Uncategorized

The saga of Harald Hardrada

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Monument to Harald Sigurdsson at Harald Hardrådes plass in Gamlebyen, Oslo, Norway. Relief by Lars Utne 1905. Photo credit: Wolfmann. Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 4.0.

I’m in between book reviews. Of what shall I blog? The other day, somebody on Facebook asked what I had to say about King Harald Hardrada of Norway. Well, there’s plenty. Probably enough for a long post. I’ve blogged before about Harald’s death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, but I don’t think I’ve ever devoted a post to the man himself.

He has much in common with Napoleon, whose biography I reviewed the other day. An important figure, and a fascinating personality. But in almost no way appealing.

I didn’t feel that way when I was a kid. I read about him in David Howarth’s 1066, and it fired my imagination. What a saga! This guy ranged all over Europe and the Mideast, fought scores of battles, amassed a fortune, and went home to be king of his homeland. A real-life Conan the Barbarian.

If you’ve read my novel The Baldur Game (you have read it, haven’t you?), he shows up in 1030 at the Battle of Stiklestad, where Saint Olaf died. Harald’s patronymic was Sigurdsson; he was half-brother to Olaf (same mother). He was about 15 at that time; I picture him as a reckless teenager, still growing into his height (he’s supposed to have been unusually tall). He was wounded in the battle, but got away with the help of Ragnvald, later jarl of Orkney. I assume he must have hero-worshipped his older brother. Very likely he admired Olaf’s autocratic policies.

Then off to exile in Kiev, where he served at the court of Prince Jaroslav the Wise (who also appears in my novel). There Harald grew to maturity – and no doubt picked up Russ ideas about government.

In 1042 he headed south for Constantinople, the goal of every enterprising young Viking in the east. The Byzantine emperors valued the tall Northmen as warriors, and Harald rose to become captain of the famous Varangian Guard, fighting in various campaigns in various places, including Sicily and (possibly) Jerusalem. We actually have outside corroboration for this service– a Greek book from the 1070s, the Strategikon of Kekaumenos, describes a portion of his Byzantine career.

Harald seems to have been involved in the revolt against Emperor Michael V, and at some point (according to the saga) he was imprisoned and escaped. Somehow he managed to get out of the city with the enormous fortune he’d amassed, and he made his way back to Kiev, where he won the hand of the princess Elisabeth, and set off for home, where his nephew, Olaf’s illegitimate son Magnus the Good, now reigned.

(Continued on p. 2)

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Fiction, Reviews

‘So Cold the River,’ by Michael Koryta

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Artifacts of their ambition. Only through study of those things could you truly understand people long departed…. The reality of someone’s heart lay in the objects of their desires. Whether those things were achieved did not matter nearly so much as what they had been.

Eric Shaw, hero of Michael Koryta’s So Cold the River, is a failure in life. That’s his view of himself, and he confirms it constantly by self-sabotaging. He was a rising cinematographer in Hollywood, until he lost his temper and made himself radioactive in the industry. Now he’s home in Chicago, subsisting through making memorial films for funerals. He recently succeeded in driving his wife away too.

A wealthy woman, impressed with one of his films, offers him a well-paying project. She’d like him to go down to Indiana to research the early life of her father-in-law’s father, a very rich man who was always secretive about his origins. It’s supposed to be a gift.

Eric goes down to the area of French Lick, Indiana, where he finds two towns, each with surprisingly lavish old hotels, relics of the 1920s, when the area was a popular location for spas. It was famous for its mineral water, which connects to the only artifact Eric’s client was able to offer him as a clue to the old man’s story – a bottle of cloudy water, bottled back in the glory days.

Eric makes one major mistake. As an experiment, he drinks some of the old water to treat a headache. First it makes him deadly sick. Then he starts seeing vivid visions of the past. Before long, Eric realizes the water is addictive – and he only has a limited supply.

Meanwhile, an elderly widow in the area is watching the sky. She’s been a weather tracker for many years, and she can tell a very unusual storm system is approaching.

I feel I’m doing a bad job describing how very well So Cold the River works. It reminded me (if I may be forgiven for the comparison) to my own novel, Wolf Time – though I fear Michael Koryta has done a better job here of constructing an epic urban fantasy/ghost story. (You can even find Christian themes if you like, though I’m not sure they’re intended. I was particularly impressed by the way the story treats one particular, unexpected hero.)

It’s a very cinematic story, and indeed it has been made into a movie – though (surprise, surprise) they gender-swapped most of the main characters.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed So Cold the River very much. I recommend it highly.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Napoleon: A Life,’ by Paul Johnson

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But whereas Bonaparte wore his hat square on, Wellington put the ends fore and aft. Why? Wellington liked to raise his hat, out of courtesy and to return salutes. Bonaparte rarely raised his hat to anyone.

So I had picked up a mystery novel, one of those e-books you can get through free offers. The description called it “a gripping thriller.” (They all say they’re “gripping” these days. The word “gripping” has become a meaningless annex to the article “a.”) The book proved to be as gripping as an empty cotton glove. The hero meandered through his days, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with his girlfriend (we were helpfully informed exactly what they ate on each occasion), discussing business with his partner, and occasionally seeing reports on TV about the murder which – one assumes – would eventually become interesting. I gave up on that book.

Then I turned to the late Paul Johnson’s Napoleon: A Life (part of the Penguin Lives series), and found there all the drama and excitement I’d missed in the “gripping thriller.”

The Penguin Lives books are short by design, and Paul Johnson’s particular talents as a historian suit the format perfectly. He was a master of the broad brush (and, frankly, the drumhead verdict). Napoleon’s life is one of the most epic in history, and the reader of this book is swept up – and horrified – to observe its progress.

Bonaparte (he rarely used his first name, and Johnson accordingly calls him Bonaparte most of the time) was the scion of impoverished minor nobility on the island of Corsica, ruled in those days by the French. He benefited from being the right man in the right place at the right time, a soldier exquisitely equipped to rise in the chaos that was about to descend on France. Bonaparte had a natural genius for maps and mathematics, enabling him to plan campaigns and strategies with remarkable prescience. His approach to tactics, on the other hand, was simple, based on dividing the enemy, softening them up with artillery, and taking the offense. These qualities worked well for him… until they didn’t anymore.

I personally have never liked Napoleon. Among other matters, I blame him for the British blockade of Norway, which caused untold suffering. Author Johnson and I are entirely compatible on this point – Johnson has little good to say about the man. He caused the loss of “four or five million lives,” left his country more or less as distressed as he found it (though smaller in population), and provided the model for every tyrant of the 20th Century, from Hitler to Mao.

He has his admirers, and many books exist to serve the needs of such readers. But for the person who (like me) has some interest in the period (and prejudice against its subject), but not enough motivation to plow through hundreds of pages of details, Napoleon: A Life offers a vivid and entertaining introduction to a life which, whatever you think of it, was undeniably important.

Blogs, Socials, The Press

Power Players Want Us Divided, Outraged

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Chase Hughes is a behavior and body language expert who has trained soldiers and diplomats on persuasion and communication. I’ve seen him on the four-man analyst channel The Behavior Panel, where the four experts discuss body language aspects of witnesses in recorded trials and subjects of popular interviews.

In the video above, Chase responds to some of the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder by saying we’re being manipulated by a covert elite who don’t care about anyone but themselves and want to divide us in order to control us.

This is a point of media literacy I think we all need. Our apps and algorithms are training us think in new ways and value new things. We think we’re still in control of the technology, but if we rejoice in the murderer of a political enemy, who isn’t a murderer or terrorist, who hasn’t warred against a neighboring country, but has only argued for policies and politicians—if we allow our machines to be identity gauges and outrage feeders—then we are not in control. We are feeding a faceless power that sees us as only a number.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘What’s Wrong With the World,’ by G.K. Chesterton

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If one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And so they are—both of them, I mean.

Reading G.K. Chesterton is (at least for me), most of the time an intellectual romp. Though I frequently agree with many of the author’s points, I certainly never agree with all of them. But I enjoy the caperings of his mind, as one enjoys watching an acrobat. Chesterton looks at the world every which-way, often from upside down. He had the body of a sedentary beast, but an acrobatic imagination.

What’s Wrong With the World is different from most of his books because (as he declares) he leaves religion mostly out of it, except in reference to other things. Though I’m a damned heretic in his view, I find that I like his religious writing better than his political writing. He was devoted to a political movement called Distributism, a sort of a mild socialism. It retained private property, but wanted to parcel that property out more fairly, so that every free man would have a piece of land of his own, holding the dignity of a property owner. The aristocracy would be eliminated as a vestigial organ (gently, if I understand it correctly). Chesterton regards everything around him in comparison with an imagined medieval Catholic world, populated by free, contented peasants.

What’s Wrong With the World is a systematic explanation of why he considers the present system of capitalism and moneyed oligarchy unjust. Along the way, he exercises his trademark imagination, peppering his pages with paradox.

For the modern reader, though, it makes for some hard going. I think I understood many of Chesterton’s references (to prime ministers, poets, and current political controversies) better than the average American reader, but a lot of it was still opaque to me.

If you’re a Chesterton fan, you’ll probably want to read What’s Wrong With the World for the sake of completeness. If you’re new to GKC, I’d recommend starting with some other book.

Religion

The Golden Rule is a command, not a strategy

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Photo credit; Jared eberhardt. Creative commons attribution-Share Alike 2.0.

Personal update: I’m still fighting my sinus infection. Got some stronger antibiotics now, and am trying to rest a lot. I had to take the garbage out today and get some groceries, and I consider those things an achievement.

I have more to say about the Charlie Kirk atrocity. I will try not to be influenced by the fact that I had to unfriend someone on Facebook today, because of a startlingly ugly comment.

[Decompress]

OK. I’ve written on this topic before – either here or at the American Spectator Online – but that was a long time ago, and I suppose public awareness has faded.

Here’s my proposition – the Golden Rule is a command, not a strategy.

I see people (to my considerable distress) saying things like, “Well, Charlie tried talking to ‘em. You see what he got for it. Now it’s time to give ‘em a taste of their own medicine.”

Many of these people even profess Christian faith.

They appear to be operating out of the common belief (buttressed by way too many well-meaning Christian children’s stories) that doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is a strategy for achieving peace. If you’re nice enough to your enemy, this theory assumes, they’ll soon grow ashamed of their meanness and start being nice in return.

Friends, this is never promised to us.

Jesus attaches no promise to this command. It was delivered to disciples who were mostly destined for martyrdom. Their enemies would not change their minds about them for about three centuries. Until then, the Christians practiced the Golden Rule without a lot of reward, just because it’s right.

The fact that Charlie Kirk suffered martyrdom in return for kindness and civility does not mean the Golden Rule hasn’t worked. It’s working just fine. God was glorified in Charlie’s life and death, in ways we can’t even guess.

We are not called to win battles, or elections, or the culture. We’re called only to be faithful. The results are in God’s hands.

“How can we protect society then?”

The answer to that is in Jesus’ teaching about God and Caesar. I saw historian Tom Holland discussing this recently, in a video clip online. He pointed out that when Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” He was initiating an historic innovation. Never before in history, anywhere, had civic life been separated from religion.

Luther’s teaching of the two kingdoms builds on historical Christian thought. The individual Christian is responsible for living as a disciple. His realm is grace. The king or magistrate bears the sword and bears the responsibility to punish evildoers. His business is law and punishment.

A Christian individual can legitimately defend himself, and certainly defend his family, but declaring war or taking revenge or making reprisals are forbidden activities.

Please, please. Do not dishonor Charlie’s legacy by taking up the sword. Leave it to God. The tribute Charlie Kirk would wish from you is to do as he did – declare the love of Christ to our enemies.

And if they keep killing us, we keep on loving them.

Blogs, Socials, Religion, Uncategorized

R.I.P., Charlie Kirk

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Credit: Adam S. Keck. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.

Charlie Kirk is dead at 31, the victim of a cowardly assassin.

I was not a follower of Charlie Kirk’s. Nothing against him; I guess it was mostly an old fart’s reflexive resentment of up-and-comers. He took over Dennis Prager’s spot on Salem Radio, and though Dennis’s accident could hardly be blamed on Charlie, I suppose I was annoyed by the change. As old men are wont to be.

I resented a video clip I saw, in which Charlie stated that “no heterosexual man” ever re-plays old conversations in his head, pondering what he should have said. Since I do that all the time (and a number of my friends, whom I firmly believe to be heterosexual as well, say they do it too), I took some offense.

Until I discovered that Dennis Prager said it first.

But I think what annoyed me (subconsciously) most of all about Charlie Kirk was that he did – extremely well – a thing I always wanted to do. He faced people who disagreed with him in public, and argued with them, never (that I know of) descending into anger or name-calling, no matter how much anger and name-calling he took from the other side. I’ve never been able to do that, to my great shame.

My strongest impression of Charlie Kirk actually comes from video clips I’ve caught on Facebook, in which he appeared on a podcast called “Whatever.”

I watch “Whatever” clips now and then, as low entertainment. It’s a podcast about men and women and their relationships, and the format (as far as I can tell) is for young women, often heavily tattooed and pierced, to appear on one side of the table in the studio, to describe how wonderful their lives are as “sugar babies,” OnlyFans influencers, or porn stars. The host and his friends sit on the other side, arguing for something (usually) a little more responsible. The guest who seems to show up most frequently is a guy about whom I know nothing at all, other than that he claims to be an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but is not shy about using profanity. His strategy seems to be to shame these women into repenting and becoming celibate (he does not recommend they marry, as he considers them morally spoiled).

But Charlie Kirk was a guest at least once. And the clips of him at the table are something entirely different. He was polite, courteous, and sympathetic with the women, even as he condemned their sins. He listened, and spoke kindly. I feel that Jesus, when he dealt with prostitutes, must have been very much like that.

And I thought I saw (though Heaven knows I know nothing about reading women’s faces) that there was something in those women’s eyes as they looked at Charlie Kirk. A look that seemed to say, “Why couldn’t I have found a guy like this?”

Well, there’s one fewer guy like that in the world today.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk. Enter into the glory of your Master. May your blood be the seed of the church for which you fought so bravely.

Uncategorized

With malice toward some

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“The Surrender at Appomattox” – Mosaic Mural by Allyn Cox, 1965 at the General Grant National Memorial

Recently, the popular intellectual Malcolm Gladwell came out with an apology for supporting the idea of men playing in women’s sports.

At first blush, this filled me with Glad(well)ness.

But I had another, delayed response. One I’m now reconsidering.

That has to do with being a gracious winner.

When I saw conservative commenters castigating Gladwell, because he should have had the courage to tell the truth from the start, I thought at first they were being unnecessarily vindictive. My tendency is to say, “Let’s just let bygones be bygones. We need to live with one another, after all.”

It looks as if (God willing), we may be winning this gender battle. Both the unisex sports thing, and the transexual thing. This is a splendid development. Much of the transgender madness was fueled by a conviction (a delusion, but often sincere) that catering to sexual dysphoria would prevent suicide. (It increasingly appears that it not only does not do that, but rather contributes to suicide and murder.)

Not to mention ruined lives and reproductive sterility, just at the moment when we’re facing a demographic cliff.

My hero has always been Abraham Lincoln, who, as the end of the Civil War approached, proposed a gracious reconciliation – “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” His plan was not fully realized, but we did, in time, work out an accommodation – the north allowed southerners to believe (not entirely without reason) that the war had been about more than slavery. That there was an important constitutional issue involved. They called it the “Lost Cause.”

It allowed them to keep their pride.

So my inclination is to say, “Let’s let the people who were wrong about transgenderism keep some dignity. Let’s let them construct some kind of myth to justify their cruel (often cowardly) error.”

But then I thought about it some more.

The fact is, the world has changed since 1865. If (as I hope), we’ve won this battle in the gender wars, we’re not in the position of the north at the end of the Civil War. Our enemy’s cities do not lie in ruins (except as a consequence of their own policing policies). Our opponents still occupy the highest, most prestigious positions in many of our most honored institutions.

We don’t have to create a new myth of a “lost cause” for the transgender advocates. They will, you can be sure, construct it for themselves. The media will (first) drop the whole business down the memory hole, as much as they can; and (second), to whatever extent the memory lingers, find a way to blame it on conservatives and Christians.

So I think the leaders of the transgender movement need to be made to pay in some way. They must suffer some kind of public disgrace.

I don’t know what to suggest, though.

I think President Trump should put somebody to work on it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Cypress House,’ by Michael Koryta

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She was that kind of beautiful. The crippling kind.

Probably later than any other fan, I’ve figured out that most (maybe all, for all I know) of Michael Koryta’s supernatural thrillers involve the same family. Arlen Wagner, hero of The Cypress House, seems to be the grandfather of Mark Novak, hero of the two books I previously reviewed.

Arlen grew up in West Virginia, and still carries the shame of having a crazy father who thought he could converse with the dead. Now he’s a veteran of World War I, and working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He’s on a train with a group of other CCC men, headed to Florida to help construct a bridge to the Keys.

That’s when he has a vision of all his fellow passengers turning into skeletons. Arlen has had this experience before, during the war, and he knows it means they’ll die soon. He tries to persuade the men to leave the train, but they laugh at him. The only one who gets off with him is a young man named Paul Brickhill, a mechanical genius for whom Paul has conceived paternal sentiments. Left at loose ends, the two men get a ride to the Gulf Coast, so Paul can look at the ocean. There they find the Cypress House, a lonely boarding house near a dying town, overseen by a beautiful woman. They don’t plan on staying long, but a hurricane blows in (fulfilling, down in the Keys, Arlen’s grim prophecy about the CCC workers), and by the time it’s blown over, Paul has fallen in love with the landlady. Also, Arlen has noticed that something shady is going on at the Cypress House. He stays on to protect the boy.

A lot of protection will be called for, and Arlen will have to make peace with his father’s legacy before he can save the lives of the people he cares about.

The Cypress House is a compelling thriller. The tension ratchets up steadily, and the final showdown is as exciting and surprising as you’d expect from Koryta. In the tradition of Dean Koontz, Koryta’s story dabbles in the supernatural, but not in a way to greatly bother Christians.

My only quibble was that the Florida nights in this story seemed to be remarkably mosquito-free (though the mosquitoes finally showed up when they were needed to contribute to the dramatic tension).

The Cypress House was a superior thriller, verging on the epic. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Rise the Dark,’ by Michael Koryta

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The Billings airport was built on a plateau above the city, and while the mountains were far off in the hazy distance, the big sky was right there on top of you. The Montana sky felt older than time and endless as space itself.

It was a humbling sky.

Pushing on through the second book in Michael Koryta’s Mark Novak series. I was a little disappointed in the previous book, Last Words. Rise the Dark made up for that, and more. The claustrophobia of the first book contrasted with the open heights of the second (Rise the Dark is about mountains and power line towers), lending epic scope to the narrative as a whole.

Markus Novak now knows the name of the man who murdered his wife Lauren. His investigation takes him to the one place he needs to see, but always feared to visit – Cassadaga, Florida, a community founded on spiritualism. Raised by a fraudulent psychic mother, Marcus has always had a horror of psychic claims. But when he goes there, and nearly gets murdered in a burning house, he comes away with the last notation in Lauren’s notebook – the words, “rise the dark,” as well as  a clue as to where the murderer is headed – to a town in Montana where he lived a while as a boy, with his mother and his two outlaw uncles. On the way, he joins forces with a beautiful private detective.

Meanwhile, in Montana, a young wife is kidnapped by the leader of a doomsday cult. Her husband, a power line worker, is informed that if he wants his wife to live, he’ll have to help the cult carry out a major act of sabotage. What no one knows is that he’s lost his nerve. If he is to do this thing he does not want to do, he’ll have to go far beyond his personal limits.

Rise the Dark was an epic story, full of Michael Koryta’s trademark plot twists and surprises. It strays further into the occult than I like, but there’s an ambivalence about the topic that comforted me. It looks like more books are coming, and I look forward to reading them.

I found Rise the Dark highly compelling. Recommended, with the usual cautions.