On Ian Fleming’s prose rhythm

Ian Fleming (1908-64)

I’ve made the case for the strength of Ian Fleming’s writing in the James Bond novels before, usually emphasizing his concrete word choice, his concise and vivid descriptions, and his strong, direct, active narration. These are all characteristic virtues of his style. But one I haven’t paid much direct attention to is the cadence or rhythm of his prose—in poetry, meter.

This week I started reading Casino Royale to my wife before bed every night. I’ve read Casino Royale several times before and even listened to the excellent audiobook narrated by Dan Stevens, but this is my first time reading it aloud myself. Going through it in this way, I noticed Fleming’s attention to rhythm immediately.

Here’s a paragraph from the first chapter. Bond, undercover at a French casino, has just received a telegram from M via a paid agent in Jamaica. He’s thinking about the process of relaying information to headquarters when this paragraph begins:

Some of this background to his cable passed through Bond’s mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M. He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work. Just as Fawcett, the Cayman Islander in Kingston, knew that if he bought that Morris Minor outright instead of signing the hire-purchase agreement, someone in London would probably know and want to know where the money had come from.

Fleming shows a lot of his skills here, including variety of word choice and sentence length. Both of those tend to be treated as boring mechanical aspects of writing (“Vary your sentence length” is a pretty rote piece of writing advice that is seldom elaborated upon) but, as this paragraph should show, both skills are crucial to rhythm and, ultimately, mood.

The rhythm of the words and phrases controls the pace of the paragraph, which rises and falls. It begins with two short, simple sentences followed by a slightly longer, slightly more complicated one expanding on the meaning of the first two. Then comes the centerpiece of the paragraph. Read this again, aloud:

“He knew that this was probably a fallacy, that probably there was another member of the Service at Royale-les-Eaux who was reporting independently, but it did give the illusion that he wasn’t only 150 miles across the Channel from that deadly office building near Regent’s Park, being watched and judged by those few cold brains that made the whole show work.”

This is a marvelous sentence, 61 words long and almost musical. It starts slowly, building momentum as Bond considers his situation before plunging into a downhill run that begins at the conjunction but and slows again, ominously, in the final dependent clause.

Here’s where word choice comes in. Fleming didn’t write poetry but he understood how to use its effects. The long vowels in the last several words, almost every word of that last clause—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—as well as the heavy emphasis the most important words require metrically—“those few cold brains who made the whole show work”—have a braking effect, slowing the reader and bringing him back down to the reality of Bond’s situation. Right alongside Bond.

All of which points to the purpose of this kind of rhythm: setting tone and mood. Narratively speaking, little happens in this paragraph. Bond stands holding a telegram slip, thinking. A lesser writer would turn this into pure exposition. But the way Fleming narrates Bond’s thinking imparts to the reader what it feels like to be Bond in this situation.

The same is true of the entire chapter. In Casino Royale’s first chapter, Bond 1) realizes he is tired, 2) receives a message, 3) sends a message, and 4) goes to bed. But through Fleming’s writing, we get exhaustion, self-loathing, a degree of paranoia (who wants to be “watched and judged” by “cold brains,” even those on your own side?), and a great deal of unexplained danger.

Here’s how the first chapter ends. Read this aloud with these things in mind:

His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Great stuff, and subtly done.

Poetry of reinforcement

From Tom Shippey’s preface to his new translation of Beowulf, in which he notes some of the strange poetic artifacts of the poem’s alliterative form and explores their deeper implications—both for the poem’s original audience and for us:

King David as Anglo-Saxon bard in the Vespasian Psalter

One may sum up by saying that, rather oddly, the words in the poem which receive the greatest sonic emphasis are sometimes the ones which carry the least information. They are there to help the poet with the first of his major aims: which is, one might say, to maintain the beat and the meter of his poetic lines.

This seems a rather humble aim to us, for our idea of poetry is that its wording should be exact, unexpected, provocative—to paraphrase the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who has just been introduced to Shakespeare—words which make you feel like you'd sat on a pin. But we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet's second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.

The modern vision of the poet as an outsider speaking truth to power and challenging norms is not only historically recent but a sadly narrow and limiting vision of what poetry does. It requires a posture of continuous antagonism to everything that grows both tedious and phony. The stereotype of the tiresome and hypocritical modernist poet and his or her predictably transgressive free verse exists for a reason.

But worse, this vision of poetry and the poet warps the interpretation of the great poetry of the past. People go galloping off in search of the hidden subversion in Homer or Beowulf and, having searched long enough and screwed their jeweler’s loupe of critical theory tightly enough into their eye, find it. Turns out these poets were just like the longhairs at the campus poetry slam. But, satisfied with presentist political interpretations, they miss what’s actually going on—and the chance to encounter people radically unlike themselves.

Good poetry can challenge, certainly. But I’d argue that the most effective and lasting prophetic verse challenges from within a culture—thus the entire power of the Old Testament prophets—rather than from some self-congratulatory political margin. But just as often, if not more so, good poetry reminds its audience of who they are. Remember, it says, This is us. This is what we love. This is what we must protect. And, with striking frequency, This is what we have lost. Consider the worlds in which the Iliad and Beowulf were composed and the poetry of reinforcement and shared love and loss makes much more sense.

Recovering the ability to “feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition” may prove a crucial part of the modern man’s great spiritual task.

Shippey has an online Beowulf “masterclass” coming up at the beginning of December. I’ve already signed up. It should be well worth your while if you’re interested in this period and its poetry. You can find information about the class here.

Homer's imaginative sympathy

Earlier this week I ran across a book called The World of Herodotus at our local used book store. The author sold me on it instantly—Aubrey de Sélincourt, whom I know best as a translator of Livy and Herodotus for Penguin Classics in its early years. When I got home and was leafing through it, I happened across this passage, which expresses what is to me one of the strongest and characteristic features of Homer’s poetry:

“[T]he burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy.”

— Aubrey de Sélincourt

Is the Iliad the tragedy of Hector, who is killed, or of Achilles, who loses his friend—and is himself doomed, as we know, to early death? The question is idle, because the burden of the poem is the universal tragedy of Man; none the less, the fact that one can ask it indicates another profound and beautiful trait in Homer—the breadth of his imaginative sympathy. It is no part of Homer’s purpose to exalt the Greeks at the expense of the Trojans or the Trojans at the expense of the Greeks. He does not take sides. If Mycenae is ‘golden’, Troy is ‘holy’; if Achilles is ‘splendid as a god’, Hector is ‘glorious’, and Priam as well as Agamemnon is shepherd of his people. We are moved by the grief of Achilles when his friend is killed, but we are moved as deeply by the noble scene in which the King of Troy humbles himself to come to Achilles’ tent and beg for the body of his son. Greeks and Trojans—all are men, splendid in manhood, and the poet looks upon them with benign and indifferent love. They fight to the death, for it is the nature of men to do so—of men proud of their strength and skill, hungry for honour and fame, glorying in the sunlight and the world of sense, but doomed so soon to fall like the leaves of a tree and to go down into the eternal darkness. It is a view of life stripped of complexity, bare of speculation, unburdened by any mystery but the ultimate mysteries of beauty and of death.

I’ve taken pains to explain Homer’s fair and sympathetic presentation of both sides of the Trojan War—his concern being less with political rights and wrongs or regional loyalty and more with arete regardless of who demonstrates it—to my students for many years. This puts it beautifully.

I especially like how de Sélincourt talks of sympathy rather than its weakling modern cousin, empathy. Sympathy, which is not coincidentally a Greek word, is what Homer evokes so powerfully throughout, even—or perhaps especially—in those vignettes that introduce us to a character as he’s dying violently. Remember that, at root, sympathy means to feel with or even to suffer with, and who hasn’t finished the Iliad feeling as if he’s suffered alongside Hector, Achilles, and Priam?

I have to anticipate at least one modern rejoinder, though, provoked by de Sélincourt’s repeated use of the word men there. Wouldn’t a dead white man’s sympathies be narrow and bigoted? Aren’t the Iliad and the Odyssey just war stories for boys? Aren’t the main characters all afflicted with toxic masculinity? Certainly the readership for the present fad of feminist parallax fiction based on Greek myth would think so, to judge by the way they talk about these stories. To which I can only say that they haven’t read Homer very well, if at all, and that it’s not Homer whose “breadth of imaginative sympathy” is limited.

If Homer, in his world, could reach across boundaries and battle lines to feel and understand—and to make his audience feel and understand—I think he deserves as much or better from us.

Where now the rider?

I mentioned in my summer reading recap that I’m currently reading Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, which my daughter thoughtfully picked out for me from her classroom’s library. Here’s a passage from about a third of the way into the book, the first time Joey, the horse, and his second owner, a British cavalry officer, see combat in the fall of 1914:

The gentle squeak of leather, the jingling harness, and the noise of hastily barked orders were drowned now by the pounding of hooves and the shout of the troopers as we galloped down on the enemy in the valley below us. Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the glint of Captain Nicholls’s heavy sword. I felt his spurs in my side and I heard his battle cry. I saw the gray soldiers ahead of us raise their rifles and heard the death rattle of a machine gun, and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

A simply narrated but powerful moment, and presented believably from the point of view of an animal. Having seen Spielberg’s film adaptation several times, I had a good idea what the outcome of this attack would be, and yet when I read “quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back anymore,” I choked up. I was moved.

Part of it is the fate of the kind, noble, courageous Captain Nicholls, and part of it is the finely wrought dramatic irony of Joey not realizing at first what has happened. (Another novel to do the same thing extremely well is Richard Adams’s Traveller.) But another factor is surely the image that the passage creates—the riderless horse.

The movie, in one of its most beautifully shot and stirring scenes, makes dramatic and stirring use of this image, but for my money the subtlety and simplicity of the original in Morpurgo’s novel cuts deeper.

Reading this passage brought to mind another riderless horse, this one from Michael Shaara’s great Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Just before Pickett’s Charge, the climactic Confederate assault on the last day of the battle, General Lewis Armistead cautions a fellow brigade commander named Richard Garnett against participating in the attack. Garnett is ill and can’t march in with the infantry; he’ll have to ride, and that means he’ll be a huge target. Garnett will not be dissuaded—an officer’s job is to lead.

The attack commences and Pickett’s division, including Armistead and Garnett’s brigades, moves out and comes under heavy artillery and finally rifle and canister fire. As Armistead, coming up with his men behind Garnett’s brigade, nears the Union line, we read:

Armistead thought: we won’t make it. He lifted the sword screaming, and moved on, closer, closer, but it was all coming apart; the whole world was dying. Armistead felt a blow in the thigh, stopped, looked down at blood on his right leg. But no pain. He could walk. He moved on. There was a horse coming down the ridge: great black horse with blood all over the chest, blood streaming through bubbly holes, blood on the saddle, dying eyes, smoke-gray at the muzzle: Garnett’s horse.

A gut punch of a conclusion to an already apocalyptic paragraph. Armistead briefly looks over the field to see if Garnett is still alive, unhorsed and on foot somewhere, but the reader knows immediately. The riderless horse tells the whole story.

The same horse reappears once later, after the attack has failed, as General Longstreet, the overall commander of the assault, responds to the destruction of his men:

There was nothing to send now, no further help to give, and even if Lee on the other side would send support now it would be too late. Longstreet hugged his chest. He got down off the fence. A black horse rode up out of the smoke: familiar spot on a smoky forehead, blood bubbling from a foaming chest: Garnett’s mount.

If the first passage is an apocalypse, with the horse a sign in the midst of catastrophe, here the horse is the final, mournful sign of defeat, a single, hollow death knell.

As with War Horse, the film adaptation Gettysburg uses this image to good effect. I think the purely visual language of film may even improve it. First, the film expands the point of view of Shaara’s novel by actually showing the viewer what happens to Garnett. He charges the Union line, trying to lead by example, and rides directly into the sights of a Union cannoneer who fires at him point-blank.* Garnett disappears instantly. We get a stunned reaction shot from General Lee, who watches from afar through his field glasses, and then this shot:

Soon after we cut to Armistead’s brigade following behind, and Armistead sees the horse and knows. No words are necessary.

And later, after Armistead has briefly breached the Union line, been shot down and captured, and the attack has collapsed, the horse reappears a final time—not for Longstreet as in the novel, but for General Pickett, who had insisted that Garnett be allowed to ride at the head of his brigade, a poignant double reminder.

The film does this wordlessly, in one of its most powerful shots.** First, as the walking wounded straggle back to the Confederate line the horse passes among them at a trot:

The camera follows, both panning and tracking with it from right to left—away from the fighting and the failed objective—to end on a poignant medium shot of Pickett, pushing in as he lowers his field glasses. The usually vivacious and fiery Pickett has been stunned into silence:

The riderless horse goes back much further than War Horse and The Killer Angels, of course. Consider the plaintive questions of The Wanderer. When the poem’s speaker turns from describing his lonely fate to ask where everything that once mattered and made life a comfort to him has gone—genap under nihthelm, darkened under night-helm—the very first pair in the list is:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

“Where is the horse? Where the young man?” Or, in a more famous but slightly less literal rendering by Tolkien, “Where now the horse and the rider?” These are paired in a way that doesn’t scan with most of the rest of the poem, suggesting their inseparability even in the loss of both.

And if we go back to the foundation of Western Literature, the last word of the Iliad, in a sentence that closes out Hector’s funeral and ends the action of the poem with thousands dead and the Trojan War still unwon, is the slaughtered Hector’s epithet: ἱπποδάμοιο, breaker of horses.

Is there any more poetic and immediately mournful image than the war horse with an empty saddle? Geared for war but aimless, it instantly suggests a whole tragedy. The riderless horse is a brave man, lost forever. The saddle is the gap he has left in the world.

* I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else mention this, but it’s pretty clear from the action around the gun that the filmmakers mean this to be Alonzo Cushing’s battery. Just watch what’s going on with the gunner and the dead officer right before Garnett charges.

** It’s not appreciated enough just how well shot Gettysburg is.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

Tolkien on tradition and transmission

From “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a draft lecture by Tolkien included in the recently published volume The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, which I’ve been reading this week during my vacation:

“But a poem perishes even as it is being uttered. To live it must be preserved in memory and be after repeated. And men die quicker than pictures or monuments; and the time soon comes when the memory must pass into a different mind and the repetition to another mouth, or perish.”

— JRR Tolkien

Tolkien’s lecture is primarily concerned with aspects of Anglo-Saxon verse forms and the perceived defects—according to earlier critics—of the verse of The Battle of Maldon, but in this early passage he makes a number of thought-provoking big-picture observations on how traditions are organically passed down and preserved.

I think this is an underappreciated aspect of tradition even, or perhaps especially, among conservatives of my stripe: it is not enough to pass things along to the next generation. Tradition must not only survive the transition between generations, but between different kinds of minds. That is, to survive, a tradition must be willingly preserved among people who, because of the changeability of human culture and the inevitable and steadily accumulating alterations of culture, are radically different from those who began the tradition. Those who care to preserve and pass on are therefore dependent upon people we will never meet, people whose backgrounds are unimaginable to us now, to continue that project.

I think this makes forming future generations to be those willing and able to imagine minds other than their own—those who are, according to Chesterton’s definition, not bigots—that much more crucial.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The life of Edgar Allan Poe seems made to be picked apart. Poe tried and failed at so much, crossed paths (and swords) with so many people, told so many different stories about himself and had so many different stories told about him, and wrote so much in so many genres that topical examination not only suggests itself as an approach but can prove unusually fruitful.

Last year I read John Tresch’s new book The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, which reexamines Poe’s life and work in the light of his deep interest in science and his connections to both the scientific establishment and popular perceptions of science in his day. It was a great read, one of my favorites of the year. This year I stumbled across a book I missed when it came out in 2020, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples. I read it with great interest.

The Man of the Crowd is both a short biography of Poe and an analysis of the urban contexts in which he lived almost his entire life and produced all of his work. Peeples divides the book into five chapters, each of which details one of the four cities in which he lived longest: Richmond, where he was fostered by the Allan family after the deaths of his parents; Baltimore, where he had family connections and got his first halting start in the publishing business; Philadelphia, where he came into his own, wrote a great deal of his fiction and poetry, and made a name for himself as a critic willing to start literary spats; and New York, his last stable long-term abode, where his wife died and his work and projects began to collapse around him.

The fifth and final chapter, “In Transit,” follows Poe’s last year and a half, a period spent almost entirely on the road between these cities—still writing, still publishing, still unsuccessfully striving to start his own monthly journal and now unsuccessfully courting a series of new brides.

In each chapter, Peeples captures not only the phases of Poe’s life—a complicated enough task, given its wild ups and downs—but the story of each city. Poe lived at a time of runaway urban expansion, of mass immigration and rapid industrialization, and Peeples succinctly charts how these cities had changed by the time Poe arrived and how they were changing while he lived there. Philadelphia, for example, had grown away from the Delaware River as it industrialized, shifting the city’s cultural and political center of gravity inland and outward, to the suburbs. Poe lived in both parts of the city at various times.

The Man of the Crowd balances this kind of sociological history with Poe’s personal and literary lives remarkably well. Peeples never allows his examinations of each city to overwhelm Poe and his family’s story, nor does he lose sight of the landscape in following Poe. This is the best kind of topical or analytical history, in that the big picture and small picture complement each other perfectly.

So, for example, when looking at how often Poe or the Poes moved (over thirty times in his short forty years), we see the interaction of artistic, commercial, and economic considerations with purely personal ones. Poe often moved his family from neighborhood to neighborhood to save on rent, or because they could not pay the rent, or to be nearer the offices of publishers or journals, but he also moved away from city centers to provide Virginia, his consumptive wife, a healthier environment.

It is the effect of the city on Poe’s personal and family life that proves most poignant. Peeples notes that at the time the Poes lived in Philadelphia and Poe, despite the quality of his work, struggled to hold down a job due to his alcoholic binges, “there were over nine hundred taverns” in the city, “including one [only] a block away” from the Poes’ house. For Poe, crime and disease were not the only hazards of walking across town. Unsurprisingly, he stayed sober longer when living on the outer edges of a city.

Peeples is also alive to the tragic symmetries of Poe’s urban life. Of Poe’s final business trip in 1849, a journey from which he never returned, Peeples writes:

The year before, Poe had tried to die in the city where he was born [Boston]; instead, he died in the city where he had found a career and family. But, in light of his peripatetic life, the location of his death seems less significant than the fact that he died “on the road.” Appropriately, the journey he had begun should have taken him to each of the four cities that shaped his career and where he lived most of that life: leaving Richmond, bound for New York by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Like so much of his life, though, this trip didn’t go as planned.

One of the charms of his relatively short study (180 pages not including notes, bibliography, and the like) is the wealth of telling detail Peeples includes. The familiar outlines of Poe’s life story are rounded out and given finer shading by the reminiscences of neighbors, friends, and would-be fiancées. The story of a young boy from one of Poe’s Philadelphia neighborhoods rowing him out to a quiet spot on the Schuylkill to shoot waterfowl was both unexpected and touching, as were details of Poe’s family life as observed by visitors. And, of course, the numerous little things that gave and give each city its unique tone and attitude are well integrated with Poe’s story. By the end you feel you know not only Poe, with all his good qualities as well as his tendency toward pride and self-sabotage, but four major cities as well.

I’ve barely even mentioned Poe’s work or any of The Man of the Crowd’s literary criticism, but that is not the book’s main focus. Peeples mostly avoids deep literary interpretation or speculation about the specific ways a given city or event may have influenced Poe’s work. Mostly. Where he does, he largely cites other scholars, almost as a formality. Was Poe’s later fiction is so violent because he grew up in a city with slave auctions? Or is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” somehow racially coded because Philadelphia, where he wrote and published it, had a large population of free black barbers? These theories seem obviously silly, and while Peeples doesn’t say so he is also refreshingly non-dogmatic and even openly skeptical about this kind of interpretation. What is most interesting is to note what Poe was working and where and when, and how the disparate pieces of his work fit together in time and place.

Like The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, this study of Poe is a study of his context, and works as a striking dual character sketch: of urban America in the first half of the 19th century—striving, rumbustious, commercial, confidently opinionated, prone to both grandeur and petty strife, and not a little dingy even in its better quarters—and of Poe himself, with all of the same adjectives applying.

The Man of the Crowd is an absorbing and well-written study of a great writer from an unexpected and informative new angle. If you have any interest in Poe or in the history of the United States during Poe’s lifetime, I heartily recommend it.

Virtue twisted

Siegfried’s death in a promotional still for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)

For the past several days I’ve been rereading the Nibelungenlied in Burton Raffel’s verse translation. This Middle High German epic, the story of the hero Siegfried, his marriage to Kriemhild and murder at the hands of her brother Gunther and his henchman Hagen, and her ruthlessly exacted revenge, is an adaptation of ancient Germanic legends for the age of chivalry. An earlier Norse version is preserved in The Saga of the Volsungs. But more on that below.

People rightly emphasize the roles of honor, vassalage, loyalty, and treachery when they look at the story of the Nibelungenlied. Knowing Siegfried’s fate from the beginning—the author makes heavy, Moby-Dick-style use of foreshadowing—it is easy to read Gunther, Hagen, and company as thoroughgoing villains, evil from the start. But what has struck me most on this reading are the admirable qualities of virtually everyone—at first. Even the awkward confrontation between Siegfried and Gunther’s court upon his arrival in Worms, when Siegfried greets the man whose sister he hopes to marry by asserting that he will take over his kingdom, is resolved without bloodshed. Game recognize game. Genuine friendship, celebration, and chivalrous and honorable victory over old enemies is the result.

Only later, when Gunther enlists Siegfried’s aid in a hopeless attempt to win Brunhild as his wife, do things start to go wrong. But what exactly, other than the famous hatred that erupts between Brunhild and Kriemhild, has gone wrong? And why do things continue worsening right up until the slaughter that ends the poem?

Here’s the passage that really got me reflecting, the opening quatrain of Adventure 16, “Wie Sîfrit erslagen wart”—How Siegfried was slain:

Usually bold, now brazen, Gunter and Hagen set
their treacherous trap, pretending a hunting trip to the woods.
Their knife-sharp spears were meant for boars and bears, they said,
and great-horned forest oxen. Clearly, these were courageous men!

“Usually bold, now brazen” is the half-line that caught my eye. It turns out to be Raffel’s gloss or amplification of the original (“Gunther und Hagene, || die réckén vil balt” is straightforwardly “Gunther and Hagen, the very bold knights”), but it neatly underscores the role of perverted—that is, twisted—virtue in the Nibelungenlied.

The villainy that runs through the poem runs through it from beginning to end, but only because the villainy morphs out of what begin as the characters’ virtues. When we meet them, Siegfried is powerful, courageous, and a loyal friend; Gunther is a generous and trusting (and trustworthy) lord and host; even Hagen’s bluntness is an asset. And all of them are mighty men, not only physically strong but vil balt, as they demonstrate over and over.

But these virtues, improperly subordinated, begin to twist and warp with the poem’s central act of deception—the winning of Brunhild. Gunther, like Siegfried, has heard of a beautiful and wealthy woman far away whom he desires to marry. Unlike Siegfried, Gunther has neither the confidence nor the abilities necessary to survive the warrior triathlon the superhuman Brunhild demands of all her suitors. And so he asks Siegfried for help, implying that he will allow Siegfried and Kriemhild to marry if he does. Once arrived in Brunhild’s kingdom, Siegfried pretends to be Gunther’s servant and dons his cloak of invisibility, beating Brunhild handily at all her games while Gunther pantomimes the actions required. An aggrieved Brunhild returns to Worms to be married to Gunther, and Siegfried and Kriemhild happily wed.

You can already see a downward spiral here, and, sure enough, this deception requires yet further deceptions—not only on Gunther’s embarrassing wedding night but for years to come. The heroes’ virtues buckle and twist under the pressure of their repeated bad choices until they become vices.

Thus Siegfried’s loyalty to Gunther and love for Kriemhild allow him both to exploit and to be exploited and end with him seeming, to us, hopelessly naïve, literally racing into the trap his enemies have set for him on that hunting trip. The prudent, generous, and courtly Gunther transforms into a cowed, easily swayed, guilt-ridden man willing to countenance murder to appease his wife. Kriemhild’s love for her dead husband leads her to abandon their son and to seek the utter destruction of her brothers’ kingdom. And Hagen’s intelligence and forthrightness twist into power-obsessed cunning and utilitarian cruelty. In the alchemy of the plot, boldness transmutes into brazenness and honor into brutality. The last casualty listed in the poem, even after Kriemhild herself has been struck down, is êre—honor.

The role of virtue, especially the destructive power of virtue twisted, is the thing that most substantially sets the Nibelungenlied apart from an earlier version like The Saga of the Volsungs. This stems from the circumstances of its composition. In The Mind of the Middle Ages, Frederick Artz describes how the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied

worked over early Germanic legends and other tales about the Burgundians and the Huns of the fifth and sixth centuries and combined with these the style of chivalric romance newly introduced from France—a strange mixture. There is more here of court manners, of women, of love, and of Christian ideas than in Beowulf, the Norse stories, or the French chansons de geste. The poet was a man of genius and from these divergent materials he produced a masterpiece.

There is a lot to be said for this summary, but for the purposes of this post I want to concentrate on the role of “Christian ideas.” Where the Norse stories of Sigurð feature doom or fate, an unyielding destiny to which the heroes must conform and willingly surrender themselves when the time comes, the murders and climactic bloodbath of the Nibelungenlied are unambiguously the result of character and choice—of strong men and women whose virtues have been twisted out of shape by deception. pride, and hatred. This is a thoroughly and vibrantly imagined picture of a world that is itself twisted under the weight of sin.

The Nibelungenlied, viewed from this angle, can be taken as a thoroughly Christian synthesis of the old Germanic stories imbued throughout not with the fatalism of the Norns but with an understanding that the world is fallen and sin has tainted everything, even our virtues.

More if you’re interested

Raffel’s verse translation is good, not least since it is one of the only recent attempts to render the odd, complex verse of the original into an English equivalent. I first read the Nibelungenlied in AT Hatto’s prose translation for Penguin Classics, which is still worthwhile and has some good appendices. Most recently I read a new prose translation by William Whobrey for Hackett Publishing, which has more scholarly apparatus than either Raffel’s or Hatto’s and includes the Klage, a short sequel to the Nibelungenlied by another unknown poet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Nibelungenlied, don’t rely on knowledge of the Volsungs or Wagner, both version of the story being quite different from this one, as I mentioned. You might check out this fun summary of the poem I discovered a few years ago, which reenacts the story 1) surprisingly thoroughly and 2) hilariously using Playmobil.

The Green Knight

Ralph Ineson in David Lowery’s The Green Knight

When the first trailer for The Green Knight appeared, five or six people immediately sent it to me. That’s speaking my love language. Y’all get me.

But I wasn’t sure what to make of the trailer. I hoped for a relatively faithful adaptation of one of my favorite poems, a truly great work of literature and Arthuriana, but I feared the filmmakers would simply use the skeleton of the story as a frame for weird, arthouse ambiguity, special effects, and sex.

As it turns out, I was kind of right about both.

The story (for those unfamiliar with it)

The Green Knight is an adaptation of the fourteenth century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The story, in brief: One year during King Arthur’s Christmas celebrations at Camelot, a strange knight—entirely green—arrives in the midst of the festivities and offers a challenge: give him one blow of whatever kind or severity on the condition that the man who strikes also receive a blow a year and a day later. Sir Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, steps up and beheads the knight, who then picks up his severed head, makes a speech, and leaves.

A year later Gawain leaves on a quest to find the Green Knight and keep his word. He stops for several days at the castle of Sir Bertilak, who engages Gawain in another game of exchange: Bertilak will trade whatever he kills while hunting for whatever Gawain gets while resting at his house—alone with Bertilak’s wife. Over three days and three hunts, Gawain resists all of Lady Bertilak’s advances except one: an offer of an enchanted belt that will render its wearer invulnerable. This Gawain accepts, a fact he hides from Bertilak during their exchange that evening.

Gawain leaves to meet the Green Knight, they spar verbally, and the Green Knight ultimately gives Gawain only a nick on his neck before revealing that he is, in fact, Sir Bertilak, and the entire scenario is a test engineered by the enchantress Morgan le Fay. Ashamed, Gawain and Bertilak make amends and Gawain returns to Camelot, chastened.

Pretty much everything in the poem is in the film The Green Knight, but often trimmed, rearranged, or expanded upon. Fair enough—an adaptation has to adapt. So, for instance, Morgan le Fay, now Gawain’s mother rather than his aunt, is present from the beginning; Sir Gawain’s quest to find the Green Knight, which in the poem gets a few offhand allusions to giants and wandering in the wild, takes up about half the film; and the time Sir Gawain spends with his host Sir Bertilak are streamlined into about two days. Again, fair enough—that kind of repetition, so thematically rich in the poem, might pose mind-numbing pacing problems in a film.

The positives

So I’m fine with the film not being 100% faithful to the source material, and went in prepared for that. Allowing for restructuring and artistic license, there was a good bit of The Green Knight that I enjoyed, or at least admired. But, on balance, I didn’t like the film, and that has a lot to do with the worries I had about the trailer.

Let me start with several things I liked:

• Despite not looking a thing like the man described in the poem (huge, unarmed and unarmored, entirely bright green, quite loquacious), the Green Knight was mesmerizing every moment he was onscreen, in no small part thanks to Ralph Ineson’s amazing voice. The rejiggering of the events at Arthur’s Christmas feast was calculated to give maximum impact to the Green Knight’s act of picking up his head and then addressing Gawain, and it worked. (In the theatre where I watched the film, I heard someone gasp when the Green Knight, headless, stood up. This is certainly one of those stories I would like to experience for the first time all over again.)

• The film has tons of atmosphere—perhaps too much (about which more below)—but I generally liked the look of things, most especially the wild Irish landscapes where much of the film was shot.

• Relatedly, the film’s music and sound design were quite good. Even though in some closeups you can tell the Green Knight is a man in a rubber mask, the sound of creaking, groaning timber and the bassy thud of his footsteps gave him tremendous gravitas.

• The strength of the source material shines through in the characters of the Green Knight himself, as I mentioned, and in Sir Bertilak, unnamed in the film but played by Joel Edgerton (recently of Netflix’s Henry V film The King, another mixed bag that I reviewed here). Edgerton’s performance is bluff, hearty, warm, and welcoming, exactly right for Sir Gawain’s host, and the trimming of Gawain’s stay with him was a detriment.

• Sean Harris (another veteran of The King) plays an older, more tired King Arthur, a performance that I liked quite a lot. I’d like to see Harris in his own King Arthur movie.

• A single scene with giants was interesting. It was simultaneously eerie—the shot that introduced the giants reminded me of that famous Goya painting—and a little unintentionally comedic. After the initial surprise wore off the scene started to look like a prog rock album cover. So this one doesn’t go down entirely in the win column, but I mostly liked it.

• One change to the source material that was quite clever: Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel for his “appointment” with the Green Knight early. In the poem the Green Knight is waiting for Gawain and sharpening his axe—a nerve-wracking image of patience. In the film the Green Knight is in some kind of hibernation and Gawain, after placing the Knight’s axe at his feet, has to wait for him through a night and a day. This recreates the night-long prayer vigil that a squire was expected to undergo before being knighted, a nice touch and thematically appropriate.

So credit where credit is due: The Green Knight is skillfully made, and I enjoyed some aspects of it. That said, the film’s style and its fast-and-loose thematic relationship with the source material do it no favors.

On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot

I’ll be brief on style. In discussing The Green Knight with several people since I saw it yesterday, the phrase I keep falling back on is artsy-fartsy. This being 2021, that means awkward editing, titles in big funky typefaces, intentionally discomforting ambient sound, an elephantine pace, dark, dingy digital cinematography, and, most especially, all of the above rolled into a whole lot of surrealist imagery. Some of this works—I enjoyed the variety of blackletter fonts used in the titles and some of the fever dream imagery. This could have been fun. But much of the rest is overwrought or simply twee, the markers of a self-aware hipster deconstruction. Another bother is the bleak, often low-contrast cinematography; some scenes are so dark it was difficult to make out what was happening.

Also: The Green Knight is “a fantasy retelling” of the story. Fine—Arthurian literature is all basically fantasy anyway. But keep your Medieval Myths Bingo card handy; the film leans hard on medieval stereotypes. The film opens on a shot of a peasant passed out in a straw-strewn yard full of livestock as seen from the window of a brothel, for crying out loud, and many scenes in mucky fields or foggy woods reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

More serious are the thematic changes. The filmmakers have given Gawain the Prince Hal treatment (it’s him waking up in the brothel in the opening scene) and depict him as an aspiring but wayward knight. The film is therefore a coming-of-age story. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this in reviews of the film, and it is mostly well-done. For instance, an invented scene in which Gawain meets the ghost of St Winifred and, when she asks him for a favor, asks what she plans to give him in exchange, shows succinctly just how much he still has to learn. But this arc is warped and complicated—if not compromised—by events near the film’s climax.

Rereading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight over many years, I’m struck more and more by how thoroughly, deeply Christian it is. There are the obvious things, like the story beginning and ending during the Christmas season, or Gawain’s shield—the shield that launched a thousand sophomore Brit Lit papers. (As a measure of the film’s regard for its source material’s themes, the shield is smashed by bandits early in the proceedings.) But this is rooted deeper than obvious symbols. Few stories are as unified in theme and plot as Sir Gawain, and separating the elements of its plot from its original themes guts it.

This is why deconstructionist versions of Beowulf always fail, and it’s why The Green Knight follows after them. A coming-of-age story is all well and good, but the Christian elements in the story offer hope of redemption for the youth who fails as he comes of age, as Gawain does.

So when The Green Knight’s Gawain is tempted by Lady Bertilak with the belt that will render him invulnerable against the Green Knight, he not only takes it but submits to a sex act (off screen) with her. How will he get out of this one when Sir Bertilak gets home and expects their gift exchange? He doesn’t—he flees, bluntly telling Bertilak that he doesn’t want his hospitality. And when the moment of truth comes and the Green Knight prepares his blow, Gawain first fantasizes about running away, becoming King himself, losing everyone he loves, and dying under siege—living a life of temporary success based on a lie. A powerful montage.

But Gawain snaps out of this fantasy sequence, removes the belt, and tells the Green Knight he is now ready. And, after a “Well done” and a wry joke, the Green Knight kills him.

Hony soyt qui mal pence

Well, it is heavily implied that the Green Knight kills him. The director thinks The Green Knight benefits from this ambiguous non-ending. The friend I watched it with was insulted that the film concluded on a punchline. The climax of the poem is a moment of grace that leads to repentance. The climax of the film gives us bravery in the face of failure but no redemption.

Finally, The Green Knight is missing the joy that runs through the poem from beginning to end. It’s a fun story to read despite the high stakes and lethal danger. The film is dour, consumed with its own grit and grime, its rare humor grim and no relief.

What The Green Knight’s filmmakers have accidentally crafted is exactly the kind of movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail was spoofing—stilted, grotesque, an anachronism stew heavy on medieval clichés, with muddy smoke-swept landscapes sparsely populated by people in rags, and, worst of all, self-important. The film delights in weird images and non-answers, which can be fine, but both there and where it matters most it simply isn’t the story of Sir Gawain.

An adaptation is free to be an adaptation, but in this case, despite the often handsome design, the wonderful atmosphere, and a handful of good performances, I’ll still take the original.

More if you’re interested

The source material is still worth reading. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been a favorite of mine for twenty years, ever since I started it one Sunday afternoon as a college freshman and couldn’t put it down. That was Burton Raffel’s translation, which is still in print and still worth your while. Perhaps my favorite is JRR Tolkien’s, still commonly read thanks to the name attached to it but a good translation first and foremost. Other good ones include those by contemporary poets Simon Armitage, who takes an odd ecological tack on his interpretation, and WS Merwin. Penguin Classics has four (!) editions—two modern English translations by Brian Stone and Bernard O’Donoghue, one edition entirely in the original Middle English, and a massive volume of the complete works of the Gawain Poet. Many others above present the text bilingually, which can be informative.

If you’re familiar with the vast tangle of medieval Arthurian literature (do take a minute to look at that map), you know that Sir Gawain varies wildly in characterization—sometimes courteous and principled, other times proud and boorish or even the instigator, because of a refusal to forgive, of the final war that destroys Arthur’s kingdom. Modern interpreters therefore seesaw on what kind of man he is. My least favorite version is The Once and Future King, in which Gawain and his clan are semi-barbarians dogged by Freudian complexes. Humbug. Inkling Roger Lancelyn Green, on the other hand, offers a convincing arc for Gawain that accounts for both the courteous knight of this poem as well as a later, compromised figure, in his King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

In a bit of serendipity, I ran across this excellent essay by Alexander Larman a few weeks ago: “Why can Hollywood never get the King Arthur story right?” An excellent question. The essay was occasioned by an announcement from Zack Snyder that he is working on an Arthurian project. One shudders to think of the result.

Moore and Dante on the state of the modern church

Virgil and Dante encounter Ugolino and Ruggieri in this engraving by Gustave Dore

Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission recently shared an incisive, searing post regarding the current state of the church. Moore is responding to the results of a recent Gallup poll that showed church membership in the United States has fallen below 50% for the first time since demographers began collecting those data.

Data, as I am always at pains to point out to my students, are one thing. Figuring out why this has happened is another. This happens to be something I have a lot of thoughts about, but let’s stick to Moore. His searing and quite clearly pained critique—a voice crying in the wilderness—stems from the church’s failure to live up to its own ideals, to walk the walk. A not uncommon critique, but well expressed and coming from an authoritative voice.

But there was one passage near the beginning that stood out to me in particular. Writing of his own adolescent crisis of faith, a crisis rooted in the obvious mismatch between many Christians’ stated beliefs and their actions, particularly where politics and the culture war are concerned, Moore notes:

I heard prediction after prediction after prediction tying current events to Bible prophecy that was all “just about to happen.”

But nobody ever said, “Remember when I said ‘Gog and Magog’ of the Bible is the Soviet Union? I was wrong about that” or “Mikhail Gorbachev, I told you was probably the antichrist, but, my bad” or “Now that I also am using these supermarket scanners, maybe they’re not the Mark of the Beast after all.” These folks just moved on with the next confident assertions, as though the last never happened at all. 

Moore only notes this in passing as he relates his own story and returns to the why of America’s decline in church membership, about which he has many sharply observed and compelling things to say. But this passage stood out to me in particular because it harmonizes with so much of my own life story.

I remember wondering as a kid where the Gog and Magog connection with Russia came from. It’s just not there in Revelation. But I never got a clear answer; it was simply a given that Gog and Magog were Russia. I was too young for the barcode freak-out, but I do remember the introduction of the BI-LO Bonus Card and the high dudgeon of a few when a handful of the cards happened to have 666 in the long number printed on the back. I wondered why, if the advent of the Mark of the Beast meant Jesus was coming back, we were trying to stop the Mark of the Beast. I heard the Onion article that generated the entire Harry Potter controversy read from the pulpit. And I remember very, very well the day my private Christian high school showed us an end times prophecy video in class, a video in which the preacher, building to what was meant to be a dramatic and chilling climax, noted that “the fasted growing currency in the world today is the German mark!” We watched this video in 2001, two years after Germany had officially switched from the Deutsche Mark to the Euro.

You can say that these are fringy or outside the norm. Certainly they do not reflect anything actually in the Bible. But as Moore goes on to argue, people lose their faith over this stuff—either because they infer from this nonsense that the entire Christian message is nonsense or because, like Moore, like myself, they believe so fervently in the truth that the nonsense creates an irresolvable tension within our belief. It’s even more discouraging if some well-meaning person takes you aside and tells you you’re just “thinking too much.” True story.

But we’ve been here before. After I read Moore’s post last week I pondered over it for a while and went on my way. But a few days later, three lines from Dante that have stuck with me for years came unbidden to my mind:

“Christ did not say to his first company:
‘Go, and preach idle stories to the world’;
but he gave them the teaching that is truth.”

— Dante, Paradiso XXIX, 109-11

The scene is heaven, the primum mobile, the outermost reaches of God’s creation, shortly before Dante moves into the presence of God himself. The speaker is Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, giving one of Paradiso’s many speeches on topics both temporal and eternal—because the two are intertwined. In the middle, she goes off on a rant against foolish earthly preachers and the damage they do. The fuller context, which I quote at length to make a point:

“…below [i.e. on earth], though not asleep, men dream,
speaking in good faith or in bad—the last,
however, merits greater blame and shame.
Below, you do not follow one sole path
as you philosophize—your love of show
and thought of it so carry you astray!
Yet even love of show is suffered here
with less disdain than the subordination
or the perversion of the Holy Scripture.
There, they devote no thought to how much blood
it costs to sow it in the world, to how
pleasing is he who—humbly—holds it fast.
Each one strives for display, elaborates
his own inventions; preachers speak at length
of these—meanwhile the Gospels do not speak.
One says that, to prevent the sun from reaching
below, the moon—when Christ was crucified—
moved back along the zodiac, so as
to interpose itself; who says so, lies—
for sunlight hid itself; not only Jews,
but Spaniards, Indians, too, saw that eclipse.
Such fables, shouted through the year from pulpits—
some here, some there—outnumber even all
the Lapos and Bindos Florence has;
so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance,
return from pasture, having fed on wind—
but to be blind to harm does not excuse them.
Christ did not say to his first company:
‘Go, and preach idle stories to the world’;
but he gave them the teaching that is truth,
and truth alone was sounded when they spoke;
and thus, to battle to enkindle faith,
the Gospels served them both as shield and lance.
But now men go to preach with jests and jeers,
and just as long as they can raise a laugh,
the cowl puffs up, and nothing more is asked.”

A familiar situation: pride, ostentation, cheeseball humor, dogmatism on topics where the Scriptures are silent, prioritization of pet theories over the Gospel, and pointless—and erroneous—scientific arguments. Who hasn’t heard the “NASA found Moses and Joshua’s missing day” myth at church at some point? (Here’s Answers in Genesis if you’re skeptical of Snopes.) And the results are the same: ignorant believers, “fed on wind.” And the ignorant are vulnerable to other, yet more dangerous winds.

Some people were surprised to learn that American Christians are so susceptible to conspiracy theories. I wasn’t.

It’s easy to despair over the situation the Gallup poll reveals, but both Moore and Dante point to possible solutions—indeed, the only solutions we can trust. Moore:

I came through it with my faith not just intact but deepened. That’s due, ultimately of course, to the grace of God. But, in terms of secondary causes, it’s due to the fact that I found a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity on a bookstore shelf and, having read to the point of memorization The Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I recognized his name. 

And it’s due to the fact that listening to Christian music led me to a Christian bookstore where I found, amidst all the kitsch, a copy of Christianity Today magazine, where I found columns by Philip Yancey and J.I. Packer and John Stott and Chuck Colson. These people seemed to take the reader seriously as someone who could think, and they seemed to be filled, not with anger and outrage and manipulation, but with what I recognized as the fruit of the Spirit—peace, joy, kindness, gentleness, self-control, etc. There seemed to be something there that bore witness to a Jesus who was not a means to an end but who was the Alpha and Omega of everything. 

And Dante, as in that passage from Ephesians I linked to above, distills Moore’s insight into one word: truth. A casual relationship with the truth is perhaps the area in which American Christians have conformed most closely to the world and departed furthest from God, who, after all, is truth. For a terrifying word study, just search for “truth” in the Gospel of John and 1 John. Consider as well God’s attitude toward those who authoritatively make incorrect predictions.

A scrupulous attendance to whether things are true or not, whether it is convenient for us or not, must be a fundamental part (“the teaching that is truth” above is, in Dante’s Italian, verace fondamento) of any hoped for revival of the American church.

Read the entirety of Moore’s newsletter reflections on the Gallup poll and the state of American Christianity here. The long passage of Dante quoted above is from Paradiso, XXIX, ll. 82-117. The translation is Allen Mandelbaum’s, which you can read here.

Heimweh

The photo above is one of the best I’ve ever taken. I snapped it during a flight with my dad over Rabun County, and it shows, from a position just southwest of Lake Burton, the lake, Charlie, Glassy, Tiger, and Black Rock Mountains, and other points north just as golden hour settles in over the folds of the mountains. Just looking at it gives me a powerful case of Heimweh.

I’ve been rereading the Odyssey for the first time in years in preparation for a podcast. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s nostos—his homecoming. This Greek word, combined with the suffix -algia (from algos, pain), gave us nostalgia, the pain and suffering felt when wanting to go home. The word nostalgia was coined in a medical school dissertation in 1688 as a scholarly form of the German Heimweh—literally “home-woe,” later borrowed and Anglicized in our tongue as homesickness.

Note that nostalgia and Heimweh were therefore medical terms. Indeed, nostalgia—homesickness—was regarded as a literal sickness until relatively recently. The original patients zero for Heimweh were Swiss mercenaries who, having left the fastnesses of their mountain homeland, often came down with the otherwise irremediable illness and had to take leave in order to recover. Without at trip home they would pine away, and even die. Being myself a child of the mountains, and having been at times homesick enough to feel it as a genuine illness, I’ve always felt a deep kinship with those long ago pikemen. I feel it even now. I ache to go home.

The word nostalgia today is a weak, bastardized ghost of what it once meant, and is the easy target of criticism. Nostalgia, we continuously hear, elides, obfuscates, or deliberately lies about the past, or offers cheap, commodified, kitsch versions of a tidied up past that is as good as a lie. There is indisputably some truth to this, but it is not the whole truth, and the corollaries that critique of nostalgia almost inevitably leads to—that there were no good old days, that the past must be remembered with scorn or a know-it-all attention to its failings, that there is only the present, that even the present is inadequate compared to the future toward which we march—are genuinely dangerous.

But the Odyssey gets nostalgia right. I have been struck, on this read-through, by Odysseus’s continuous, vocal Heimweh. But his pain and his desire to go home are not rooted in cheap reproductions of the past or self-aware cosplaying of previous decades, but in the real, concrete goods that he has lost—is losing—so long as he remains a maroon on a goddess’s island.

“Mine is a rugged land but good for raising sons—
and I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth
than a man’s own native country. . . .
So nothing is sweet as a man’s own country,
his own parents, even though he’s settled down
in some luxurious house, off in a foreign land
and far from those who bore him.”

Rereading the Odyssey now has been a revelation. Now, with sons I pray fervently to raise well and settled in a luxurious house (much nicer than I ever expected to live in at this stage of life, anyway) in a foreign land, far from those who gave me life in the rugged place where I was born… What is this pang in my chest? This sudden melancholy? Why do I feel so listless? Why does even a hazy glimpse of the mountains on the horizon, seen from a highway in the Piedmont, overpower me so?

Nostalgia can be false, undoubtedly. But real nostalgia, real Heimweh, is a sweet pain that can lead you back to goodness. It’s the call of rootedness, of the past and the future together in chorus, of restoration. Homer ably dramatizes that in the Odyssey, which, perhaps, is why Western literature, in the nostos of the canon, keeps trekking back to it.

The translation above is that of the late great Robert Fagles for Penguin Classics. I highly recommend it. The lines quoted after from Book IX, ll. 30-41 in Fagle’s translation.

Sappho's wedding songs on Core Curriculum

Amo te, ama me, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

I’m particularly excited about this third episode of the Core Curriculum podcast’s series on Sappho because, in keeping with its theme of epithalamia—marriage songs—host Katie Grubbs invited my wife to join her, her husband David, and me for the discussion!

This is Sarah’s first podcast appearance and we had a great time discussing Sappho, what exactly an epithalamion is, these specific poems and their sometimes troubling, sometimes amusing, often touching themes, and marriage both then and now. It’s a wide-ranging discussion and Sarah and I really enjoyed it. Please listen in!

You can find this episode’s excellent and detailed shownotes—including the specific poems under discussion as well as the translations we used for this episode—at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site here. You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or listen to this episode via the embedded player in this post. Please also like the CHRN’s Facebook page to get updates on new shows and episodes as they arrive.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.