“Behold! The Mountain of the Lord” performed by Godfrey Birtill at a live concert
Who wrote today’s Advent hymn, “Behold! The Mountain of the Lord,” appears to be a controversy. Scottish Minister John Logan (1748-1788) got it published in a collection of hymns in 1781, but the words may have come from his friend Michael Bruce (1746-1767). Given the family’s accusations and Logan’s track record with his definitely original material, it seems Logan passed some of Bruce’s hymns off as his own.
The tune called “Glascow” comes from Thos Moore’s Psalm Singer’s Pocket Companion (1756).
The performance above doesn’t include all of these verses and makes a good modification to the final verse.
1 Behold! the mountain of the Lord in latter days shall rise on mountain tops above the hills, and draw the wondering eyes.
2 To this the joyful nations round, all tribes and tongues, shall flow; up to the hill of God, they’ll say, and to his house we’ll go.
We watched a new superhero comedy/drama called “The Hyperions” over the holiday. It’s the story of a super-enabled family that has broken up, because though they talk about being family, they have been managed more like a business team. Two of the original team members are young adults now, and they want their powers back.
The trailer leaves the impression the movie is pretty darn funny, but it doesn’t quite bring the laughs. It’s funny, just not that funny. Instead it leans into Vista Mandulbaum’s anger against her inventor/showman father, Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum, who seems to have wounded her and damaged the whole team only after she rebels and leaves. That makes this more a feel-good family drama with superhero comedy thrown in.
Cary Elwes carries the story as the absent-minded, perpetually frumpy Professor Mandulbaum. Penelope Mitchell Vista, the first of the Hyperions, conveys most of the story’s emotional weight, and everyone else is fine.
I chaffed most when the characters couldn’t talk honestly with each because of issues. One of my daughters thought the story could have shown us happy family moments in order to help us care about their pain more. Most of the violence is muted and sometimes light-hearted. It’s not really a superhero story. It’s a family-business story about superheros, and overall I enjoyed it.
What else to do we have?
Western Civilization: Susannah Black Roberts responds to an argument in Stephen Wolfe’s book on Christian Nationalism. He says no one seeks the well-being of everyone around; he only seeks that for himself and his own kind. The idea that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applies to all mankind is not sound. We only seek that for those in our own ethnicity. To support this thesis, Roberts writes, Wolfe cherry picks from a wide range of author in the western tradition. And then she quotes Chesterton.
Thomas Jefferson: World News Group’s book of the year is Thomas Kidd’s Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. “In this biography, Kidd shows us an original thinker attempting to cobble together his own brand of spirituality. Jefferson held unorthodox views long before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he wasn’t a Deist who saw God as an uninvolved Creator. He believed in God’s providence, but he saw that providence at work in America’s founding rather than in the saving of souls or the creation of the Church.”
They worked in the herring fisheries in the autumn, and in the winter sailed hundreds of miles in open boats up to Lofoten, perhaps tempted by the hope of gain, but perhaps too because on the sea they were free men.
More than once over the years on this blog I’ve mentioned Johan Bojer’s novel, The Last of the Vikings, which I read in Norwegian (Nynorsk). I even translated a section and posted it once (though I can’t find it now), because I dearly wished to share this book with others, but the English translation was out of print.
I’m delighted to report that this has changed. You can now get The Last of the Vikings in translation for Kindle.
First of all, I must inform you that this book isn’t about Vikings. It’s about the cod fishery in Lofoten sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, when steam was beginning to replace sail. If you see a picture of one of the old Nordland boats, the kind used in this book, you’ll think for a moment that it’s a picture of a Viking ship. That’s because the Nordland boats were descended from Viking boats through unbroken evolution over centuries.
Kristàver Myran is a small farmer (although the text doesn’t say it, his home is in the Trondheim area, where author Bojer grew up). Every winter, like most of the able-bodied men of his neighborhood, he makes the long sail up to Lofoten to participate in the cod fishing, gambling that he can make enough money to get ahead a little in the world. But this year he has great hopes, because he finally has his own boat (purchased on credit). He wondered why the boat was going for such a low price, but only learned after the sale that it’s jinxed. Over the last three winters it has capsized every year. Well, nothing can be done about that now.
Coming along for the first time is his son Lars, proud to be a Lofoten man at last. Lars idolizes his father and dreams of following in his footsteps, but also likes to read and has educational aspirations. He is the main point-of-view character in the book.
Other crew members include Elezeus, Kristàver’s brother-in-law, an abusive, self-loathing husband. And Kaneles (Cornelius), a fun-loving bachelor who’s the sole support of his young sister and blind father. And Arnt, another first-year man, a bad sailor terrified of the sea.
Another skipper from the neighborhood is old Jacob, a limping, black-bearded, drunken, cheerful force of nature. A man with no family and no home on land, who knows nothing but the sea, but knows it like no other.
The men will face many challenges over the winter. They’ll face conflicts with other crews over tangled nets and regional rivalries in drinking shops. They’ll face long hours rowing, and days and nights without sleep when the shoals of fish come in, and boredom when they don’t. They’ll face daunting competition from the new steam-powered boats, along with the arrogance of the authorities. But most of all they’ll face the weather, the killing storms of the arctic sea. They will look in the face of death itself.
I’ve rarely read a book that affected me more than this one. I don’t think it’s just because some of my ancestors must have been involved in this fishery. This is the story of all the poor men over the centuries who’ve taken the poor man’s gamble – risk your very life in the hopes of making a better future for your family, even at the risk of leaving them without a provider. I cared deeply about these characters, and mourned and rejoiced with them.
I have to say I don’t consider the translation first rate. It’s over-literal, in my opinion, which makes the dialogue, in particular, sometimes awkward. But the scenery descriptions were vivid, and the storm sequences sublime.
The Last of the Vikings gets my highest recommendation. It’s unforgettable.
I hope everyone here, there, and elsewhere has had a happy Thanksgiving. I realize this is an American holiday, but it’s just one more way you should allow America into your hearts and lives for your own and your country’s flourishing. I’m talking to you, United Kingdom. You never should have let all the good people leave your empire, you sick tyrant.
Okay, what else have we got?
First Thanksgiving: “After a rough two-and-a-half months on the Atlantic, [the Margaret, a 35-foot-long ship with 36 settlers and crew] entered the Chesapeake Bay on November 28, 1619. It took another week to navigate the stormy bay, but they arrived at their destination, Berkeley Hundred, later called Berkeley Plantation, on December 4. They disembarked and prayed.”
Ben Franklin: In a new biography, D. G. Hart presents Benjamin Franklin as an example of a “spiritual, but not religious” American Protestantism. “As much of a cliché as pulling himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his wit and striving say as much about Protestantism as it does about American character.”
Cultural Elites:Carl Trueman is thankful for David French‘s articles supporting the Respect for Marriage Act. “Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.”
The Ends of History: Michael Bonner has written a defense of civilization. “All this is to say that the ‘whole new world’ we were promised in the 90s is much like the old one, only worse. The theory of irreversible progress seems increasingly implausible. It seems that anyone of any walk of life or partisan stripe could agree with Livy that ‘we can bear neither our vices nor their remedies’.”
Education:Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course? “I could rattle off a litany of universities that remain under the auspices of Mainline Protestant denominations but where an effort to think Christianly beyond the bounds of theology is foreign to its educational mission and has been for a long time.”
Happy Thanksgiving, Brandywinians. I wish there were more good hymns of thanks. Though there are probably ones that have slipped my mind.
In any case, this is the hymn of thanks they liked best at my church when I was a kid. “Thanks to God for My Redeemer,” by August Ludvig Storm (1862-1914), a Swedish Salvation Army officer.
I always found it a little disappointing, because the translation is weak. Still, my dad and my grandparents would have loved to hear it.
In 1958, humor rag Punch published an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Revival or Decay?” in which Lewis criticized broad-brush assessments of his day–the same assessments people still make. Here’s his closing paragraph.
Is there a homogeneous ‘West’? I doubt it. Everything that can go on is going on all round us. Religions buzz about us like bees. A serious sex worship–quite different from the cherry lechery endemic in our species–is one of them. Traces of embryonic religions occur in science-fiction. Meanwhile, as always, the Christian way too is followed. But nowadays, when it is not followed, it need not be feigned. That fact covers a good deal of what is called the decay of religion. Apart from that, is the present so very different from other ages of ‘the West’ from anywhere else?
For some years I’ve been a fan of Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, one of the oddest sites on the internet. Well, just look at it. The humor is the driest of the dry; the sort of thing you either get or you don’t. I don’t always get it, but I enjoy checking to see what’s new each day.
Dr. Boli writes books too. I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of them, so I figured I’d try his newest, The Emperor. It’s rather different from the others.
When I was in college, I encountered a couple of old novels (Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas comes to mind) in which older writer/philosophers told fantastic stories of princes in old times and distant lands as a means to comment on their own times and politics. The Emperor seemed like that kind of story to me at first, but I think I was wrong. Maybe.
The Emperor is a young man, orphaned as a boy, who has lived under the guidance of the Consul and the Tribune most of his life. The empire he rules seems to be Roman, in an alternate world where Rome never fell. The geography doesn’t match our world, but the Christian religion seems to be pretty much the same. They have been at war with an enemy for hundreds of years, and the Sultan (who worships Apollyon and dwells just across the strait) is their most faithful vassal.
The young Emperor is beginning to chafe at the many restrictions that hedge his life around. Every moment of his day is scheduled, every action choreographed. He is never alone. His future is determined – he will marry a princess who was sired by the Sultan expressly for that purpose, once she grows old enough. Any suggestion he makes that it might be a good idea to visit his domains or oversee the war is argued down. The Emperor, it is explained, needs to keep the Empire stable through performing his regular duties in the safety of the Palace.
His only escape (or so he thinks) is at night, when the orchestra that serenades him finally leaves – because he pretends to sleep – and he slips out a window to visit an ancient ruin. One night he gets lost and wanders into an unfamiliar part of the palace grounds. There he meets a young servant woman named Pulchrea, scrubbing a floor. The Emperor immediately falls in love with her, and the rest of the story involves him testing his strength of will against those of the Consul and the Tribune, in order to win the freedom to do what he really wants.
But only at the very end does he learn the Big Secret.
I’m not sure what to say about The Emperor. It started slow – the author indulged himself too long in setting the scene; his character’s constrained life and discontent could have been established much more efficiently. Modern readers won’t generally put up with too much stage-setting. The story was interesting once it finally got going. I’m not sure what to think of the ending.
I’m of two minds about The Emperor. You might try it out if it sounds interesting to you; it’s not expensive in Kindle format.
I had run out of bargain books that I’d picked up through online deals, and noticed a Harry Bauer book by Blake Banner. And I thought, “I haven’t read a Banner for a while. I wonder why I stopped following him?” A check of my past reviews gave no clue, so I bought LA: Wild Justice, the 7th installment in the series. It proved entertaining in a popcorn movie way, but I also was reminded why I’d given Harry a rest.
Harry Bauer is a professional assassin working for an ultra-secret agency called Cobra. His bosses call him in for an assignment: they want him to kill a saint. The saint in question is Sen. Charles Cavendish, a billionaire who famously bankrolls a number of much-needed relief organizations around the Third World. He feeds the hungry, provides clean water, cares for the sick, etc.
In fact, according to Harry’s bosses, he operates those charities only as a blind. The entrée he gets to many corrupt countries permits him to sell drugs, arms, and chemical weapons to some of the world’s worst actors – including Harry’s worst enemy in the world.
But Harry has hardly begun his job when one of his bosses is kidnapped. Now it’s a race against time to complete the sanction and rescue his friend.
Harry is a hero very much in the James Bond mold – and I mean the movie Bond, not the one in the Fleming books. He effortlessly subdues very formidable enemies, even in groups – until the plot points call for a dramatic setback. He suffers traumatic injuries and just fights on. Pain barely slows him.
LA: Wild Justice was fun, mindless entertainment. What annoyed me – and this is probably why I dropped the series before – is that the author likes to leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. That just annoys me. Stand-alone books should wrap up the main plot. There can be larger, ongoing plots over a series of books, but you owe it to the reader tie up the threads on the main problem in the volume in hand.
Still, an entertaining book. Moderately recommended. I’m likely to read the next eventually.
A friend gave me a copy of Cat Jarman’s River Kings out of the blue, and I read it with great interest. I wasn’t always comfortable with the book, but it does very well in the job the author (a Scandinavian-English archaeologist) sets out to do. I believe its sales have been successful, and it deserves them.
The story begins with a nice narrative “hook” – a carnelian bead found in excavations at a Viking burial site in Repton, England. Carnelian is a semi-precious stone that was popular among the Vikings (especially with Viking women) and was imported from India. That is a long road to come by, and Dr. Jarman follows that road – through known evidence and speculation – to show how the great Viking trade system passed through England to the Baltic, down through Russia to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea region, eventually linking up with sources of carnelian. At each step along the way she describes how people and objects moved, how the world worked, and what social and economic forces impelled trade. She has the professional ability to provide many fascinating details of Viking Age life, and I benefited from reading this book.
My sole real quibble is purely a subjective one. As a woman of the 21st Century, the author looks everywhere for evidence of women’s activity and influence, as well as for signs of what we call today “cultural diversity.” She finds them and emphasizes them.
This is perfectly fair. I do the same in my own studies, though I’m looking for different things. If I disagree with her on some points, she’s the one with the credentials, so the burden’s on me. And I have to admit, she provided evidence I wasn’t aware of on the touchy subject of women warriors. I’m still skeptical about them, but the other side’s argument is stronger than I thought.
I recommend River Kings. It is informative, interesting, and well-written.
“Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” performed by the OCP Session Choir
This Thanksgiving hymn was written by a rector of Aston Sandford, Buckinghamshire, England, named Henry Alford. He seems to have been one of those accomplished scholars who wrote many hymns, taught many students, and passed into history mostly unnoticed. The tune to this hymn was written by George Elvey for another piece, “Hark! The Song of Jubilee.”
Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home: all is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin; God, our Maker, doth provide for our wants to be supplied: come to God’s own temple, come, raise the song of harvest home.
2 All the world is God’s own field, fruit unto his praise to yield; wheat and tares together sown, unto joy or sorrow grown: first the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear: Lord of harvest, grant that we wholesome grain and pure may be.
3 For the Lord our God shall come, and shall take his harvest home; from his field shall in that day all offenses purge away; give his angels charge at last in the fire the tares to cast, but the fruitful ears to store in his garner evermore.
4 Even so, Lord, quickly come to thy final harvest home; gather thou thy people in, free from sorrow, free from sin; there forever purified, in thy presence to abide: come, with all thine angels, come, raise the glorious harvest home.
