactment events – he isn’t sure that the saex knife was reserved for the use of free men (spears, on the other hand, were, he says). And he doesn’t think the “wings” on a “boar spear” are actually intended to prevent a body from slipping down the shaft. He thinks they’re for parrying, and he probably knows more about it than I do.
General readers looking for a history of warfare in the period should probably find a different book. Certain events and campaigns are described in considerable detail, but they’re examined out of historical sequence. This is a book for enthusiasts interested in the period. Historical reenactors in particular will appreciate it.
For a while now I’ve had the unsettling feeling that there was a series of thriller novels I’d been following in the past that I’d forgotten about. The other day I was looking at some of my old reviews and I realized it was Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August series. So I picked it up again with These Mortals after a long delay (turns out the book itself was delayed in publication, so my delay wasn’t so bad).
I needed to get up to speed with the characters and ongoing story, of course. Mackenzie August is a former cage fighter, now a private eye. His best friends are a drug dealer (who goes to the same church as he) and Mannie Martinez, a US Marshal and super-patriot. Mack is now married to the love of his life, Veronica “Ronnie,” a stunningly beautiful lawyer and former prostitute. They have a small boy, known as Kix.
As These Mortals begins, Mack is starting his day. Suddenly his worst enemy, Darren Robbins, a corrupt former government official who has faked his death, breaks into their home, accompanied by a gigantic Hispanic who is pointing a shotgun at a captive Ronnie.
Darren explains that he’s about to disappear forever, but before he goes he wants to see his wife and son, who are in the federal witness protection program. Mack has until Thursday to locate them and arrange a meeting, or else the thug will kill Ronnie (who happens to be Darren’s former mistress).
Mack is not one to despair. He confidently concocts a plan, assisted by Mannie and his partner, and by the local sheriff (apparently everybody in the world except Darren loves Mack and Ronnie because they’re both so good-looking). It calls for close coordination and precise timing, so you know everything that can go wrong will go wrong. But anything remains possible with the right attitude.
It must be understood that none of this is meant to be taken too seriously. The atmosphere here is fairly close to that of a comic book. The chief charm is the intellectual tough-guy cross-talk between Mack and Mannie. There are here (as I’ve mentioned before) echoes of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk – except that author Lee isn’t quite as good at the erudition part.
Still, it was fun, and Christian in some sense (there’s no doctrine here, only the fact that likeable characters declare themselves Christians). These Mortals is implausible, lightweight, and entertaining. A few references to the plight of illegal immigrants may or may not be meant to convey a political message.
“Look, Ye Saints, the Sight Is Glorious” sung by the congregation of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London
Last Thursday was Ascension Day, making today Ascension Sunday. It’s been a trying week for me, so leaning into Christ victorious is comforting.
Peter referred to Christ’s ascension when he preached to the crowd at Pentecost, saying, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. . . . For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,
“‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”’
Today’s hymn by Irishman Thomas Kelly (1769-1855) speaks to this most incredible moment in history. Look, ye saints, he says. Look at the Man of Sorrows now! You thought he was dead, and now, not only is that not true, he has risen into the clouds to receive his crown.
1 Look, ye saints, the sight is glorious; see the Man of Sorrows now; from the fight returned victorious, ev’ry knee to him shall bow. Crown him! Crown him! Crowns become the Victor’s brow.
2 Crown the Savior, angels, crown him; rich the trophies Jesus brings; in the seat of pow’r enthrone him, while the vault of heaven rings. Crown him! Crown him! Crown the Savior King of kings.
3 Sinners in derision crowned him mocking thus the Savior’s claim; saints and angels crowd around him, own his title, praise his name: Crown him! Crown him! Spread abroad the Victor’s fame!
4 Hark! those bursts of acclamation! Hark! those loud triumphant chords! Jesus takes the highest station; O what joy the sight affords! Crown him! Crown him! King of kings and Lord of lords.
