I have some dislocated thoughts I’m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you.

The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who’s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones miniseries. Beside him is his wife, Gry Molvær Hivju, who is a documentary film maker. They constitute, as you’ll note, a striking couple.

I heard about a documentary series they made together, and watched it recently on the Norwegian NRK network feed, using a VPN. I don’t know if it will ever be offered outside Norway. The series is called simply “Olav,” and it relates a personal quest to find the historical truth about Norway’s patron saint, Olav (or Olaf. Best known, of course, as a character in my novel, The Elder King) Haraldsson. We learn that Kristofer first learned of Olav as a boy, when his father, also an actor, played Olav in the annual Olav play presented (most years) near Trondheim, Norway. He tells us that Olav has been his hero all his life – the Viking who became a Christian king, and converted his country.

I’m not sure how seriously to take the dramatic arc of the series. Hivju may be playing a role as he presents himself as a lot like a little boy, shivering with excitement to go where his hero went and see all the evidence of his life. His disappointment is palpable as he travels to England, France, and Russia and finds – generally – that evidence for Olav’s life (outside the Icelandic sagas) is pretty sparse. Judging by the evidence, Olav was a fairly minor player on the European scene until after his death, when Norwegian churchmen and chieftains promoted him and his saga for political reasons. (I note that no mention whatever is made of the work of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, whose book, Viking Legacy, I translated. They even report that a Norwegian translation of the Icelandic Flatøybok has recently been released, but they don’t mention its publisher, Saga Bok, Prof. Titlestad’s publishing house, or even let us see a copy).

The final resolution of the whole thing (and I’d have bet my house that this would be the case) is that they conclude that history and faith are different things, and each is important in its own realm. I reject that principle in terms of the central affirmations of Christianity, though I don’t doubt that many false stories have been told of saints and holy men over the years. I wondered about Hivju’s own faith, which he never really explains. Does his faith include Olav’s God, or only Olav as a hero? None of my business, I suppose.

 Around the same time, I was reading a couple books by Blake Banner, whose Cobra series of thrillers I’ve enjoyed very much. So I picked up a couple from his Dead Cold Case series, which I’d started and given up on for some reason. Reading again, I remembered why.  I’ve never encountered a more God-bothered series of books, and in a bad way. In each of these books (as far as I could tell) the author felt it necessary to insert a few Awful Christians. Judgmental, repressed, joyless, hypocritical, and often criminal. His knowledge of Christianity seems to come primarily from a bad experience of Roman Catholicism – when he describes an American Methodist Church, he assumes that they cross themselves when they enter the church, call their services masses, and reject sexual pleasure as sin. I feel sorry for whatever bad experience the author must have had, but I couldn’t take much of it.

We live among the ruins of shattered faith today. Those who believe, generally believe in a subjective way that has little to do with the real world. Those who don’t believe seem furious at God for not existing. We who hold onto Christianity have lots of work to do. It may be illegal work, before long. But that’s how Christianity started, after all.