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A walk through Erling’s stomping grounds

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I just found the video above, recently posted. It shows you the area of Erling Skjalgsson’s home. This is apparently part of a series, in which the modest videographer says nothing at all himself, relying on a few captions and some short narration (possibly by an AI voice). It’s rather leisurely in pace.

I’ve talked about Sola Ruin Church here before. I’ve been there, I think, three times, the last time in 2022, and it always gives me a thrill to be that close to Erling. The stone church was built after Erling’s time, but quite plausibly may stand on the site of an earlier wooden church – which is how I portray it in my novels. I like to think Erling was buried near the altar, though we have no positive information on that.

The church was demolished by the Germans during World War II, to prevent its use as a landmark by English bomber pilots. However, the Germans were thoughtful enough to number all the stones, making it possible to rebuild it pretty much exactly as it had been, after the unpleasantness had passed. It’s used as an event site today.

The “Domsteinene” are also known as “Erling Skjalgsson’s Thingstead,” though they go much further back in time than that. I seem to recall I used them as the site for some unspeakable heathen rite, in one of my novels.

Bear in mind that the area was much less wooded in Erling’s time. Even so, it’s more rugged than I describe it – I generally wrote from memory, and I guess my memory has a tendency to flatten out terrain.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Down These Streets,’ by James Scott Bell

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He was my height—six feet—but if I curled up I could have fit into his chest.

I’m not a big fan of short story collections. Short stories are fine in their natural habitat, taken one at a time. But in bunches I find them bumpy reading – I get invested in a couple characters, and then they find their destinies and I have to jump into somebody else’s life.

Still, I do enjoy James Scott Bell’s writing. So I figured I’d pick up Down These Streets, his big (and I mean big – north of 700 pages) short story collection. (The title is inspired by a famous line from Raymond Chandler’s essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.”) He pretty much throws in everything, from hard-boiled tales to “twist” stories in the O. Henry tradition, to a series of light action stories about a hard-luck boxer named Irish Jim Gallagher (inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan), to flash fiction, including a few that are just re-tellings of old jokes.

I liked the hard-boiled stuff. The Irish Jim stories were fun, particularly one long in which the world, the devil, and the majesty of the law seem to have conspired to prevent his keeping an important date with his girl (this story, amazingly, features cameo appearances by both Marilyn Monroe and Dr. J. Vernon McGee – and how many stories can make that claim?).

Many of the shorter stories seemed to me rather slapdash, but they didn’t take long to read.

I didn’t love Down These Streets, but it kept me entertained for several days, and you may enjoy short stories more than I do.

Recommended. No profanity.

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Trailer: ‘The Pendragon Cycle’

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In spite of the cosmic injustice that has made Stephen R. Lawhead more famous and successful than me, I figure I’ll showcase my generosity of spirit by posting the trailer above, for the Daily Wire’s coming production of The Pendragon Cycle.

You can’t always tell from trailers, but it looks to me as if it might possibly not be awful. One doesn’t look for great historical authenticity, of course (as if I know enough about the ancient Britons to be able to judge), but I’d probably watch it if I had a Daily Wire subscription. Doubtless it will become available through some other venue, down the line.

It’s an odd thing – back in my day, money spent on making a movie generally provided some clue to quality of production. A production that looked cheap usually skimped on talent as well.

But today, most of the technical bells and whistles are available to any amateur working in his/her basement, with only a moderate investment. And the big studios dump sufficient money to fill small lakes into one bloated, CGI-laden project after another, and produce consistent dreck.

So I wish the Daily Wire people, and Stephen Lawhead too, all the best in this.

One of these days (probably shortly after my death), my Erling books will get their turn. I choose to believe that, because that’s the game I chose to play in my life, and it’s too late now to sign onto a tramp steamer.

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Many thanks for nothing, Alcuin

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Alcuin is the fellow in the middle. (Wikipedia)

No review tonight. My chosen topic was prompted by a video clip I saw, one of many floating around YouTube, which extract moments from conversations between the historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. (I can’t find that particular one at the moment.)

Anyway, one of the two men – I think it was Holland – mentioned, in a parenthetical way, that the English divine Alcuin of York (ca. 735 – 804 A.D.) was responsible for the innovation of putting spaces between words in documents. (You may be aware, if you’ve read about ancient manuscripts, that they wrote out their sentences without spaces, sometimes making interpretation hard.)

This intrigued me, as I’m something of an admirer of Alcuin’s. I thought I’d do some web searching on the subject.

My conclusion: Alcuin certainly did not invent the separation of written words. But he’s very likely responsible for its adoption as a standard.

When I deliver my little lectures on the book Viking Legacy (which I translated), I must perforce mention the contention of the author, Prof. Titlestad, that the Viking raids, starting at Lindisfarne in 793 AD., were a strategic response to Charlemagne’s massacre of the Saxons at Verden in 782. In discussing Lindisfarne, I always quote Alcuin, who famously wrote of the raid:

“Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.”

Alcuin would (to his eternal credit) pressure the emperor to stop using violence to try to convert the heathen. He joined Charlemagne’s court shortly after the Verden atrocity, and he brought with him the influence of the English church. The English tradition was inherited from Pope Gregory and St. Augustine of Canterbury, who urged missionaries to be kind and tolerant of heathen ways, so long as those ways were morally innocent. (It was this policy that led them to convert heathen festivals to Christian purposes – which means that when people complain that Christmas and Halloween were originally heathen festivals [a great oversimplification in itself] they are complaining about a tradition arising from the church’s rejection of conversion by the sword.)

As far as the spaces between letters goes, scholars tell us that the idea first arose in Ireland, where the monks adopted it to assist them in reading Latin, an unfamiliar language. Alcuin promoted this system during his time in France, helping to make it the standard throughout Europe.

So if you like reading, and appreciate those spaces – those blessed little bits of nothing – that help us recognize and identify separate words in a fraction of a second, you might pause a moment to remember and thank God’s servant, Alcuin of York.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Romeo’s Truth,’ by James Scott Bell

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I always look forward to a new entry in James Scott Bell’s Mike Romeo series. The latest volume, Romeo’s Truth, is (as I announced yesterday) adorned by a quotation from a review I did, on this blog, of a previous installment, placed first among the review blurbs at the front. Proving that not only is author Bell a good writer, but he recognizes fine criticism.

Mike Romeo, if you aren’t yet familiar with him, is a very big, strong man. He’s a former cage fighter and a self-educated genius. He goes about doing good in the world, kicking butt and quoting the classics.

In Romeo’s Truth, Mike is on a job for Ira, his lawyer boss, when he stops at a diner in California’s Central Valley. He observes a big guy beating up a little guy in the parking lot and (of course) steps in. This is the inciting incident that will soon have him involved in a simmering dispute between a local rancher and anti-meat agitators (in case you’re wondering, this book is entirely on the side of the carnivores). Soon his lawyer will have a new client (the little guy who got beat up, up on a murder charge), and a great need to tear the cover off a conspiracy of people who do not hesitate to blow up buildings or shoot people. No matter – getting Mike Romeo mad is one of the classic strategic errors.

Romeo’s Truth isn’t the best of the series, but it’s plenty of fun – a fine entry in a series which provides the joys of hard-boiled detective stories for audiences who prefer their fiction clean. Mike’s relationship with his new wife, Sophie, sometimes approaches the realm of the cutesy, but never goes quite that far. Self-awareness saves them from that.

My only real quibble is with a “fact” delivered in a throwaway line – Mike says that the Vikings had double-headed axes, which isn’t true.

That is, of course, unforgiveable. But otherwise, it’s a great story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Turn On the Heat,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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I suppose the kids today don’t even know who Erle Stanley Gardner was (even though he was once the bestselling author in the world). But my generation, who did know about him, generally got him wrong, I think. This was due to the blockbuster popularity of the Perry Mason TV show, based on his books about that character. The show (though well done and still fun to watch) was slightly bowdlerized. The original Mason of the novels had rougher edges, especially in the early stages.

That goes equally – or more – for his Bertha Cool and Donald Lamm books, of which Turn On the Heat (published 1940) was my first experience. This is pure hardboiled stuff, but handled from a new angle – a hardboiled story without a hardboiled hero.

Bertha Cool is a stout, middle-aged woman, tight with a buck. She runs a private investigations agency in Los Angeles, and her chief operative is former lawyer Donald Lamm. Lamm is tough in his own way, but he’s only a little guy. When the muscle boys work him over (which happens more than once), he bides his time and finds clever ways to get his revenge.

They are hired by a man to find his ex-wife, who disappeared 21 years previously. Donald goes to the town where they once lived. She’s not there anymore, and nobody seems to know where she went. But as he pokes around, Donald discovers that pretty much everybody is lying to him – including their client. A perky female reporter seems to be a useful ally, but a big, brutal police detective invites him – forcefully – to get out of town. It will take a lot of brains and strategizing to finally close this case, but Bertha and Donald have what it takes.

Turn On the Heat was a lot of fun. Pure entertainment for hard-boiled fans. Recommended.

Authors, Bookselling, Reviews

I am now a blurber

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What was my surprise to open up James Scott Bell’s latest Mike Romeo novel, Romeo’s Truth, and find that one of my own reviews on this blog was quoted as the very first blurb at the front of the book?

James Scott Bell has produced gold in the Mike Romeo series, about a one-time cage fighter and certified genius on a quest for virtue. I want to be Mike Romeo when I get younger. Highly recommended.

My thanks to author Bell. I’m enjoying Romeo’s Truth.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lion of Cairo,’ by Scott Oden

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The friend who gave me a copy of Scott Oden’s The Lion of Cairo told me, “I’ve never read an author who reminded me so much of Robert E. Howard.”

And he was right. In terms of setting and atmosphere, this is a very Howardian book. Gilded palaces inhabited by scheming courtiers contrast with dark, fetid alleyways infested by thieves, beggars, and cutthroats. The setting is very exotic, very romantic (in the sense of adventure in faraway lands). Author Oden makes no secret of his indebtedness to Robert E. Howard and of his intention to produce a story in that Weird Tales tradition.

And yet, it didn’t work for me.

Our antihero is Assad, a member of the Assassins cult. He is a skilled and remorseless murderer, armed with a long Afghani knife forged by a magician, possessed by an angry, vengeful spirit.

He is assigned to go to Cairo to protect Rashid, the caliph, who is dominated and manipulated by his ambitious vizier, Jalal. Jalal has made a treacherous pact with the Syrians and the “Nazarenes” (Christians) to deliver the city into their hands, in return for his own political advancement.

The only friend Rashid has in the palace is unknown to him – a minor member of the harem named Parysatis. She has discovered secret passages in the walls that allow her to eavesdrop on conversations. She knows what Jalal is planning, but to whom can she turn for help?

It all sounds pretty gripping, but it didn’t work for me. No doubt much of the problem is my sheer, provincial inability to sympathize with Islamic aspirations. In spite of the way the story was set up, I was still rooting for the Christians. (The author assumes the widely-held contemporary trope that the Crusaders were barbarians who ran around massacring everybody, while the Muslims were sophisticated and compassionate. We are often reminded that the Christians massacred the citizens of Jerusalem when they captured it, while Saladin spared them when he did the same. This is historical cherry-picking. There were rules of warfare, recognized by both sides, which governed when a city could be put to the sword or not. Saladin massacred cities on other occasions.)

But the book was also a little light on sympathetic characters. Assad is a stone-cold killer. The caliph is (at least at first) disengaged and addicted to drugs. Parysatis is a good character, but she shares the stage with a lot of other people, and has limited opportunities for taking initiative.

Also, author Oden is frequently weak in his word choices. Often he fails to say precisely what he’s trying to say. For instance, he tends to use “a sense of” when he means “an impression of.”

I’m afraid I found The Lion of Cairo something of a chore to read. The epilogue seems to suggest that a sequel will be coming, but I won’t be looking for it.

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‘The Far-Traveller’

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I’m moving through the book I’m reading with unusual slowness. So of what shall I blog? I don’t want to post about my car again; that topic has outlived its welcome. Anyway, there’s nothing much left to say.

Except that I named her. You may recall that I always name my cars, and they’re always female names – probably because of my chronic deficiency of female companionship. I used to use the names of old schoolteachers of mine, emulating the fictional detective Travis McGee, who named his Rolls Royce pickup truck after a schoolteacher from his childhood. (Note, I make no claim to ever owning a Rolls Royce pickup truck.) But I named my previous car Sigrid the Haughty, after a femme fatale from the Norse sagas.

So I chose a saga name for my “new” Toyota Rav-4 too. Because she has quite a high number on her odometer, I’ve chosen to christen her “Gudrid the Far-Traveled.”

This is another great saga name. Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is a prominent character in the Icelandic Vinland sagas, Erik the Red’s Saga and the Saga of the Icelanders. If I recall correctly, she figures most prominently in the first, which gives the impression (to this reader at least) that it was intended as a sort of a defense of her reputation. According to the sagas, she was descended from slaves, but the saga writer takes every opportunity to point out that she was (in spite of that) a very outstanding woman who entirely transcended her humble origins. And had great stories to tell.

Just to mention the high points, she married Erik the Red’s son Thorstein, and traveled with him to Vinland (America). After his death, she married an Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni (the nickname means, essentially, macho), and with him attempted to plant a permanent colony in the new country. These efforts failed, unfortunately (though Gudrid bore the first European child born in America), and eventually they moved back to Thorfinn’s home in Iceland. After she was widowed, she made a pilgrimage to Rome, and she ended her life as a hermit nun. Thus she earned the nickname, víðförla (far-traveled), since she’d been to America and Rome. That made her the European who had seen the most of the world in her time.

The video clip above is a trailer for a documentary which may or may not have ever been released – I don’t know. As you’d expect, it “spins” the story, catering to current fashions of thought. Gudrid seems to be portrayed as a leader of expeditions (which she was not) and a warrior (which she even more certainly was not).

But she was a remarkable woman, and her descendants had every reason to immortalize her in literature.

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Mobile again

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I apologize for wasting bandwidth on my petty struggles with internal combustion transportation issues. But having endured so much on the topic already, you deserve the closure of being informed that I did buy a new (used) car today.

This is my “new” car – a 2009 Toyota Rav-4 (dealer’s photo). It’s a bare-bones model, with no “smart” features I’m aware of, other than the remote key fob. It’s a southern car, so there’s little rust on it, always a nice thing up here in Road Salt Country.

It turned out to have higher mileage than advertised, so I persuaded the dealer to knock a couple hundred bucks off his asking price (when a Norwegian does this, I believe, there’s someplace he can apply for a medal. I’ll have to look it up). It drives nicely, as far as I can tell so far.

My favorite thing (aside from the pretty color) is that it takes regular gas. The Subaru only accepted high test, and it got worse mileage than this one does. So that cheered me considerably.

Toyotas have a good reputation for reliability. Pray, if you will, that that will prove true for this marginal writer and Viking.