. . .
From death to life eternal,
From this world to the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over
With hymns of victory.
. . .
An early hymn from St. John of Damascus. Read the whole thing on Bartleby.com.
Happy Easter
Discussing How Modern Liberals Think
Here’s a link to a video from a Hollywood guy on how liberals think. In short, any kind of values or culture must not be judged better or worse than any other, relatively speaking. Arguments ensue.
Tilt-A-Walker
More rain today, and it’s supposed to rain even more over the weekend, then snow early next week.
But it’s Friday. I don’t intend to go out any more than I have to over the weekend, anyway.
I stopped for groceries on the way home. A side street at the grocery store intersection had been cordoned off by the police. Cop cars were parked all over. A news helicopter hovered patiently overhead. I don’t know what was going on, but somebody was involved in a life-or-death drama, just a few hundred feet from where I was buying bananas.
It seems wrong, somehow, that we can be utterly oblivious to the sufferings and stresses of our fellow humans, even near at hand. I often remember that episode of Star Trek where Mr. Spock felt a sudden psychic pain when a Vulcan starship exploded.
On the other hand, I have to admit what we’ve got is a mercy—a kind of spiritual and emotional air-lock system. C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Problem of Pain that, by God’s kindness, the greatest amount of pain that can exist in the universe is limited to the greatest amount that one individual can endure. That may be a lot of pain, but there is no accumulation of common suffering.
There’s been some “buzz” around the blogosphere about the proposal in the Minnesota State Legislature to make the Tilt-A-Whirl the Official State Carnival Ride. The proposal was made by a representative from Faribault, where the Tilt-A-Whirl was invented and continues to be manufactured.
Let me state for the record that, as a person born in Faribault myself, I fully support this initiative, and indeed any initiative intended to promote anything or anyone originating in Faribault (pronounced “Fair-boe”).
I plan, in fact, to petition to have myself named Official Minnesota Washed-Up Midlist Author.
The tank is empty tonight
I have less than nothing to say tonight. Anything I said would actually reduce the sum of public knowledge, just as a carbon credit is supposed to reduce global warming (but doesn’t).
Gleaned from a comment at Luther At the Movies: Scenes from Luther’s life done in Legos! That’s what I call culture!
For Aitchmark and other cat-lovers: This piece by Austrialian writer Hal G. P. Colebatch on cats in literature.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Wake me when it’s summer.
Walker plays the sax
Today is a rainy day, cool but not cold. My lawn is starting to green up.
I still expect another snowfall before spring.
I meant to post the pictures below on Monday, but was prevented for reasons explained yesterday. Then I figured I’d better review the Barnitz book while its memory remained fresh (memories go bad faster than ripe bananas for me these days). So I left it to today to report on my big weekend project.
The Vikings had two kinds of swords. One, called a sverd, was a double-edged, one-handed broadsword. The other was similar to the sverd, but had only one cutting edge. This somewhat cheaper sword was called a saex (or seax, or sax). There was also a shorter version called a scramasax, which was used as a utility knife, chef’s knife and backup weapon. A few weeks ago I bought this replica scramasax on eBay:
The knife itself is pretty decent. It appears to be a copy of a 7th Century Frankish scramasax presently located in the Cleveland Museum of Art (which I’ve visited, years back—great arms and armor collection). A knife like that is kind of early for my own Viking “impression,” but it wasn’t uncommon for weapons to be passed down from generation to generation.
The main problem with this knife, and the reason, I suspect, why the guy on eBay is selling them off cheap, is the sheath that comes with it. This sheath’s first sin is the black leather, which is something all serious reenactors eschew. It seems the Vikings did not blacken their leather.
Secondly, the sheath has too narrow a “collar.” The collar is important in a knife hung horizontally (in the Viking manner), because you need to hold it in the sheath with friction, as you can’t depend on gravity. But this sheath’s collar is too narrow to allow the knife to be completely sheathed. The guard comes up against it and is too big to squeeze inside. The only way to use this sheath is to slit the collar’s closed side, creating a pair of “wings” on either side that hold the knife only loosely. Since the knife is grip-heavy, this makes it prone to slipping out, especially in the action of live steel.
So I made a sheath of my own. It looks like this:
I’m pretty happy with it. It’s tight enough to hold the scramasax securely, and the rear belt loop is far enough toward the collar to make it hang pretty straight. You’ll note that the knife is suspended with the cutting edge upward in this configuration, but that’s something many reenactment groups prefer, or even insist on. It has the advantage of putting the weight down on the knife’s spine, which then doesn’t cut into the bottom of the sheath (an academic point here, since I gelded the blade for live steel use). And it’s no problem to draw that way, because it’s worn behind the back.
My real innovation is the shape of the collar. Instead of it being cut straight across, it’s cut at an angle. This wasn’t the result of a plan, but of the shape of the piece of scrap leather I was using. Once it was done, though, I found I rather liked it. It has a humped, whale-backed appearance that looks very Scandinavian to me.
Probably wouldn’t be approved by the English reenactors, though. But I already know the English reenactors would laugh my impression off the field.
My vengeance, needless to say, would be terrible to behold, but that would be bad for transatlantic relations.
The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz
Sorry about not posting last night. I was… indisposed. I’m not going to go into more detail, because it was pretty disgusting. Don’t even think about it. I’m trying not to.
And that was a great pity, because it tacked a nasty ending onto a glorious day. The temperature was something like 80°, a record for the date. As I took my evening walk (wearing a tee-shirt) I just wanted to spread my arms and sing out—
“DON’T BE TAKEN IN!”
Don’t forget it’s March, fellow Upper Midwesterners! Haven’t you paid attention to what I’ve been saying about the deceitfulness and tricksieness of Madame March? When she gives you a beautiful day like this, it’s only for the purpose of softening you up for the big double cross. Beware! Beware!
On the other hand, she did come in like a lion. Maybe she’s tired.
No, no, no, no! Listen to me—even I am falling for it.
Cooler today. Rain coming tonight.
When frequent commenter Dave Alpern sent me a pile of books to read a while back, he included the novel The Deepest Sea by Charles Barnitz. I read it with much interest and considerable enjoyment.
If my own The Year of the Warrior ever had a sister, it would be The Deepest Sea.
I hasten to add that I don’t mean to suggest he copied my book (the first part of TYOTW came out in 1995; the Barnitz book in ’96). I’m sure he’s never read any of my books (who has?).
But clearly he was trying to do the same thing I was attempting—to tell a rollicking Viking story in a non-clunky form. I tried to do it by putting on a stage Irishman’s brogue and trying to be creative with idiom. Barnitz tries to do it by creating a character who’s been alive since Viking times (I won’t tell you how) and so speaks our language. This results in a Dark Age narrator using terms like “off ramp” and “middle managers,” which irked me at first and never entirely pleased me, but I got used to it.
The book started a little slowly, but (as many people have told me about my own books) it grew on me as I read, and I spent Sunday afternoon and evening not putting it down. One problem I saw is one I can identify with—delayed introduction of the fantasy element. Jim Baen was always complaining about that with me. “This is a fantasy, isn’t it?” he’d say. “We don’t publish historical fiction.”
There’s a natural impulse to try to draw your reader in with naturalistic narrative before taking the risk of introducing the fabulous. But the fact is, if you delay the magic too long, its introduction jars the reader. In a book like this one, where you’re planning to bring a dragon onstage later on, it’s good to set it up with something a little stronger than mystic dreams and soothsaying.
I can quibble with some of the Viking stuff. Barnitz has a character named Snorri and one named Skallagrim, in a book set in the 790s AD. But we know from the sagas how each of those names came to be (they started as nicknames), and that was in Iceland some time after the date of this book. Also he has a minor male character he calls Hjordis, which is a woman’s name. He also thinks people sat around belowdecks in Viking ships. They didn’t. (One reenactor has described Viking ships as “floating water tanks.”)
But these are nitpicks. The book grabbed me before long, and had me by the short hairs by the time it was done.
The hero-narrator is Bran Snorrison, the son of a Danish settler in Clontarf, Ireland. He falls in love with the sister of his chieftain, and goes on a Viking raid to England, in order to either win enough money to sue for her hand, or kill the Irish nobleman who is betrothed to her (and who is along on the raid), or both. He gets separated from the army, and finds himself traveling cross-country in the company of a strange young woman who attaches herself to him for no reason he can understand. She has a secret, which is revealed in a very effective climax.
The anticlimax pleased me less well, but that’s mostly because of my taste in music.
I was worried in the beginning by Barnitz’s flip attitude toward his Vikings, and I was afraid I’d be treated to another “dumb warriors” story, but the characters and the stakes got more serious as time went on.
I was also worried that there’d be a lot of Christian-bashing, but I was surprised to see Barnitz depict the monks of Lindisfarne (which makes a big part of the story) with considerable respect. This is not a Christian novel by any means, but it could have been much worse.
All in all I liked it a lot, and wish there were more.
But there aren’t. Barnitz hasn’t published a book since this one.
Not a good omen for our sub-genre.
Mentoring
Mary DeMuth is blogging about mentoring, both spiritually and in the craft of writing.
For ten years I wrote in obscurity, nary a mentor in sight. I honed the craft, stumbled over my prose, read books, made my husband read my creations. By the time I met my first writing mentor, I’d been down a very long road of writing in the quiet margins of life. I don’t begrudge that time because I found my voice and learned how to write for the sheer joy of it.
Should They Write What They Know?
Should female writers compose stories teased from their lives at home with family? Muriel Gray urges them to avoid that track:
Judging by the increasing lack of inventiveness and imagination amongst too many, though not all, women authors it would seem that we have either been persuaded to stay within a narrow experience in order to be “taken seriously”, or more worryingly we are cautiously self-censoring because we are afraid of the gathering forces that are threatening feminism both domestically and internationally. As a judge in this year’s Orange prize, it’s hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised autobiographical writing from women on small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas. These writers appear to have forgotten the fundamental imperative of fiction writing. It’s called making stuff up.
Breaking into the Market
It’s hard to be a first-time novelists these days. “Once upon a time, a first novel could afford to be a dress rehearsal, a proving ground. That is no longer true.”