Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

The Odyssey trailer reaction

Matt Damon as Odysseus in the teaser trailer for The Odyssey (2026)

To say that Christopher Nolan’s treatment of Homer is highly anticipated would be an understatement. By the time I discovered the first teaser for The Odyssey this evening while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping for my kids, the official trailer on the Universal YouTube channel had been up twelve hours and already had 9.8 million views. (Addendum: In the time it’s taken me to dash off these thoughts and observations, the trailer has cleared ten million views.)

So, in a very real sense, what I think doesn’t matter. Here are my thoughts anyway.

I’ve mentioned recently that, while I like Nolan generally and love a couple of his movies, I think his success and the leeway studios have given him since he wrapped up his Batman trilogy have led him further and further into self-indulgence. This peaked with Tenet, which was entertaining because Nolan is a spectacular showman and completely incomprehensible because, with its involuted story, he leaned hard into all of his own worst instincts. Part of what kept it from being a pure disaster was that its slick near-future world was fitting for his style: Inception and Interstellar both fit the bill, as does the futuristic Wayne Enterprises tech of his Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight Rises.

But imagine that recognizable Nolan aesthetic—matte black tactical gear, brushed steel and brutalist concrete, affectless acting, and obsessive rejection of linear time—transferred to… the Bronze Age.

I follow a number of gifted historical and archaeological artists on social media and the scuttlebutt is that Nolan’s crew reached out to some experts in Mycenaean material culture and then ghosted them. It shows. Homer’s world was a world of elaborate courtesy and protocol, gold, jewels, and precious metals, and suits of burnished bronze armor that thundered when their warriors leapt from their chariots to do battle. Matt Damon’s crew from Ithaca look like someone asked an LLM to blend 1950s sword-and-sandal Romans with a SWAT team.

That’s harsh, I guess. I’m not particularly hopeful. As much as I like Nolan, he has to be one of the filmmakers least suited to this kind of story. (Let me second what some of those historical artists have wished for: a Homer adaptation from Robert Eggers.) If I hope anything, I hope I’m wrong.

With (most of) the negativity out of the way, here are a few things that impressed me in this teaser:

• The IMAX cinematography looks atmospheric as Hades, so to speak. Hoyte van Hoytema is working with Nolan again and a number of the brief glimpses we get of major episodes from the Odyssey look good in strict filmmaking terms.

• Anne Hathaway as Penelope looks pretty woebegone in her brief appearance. I like Hathaway but wonder if she has the requisite cunning for the woman who was so perfectly matched to Odysseus. (My ideal casting: Rebecca Ferguson, who combines regal beauty with obvious, potentially terrifying intelligence.)

• I like the shots in Polyphemus’s cave, but am puzzled that we actually get a brief glimpse of a giant, shadowy form entering behind Odysseus’s men. Word was that Nolan’s Odyssey would be demythologized to some degree. Perhaps not? Or will the adventure scenes be Odysseus’s exaggerated retelling? If Nolan indulges in his nonlinear storytelling it will surely be when Odysseus is rescued and hosted by the Phaiakians and tells them his story—a portion of the poem that, to be fair, lends itself to Nolan’s thing.

• We get a glimpse of Benny Safdie as Agamemnon near the beginning. Ridiculous Greek fantasy armor. Perhaps an artifact of Odysseus telling an embellished version of his story?

• We don’t see him in the trailer, but Jon Bernthal is listed as playing Menelaus. I’d like to have seen him—or someone like him—in the lead. Bernthal looks tough and has unbelievable charisma. Somehow he keeps getting slotted into second-fiddle roles behind flat, awkward leads (e.g. “The Pacific,” in which he by all rights should have played John Basilone, and “The Walking Dead”). Robert Pattinson is also slated to play Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors, which should give him plenty of opportunities to steal the scene.

• Back to the trailer. We get brief glimpses of the Trojan Horse. No idea what the Achaians are doing hoisting it out of the sea, but the shots of the warriors crammed inside look great.

• Near the end we get some eerie shots of what appear to be Odysseus’s journey to the underworld. Not at all what I imagine when reading the story, but exceptionally atmospheric and spooky. Rightly so. Curious to know if we’ll see a bored, disillusioned Achilles.

• Devotees of ancient Greek shipbuilding are upset about behind-the-scenes images of the ships here. I know just enough to identify them as clinker-built, which is right for the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings but obviously wrong for Mycenaean Greece. That may or may not bother you.

• We end with an Odysseus and Penelope before the war, who seem much weepier and worrisome than the figures from Homer. Homer’s Odysseus cries, to be sure, but only after twenty years of bloodshed and captivity. Maybe it’s just that I have a hard time taking Matt Damon seriously when he channels high emotion. (His outburst as General Groves in Oppenheimer came across to me as impotent rather than righteous rage.)

So—we’ll see. This is a teaser trailer with perhaps a minute of footage, after all, and much of the film’s staggeringly large cast doesn’t appear at all. (Keeping Zendaya—as Athena!?—offscreen might have been a smart move.) It will certainly trade in spectacle, and maybe that will be enough. I’ve loved plenty of other atrocious historical films on that level (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), but something else those movies had going for them was strong performances and surehanded storytelling. Again—we’ll see.

I’m with those who were hoping for something a bit more meticulous in its reconstruction of Homer’s world, something we still haven’t really seen onscreen before. But that, for better or worse, is not Nolan’s forte. Even from this teaser it’s clear that he’s put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.

Artistic appreciation comes first

I was revisiting Chesterton’s Everlasting Man over the weekend and was struck by this passage in the opening paragraph of Chapter V, “Man and Mythologies”:

It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticize it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.

That last line is gold.

What I found striking was that Chesterton is essentially making the same point about understanding and interpreting mythology in general that Tolkien was in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Crtiics.”

“Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.”

— GK Chesterton

Early on Tolkien asks “why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical document?” And after summarizing the many prevailing angles of scholarship—and sometimes mere prejudice—from which Victorian and early 20th century scholars dismissed Beowulf as worthy of study, he argues: “[I]t is plainly only in consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view of conviction can be reached or steadily held.”

And he makes his point about the misunderstood—or simply missed—artistic purpose of the poet in a famous allegory:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

This is not to deny the value of doing the historical, cultural, and linguistic spadework to gain better understanding of mythology and its place in a given culture. That would be an overcorrection, as Tom Shippey has argued, in Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, that Tolkien’s lecture unintentionally swung the pendulum too far away from studying Beowulf for its history, so that Beowulf and Hrothgar are assumed to have the historicity of Leda and the swan.

These things require balance, but the artistic and imaginative—what Chesterton elsewhere in the same book called “the inside of history”—must come before historical parsing and sociological datamining. Once the artistic purpose is understood, what the myth-makers were hoping to see or show us from the top of their construction, the rest will fall more clearly into place.

The illusion of insight

A quick follow up from last week’s post about the overemphasis on “themes” as part of English education.

People may rebel against their middle- and high-school English classes out of frustration with things like themes and symbols, but the same oversimplifying impulses are alive and well in pop culture. Where the wannabe intellectual discussing his favorite books online might still talk about themes, the more populist, mystical type will gravitate toward “archetypes” and, the thing that has introduced legions of precocious readers to this kind of talk, the Hero’s Journey.

I don’t know enough about Jung qua Jung to judge the validity of his ideas as an approach to psychology, but I abhor the Jungian “archetypal” approach to literature, and for the same reasons I abhor overemphasizing themes.

An example, and one of the things that alerted me to and turned me against archetypal readings:

Years ago I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, a book on “the masculine archetypes” recommended in a blog series at The Art of Manliness. The authors, Jungian analysts, use the four titular archetypes to develop a taxonomy of the male personality and to examine the ways deficiencies and excesses—to put it in Aristotelian terms—warp it. Where the “mature masculine” balances all four, too little or too much of any of the archetypes result in various forms of bad character. The king, if insufficiently strong, becomes a weak puppet; if too strong, a tyrant. The warrior must use the wisdom of the magician to balance his propensity for violence, lest he become either a cruel sadist or a passive masochist. And so on.

All well and good. What has always been most interesting and appealing to me about Jungian archetypes is their usefulness in taxonomy—in sorting and categorizing. (There’s the Aristotelian in me again.) But the authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, in their effort to support their thesis, plunder history and world mythology for examples and badly misuse the ones that aren’t flatly wrong or made up.

Thus, in discussing the “generative,” fertility-related traits of the lover archetype, they give us Abraham and… Zeus. The father of two nations and the ravisher of mortal women and, in at least some traditions, little boys. Sure, both fathered children, but focusing on that similarity and ignoring the differences between these two “generative” archetypes is morally incoherent.

Which brings me to Jungian archetypes in literature and to the Hero’s Journey specifically. (Somewhere inside me I have a 5,000-word essay called “Against the Hero’s Journey,” but until I find the time and patience to write that, a post like this one will have to suffice.) There are plenty of problems with the Hero’s Journey—not least its artificiality, oversimplification or misinterpretation of other myths, and its rarity in the wild—but my primary objection to it is the temptation to treat an observation about structure as some kind of insight into content. Time and time again, I’ve seen stories dissected as examples of the Hero’s Journey and its characters labeled with various archetypes as if this says anything at all about them beyond pointing out the shape of their plots.

I can provide a very direct example. A few years ago I was surprised to see a new review on Goodreads for my first novel, No Snakes in Iceland. The review was fairly positive but what stunned me about it was seeing the author label No Snakes in Iceland an example of the Hero’s Journey. Is that actually true? I wondered. I had a good, long think about it and had to conclude that, yes, it mostly fits the shape proposed by Campbell.

But does that actually say anything about the story? No.

Borrowing from John Gardner and others, I’ve emphasized over and over and over particularity—the preeminence of concrete specifics—as a creative principle. It seems to me to be a good interpretive principle as well. So, to look at just one element of the Hero’s Journey with that in mind, the hero himself, what is this comparison ignoring that matters to the story?

The hero of No Snakes in Iceland is Edgar, a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon nobleman and close associate of King Æthelred, who has served the king for years as gofer and chronicler. Edgar is educated, intelligent, dutiful, and brave, if self-effacing and preferring to work behind the scenes. He is also bitter in the extreme at the loss of his only child to an accident and the loss of his wife in a Viking raid a few years before. He is in Iceland by the order of an archbishop as an act of penance and longs for home. Edgar’s story then—if you’re looking for a theme or character arc—is one of repentance.

Compare him to the specifics of a few other purportedly Campbellian heroes:

• Luke Skywalker—a young single man in an out-of-the-way place with no prospects and apparently undistinguished background. He is brave but petulant and ignorant of the world and mostly wants to get away from the family farm and make something of himself.

• Harry Potter—a child of exalted background who has been orphaned, deprived of his inheritance, and kept in total ignorance of who he is. Longsuffering and not ambitious, he is rescued from his predicament rather than escaping from it and placed in a situation where his natural goodwill can develop.

• Bilbo Baggins—a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor who enjoys a quiet, undistinguished rural life in his ancestral home. Unambitious to a fault and utterly unaccustomed to danger and hardship.

• Neo—a twenty-something cubicle drone by day and computer hacker by night, who lives in total isolation and with no apparent drive and no prospects of improvement. He is ignorant and apathetic and important mostly by dint of being “chosen.”

• Hamlet/Simba—an actual prince who is deprived of his inheritance by his uncle and actively and knowingly avoids his calling until confronted by his father’s spirit.

Are there points of similarity? Yes! But focusing on these obscures more than it reveals. The dissimilarities matter immensely, not only in terms of the specifics of each story but for message, moral import, and, yes, theme. Does it actually mean something that these heroes’ stories play out in a similar structure? No, I don’t think so. Does it mean something that Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are young and undistinguished while Bilbo and Edgar are older, successful, and well-connected? Yes. So why don’t we focus on that instead? Similarities might draw your attention but you’ll get more understanding from looking at dissimilarity.

As I hope I’ve suggested above, there’s a place for archetype talk in the discussion and study of good stories, but more often than not, without a counterbalancing focus on the particulars of a given story, it offers only the illusion of insight.

Homer and His Iliad at Miller's Book Review

I’m excited to say I have another guest post at Miller’s Book Review on Substack. Today I review classicist and historian Robin Lane Fox’s excellent recent book Homer and His Iliad, which I read this summer and briefly noted in my summer reading post here.

A short sample:

The poem’s style suggests that Homer was illiterate, master of a strictly oral tradition, but with important differences from the bodies of modern oral epic so often used to understand him. These epics from Albania, Finland, and the central Asian steppes are transmitted communally, mutate from telling to telling, and have a loose-limbed, gangling structure of “and then . . . and then,” stretching across their heroes’ entire lives.

The Iliad, on the other hand, is a tightly focused and artistically unified whole that minutely dramatizes one major incident over the course of a few weeks. Its characters, themes, and setting remain consistent throughout. Even minor details which Lane Fox calls “signposts”—a hero’s armor, horses taken as booty—are established early in the poem so that, when they reappear sometimes thousands of verses later, they do not seem a contrivance.

All of which indicate a single creative mind behind the work, a mind capacious enough to keep an entire war’s worth of characters and plot lines straight without reference to writing. If the style is indicative of oral poetry, the content—in its control, economy, and subtlety—suggests one poet.

Read the whole thing at Miller’s Book Review and be sure to subscribe for twice-weekly reviews and essays. I’m grateful to Joel for inviting me to contribute again.

Mound-dweller sighting in The Northman’s new trailer

Ian Whyte as the Mound-Dweller in The Northman

Update: You can read my full review of The Northman here. While I don’t directly address the mound-dweller scene in my review, let me endorse it and say it was one of the film’s highlights.

Yesterday a second official trailer for The Northman appeared on YouTube. As with the original teaser released before Christmas, which I wrote about here, this new trailer doesn’t provide a lot of plot specifics but does offer an abundance of intriguing snippets mostly conveying the same impression as the teaser—murder, revenge, and plenty of bloodletting along the way. It also offered something new, something not seen in the teaser: a mound-dweller.

At the 0:55 mark in the trailer we get three shots in two seconds. First, in a match cut from a deranged-looking Willem Dafoe, the corpse of a helmeted man enthroned in deep shadow. His eyes open. Next, presumably the same figure hunkering down behind a shield and raising a sword, a typical early medieval attack stance. Finally, an over-the-shoulder of the helmeted figure bearing down on the hero, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) as they fight in a tight, gloomy space surrounded by barrels, jars, and at least one shield, all within what looks like the gunwales of a ship.

It’s not much, but oh, how much it suggests. These two seconds show an instantly recognizable encounter with a mound-dweller—the ghost of Old Norse literature.

Caveats and corpses

I use the word ghost advisedly, since ghosts as the Norse conceived of and described them in the sagas are wildly different from the floating, translucent spooks you can simulate with a bedsheet. First, and most importantly, they are corporeal. These ghosts have bodies and can—and sometimes must—be killed a second time. In this respect they are more like zombies, undead revenants that can be killed. Unlike zombies, they are often swollen or grown to enormous size: “big as a bull” is a common description.

Second, it’s not typically hard to locate a mound-dweller. Just look for the mound or barrow where the undead was buried; this will usually be a local landmark. (Old Norse ghost-hunting shows would end after one episode, but probably be much more entertaining.) The mound-dweller, true to its name, could in a sense be said to “live” in its barrow.

Finally, mound-dwellers are almost always hostile. The bedsheet ghost or poltergeist might content itself with moaning at night or trashing a room. Mound-dwellers can be devastatingly destructive, killing cattle and any people it can catch.

Beyond that, there’s some variety in how these ghosts are described and how they behave, something reflected in the terminology. A commonly applied word is draugr, a general term for an undead revenant. I want to avoid implying that there’s a precise taxonomy to these creatures, but two other words for draugar are suggestive of different kinds:

After-walkers

The first, the aptrganga (literally the “after-walker,” i.e. walking around after he’s dead), roams around, usually at night, causing trouble and killing people or damaging property before returning to its barrow. These are the most fearful and destructive ghosts.

A famous is Víga-Hrappr or Killer Hrapp, a man who appears in Laxdæla saga or The Saga of the People of Laxardal. A pushy neighbor and household tyrant, Hrapp actually drives his neighbors to combine against him for mutual support. He finally dies—in bed, weakened but still malicious, and asking to be buried sitting upright so he can watch the house. These are all bad signs. The saga writer goes on:

But if it had been difficult to deal with him when he was alive, he was much worse dead, for he haunted the area relentlessly. It is said that in his haunting he killed most of his servants. To most of the people living in the vicinity he caused no end of difficulty and the farm at Hrappstadir became deserted.

One of the saga’s heroes, Hoskuld, disinters Hrapp and reburies him farther from everyone’s farms. “Hrapp’s haunting,” the saga writer tells us, “decreased considerably after this.” That’s not enough assurance for a lot of people, including Hrapp’s widow, who refuses to move back, so Hoskuld himself moves into the area. It’s Hoskuld’s son, Olaf the Peacock, who finally rids Laxardal of Killer Hrapp.

One evening the farmhand in charge of the non-milking cattle came to Olaf and asked him to assign the task to someone else and ‘give me other duties’.

Olaf answered, ‘I want you to look after your own duties.’

The man replied he would rather leave the farm.

‘Then you must think something is seriously wrong,’ Olaf said. ‘I’ll accompany you tonight when you tie the animals in their stalls, and if you’ve any cause for complaint, I won’t blame you. Otherwise you’ll pay for causing trouble.’

Olaf then took the spear known as the King’s Gift in his hand and went out, the servant following him. Quite a lot of snow had fallen.

They reached the cowshed, which stood open, and Olaf told the servant to go inside, saying. ‘I’ll herd the animals inside for you and you tie them in their places.’

The servant went towards the door of the cowshed but suddenly came running back into Olaf’s arms.

When Olaf asked what had frightened him so, the servant answered, ‘Hrapp is standing there in the doorway, reaching out for me, and I’ve had my fill of wrestling with him.’

Olaf approached the door and prodded with his spear in Hrapp’s direction. Hrapp gripped the spear just above the blade in both hands and gave it a wrench, breaking the shaft. Olaf made a run at him, but Hrapp let himself sink back down to where he had come from, putting an end to their struggle.

Hrapp having cheated by sinking into the ground and ending the fight, Olaf goes to the place where Hoskuld had reburied Hrapp and opens the grave, in which he finds eerie confirmation of the previous night’s struggle: “Hrapp’s body was perfectly preserved and Olaf found his spear blade there.” Olaf has the body burned and the ashes scattered at sea, ending the haunting.

The outlaw Grettir the Strong fights and kills two draugar in the saga named after him. The second, a shepherd named Glam, freezes to death and returns as a ghost to terrify the farm where he died. When Glam enters the farmer’s hall at night, Grettir confronts him, cuts off his head, and stuffs it between the corpse’s legs against the buttocks.

The mound-dweller proper

But the first of the two draugar that Grettir fights in his saga belongs to the other subset: it’s a haugbúi, a mound-dweller devoted to protecting its mound and grave goods. Told of Kar the Old’s haunting and terrorization of the countryside, Grettir resolves to kill the ghost—not by waiting to encounter it in the wild, by accident, but by entering the mound and confronting it:

The night passed; Grettir appeared early the next morning, and the [farmer], who had got all the tools for digging ready, went with Grettir to the howe [barrow or grave mound]. Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; Audun implored him not to go down, but Grettir bade him attend to the rope, saying that he meant to find out what it was that dwelt there. Then he descended into the howe. It was very dark and the odour was not pleasant. He began to explore how it was arranged, and found the bones of a horse. Then he knocked against a sort of throne in which he was aware of a man seated. There was much treasure of gold and silver collected together, and a casket under his feet, full of silver. Grettir took all the treasure and went back towards the rope, but on his way he felt himself seized by a strong hand. He left the treasure to close with his aggressor and the two engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed. The howedweller made a ferocious onslaught. Grettir for some time gave way, but found that no holding back was possible. They did not spare each other. Soon they came to the place where the horse's bones were lying, and here they struggled for long, each in turn being brought to his knees. At last it ended in the howedweller falling backwards with a horrible crash, whereupon Audun above bolted from the rope, thinking that Grettir was killed. Grettir then drew his sword Jokulsnaut, cut off the head of the howedweller and laid it between his thighs.

Most prized of the treasures Grettir recovers from Kar’s mound is a sword, and many of the stories in which heroes break open mounds do so either with the result of or, as with the shieldmaiden Hervor in The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, for the express purpose of getting a sword.

Conclusion

Again, I want to emphasize that Norse literature doesn’t present a Linnaean taxonomy of supernatural creatures, and you should have noticed some overlap and sloppiness in how the passages quoted here describe these creatures. Kar the Old, though explicitly a mound-dweller, apparently also leaves the mound sometimes, driving people out of the area just like Killer Hrapp. And Killer Hrapp, a clear case of the after-walker, is dispatched like any mound-dweller—disinterred and destroyed.

The three terms I’ve unpacked are not apparently completely interchangeable, but there is enough overlap to allow for using them loosely. What mattered more to the saga writers and the generations of Icelanders who handed these stories down was the stories themselves. And those stories have inspired generations of storytellers and writers since, including myself.

The ghosts in The Saga of Grettir the Strong and other sagas directly inspired my first published novel, No Snakes in Iceland. In that story, set on a farm in late 10th-century Iceland, the brother of a prosperous farmer drowns in a frozen river and, following his hurried burial in a mound, returns to terrorize his brother’s farmstead and those of the surrounding valley. He rides the house like a horse, kills cattle and men, and, in his bloodiest attack, breaks into the farmstead’s hall itself. The novel’s narrator, Edgar, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and poet living in self-imposed exile, reluctantly accepts the task of killing the ghost. This proves harder than even Edgar anticipates, and also reveals that there is much more going on among these farmsteads than the attacks of a ghost.

But rather than the roving, cattle-throttling variety, The Northman’s ghost seems pretty clearly to be the mound-dweller proper—and not just any mound-dweller, but one buried enthroned, in fine armor, aboard a ship loaded with goods. What we get in those two seconds of the trailer is strikingly reminiscent of Grettir’s battle with Kar the Old in his mound. Further, the actor playing the mound-dweller, Ian Whyte, a stuntman and former basketball player, stands over seven feet tall, so the filmmakers have clearly also gone for the “big as a bull” characteristic for this mound-dweller. It’s hard to tell from what we get in the trailer, but it should be fantastically intimidating.

I don’t know at what point in the film Amleth’s raid on the mound will take place, or what he will seek there or why (though I’d be surprised if a famous sword doesn’t come out of it), but I’m most looking forward to encountering this ghost.

More if you’re interested

One of the sagas I mentioned here, The Saga of the People of Laxardal, is collected with other goods ones in the excellent Penguin volume The Sagas of Icelanders. It’s Keneva Kunz’s translation in that volume that I quoted from above. It and The Saga of Grettir the Strong are also available in individual volumes from Penguin Classics, as is Eyrbyggja Saga, another saga with a detailed ghost story. And Jackson Crawford’s recent translation of The Saga of Hervor and Heiðrek in Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes includes the strikingly different encounter with a mound-dweller that I allude to above. You can also read most of these for free online at the Icelandic Saga Database, whose translation of Grettir I quote above.

On YouTube, Jackson Crawford offers a concise but detailed breakdown of Old Norse ghosts using the story in Eyrbyggja Saga, with his usual careful attention to the sources, here. If that’s only whetted your appetite for this stuff, he also has an excellent hourlong interview on mound-dwellers, trolls, and other such creatures with University of Iceland Professor Ármann Jakobsson here.

The Northman arrives in theatres next week. Check out the new trailer either embedded above or on YouTube here. And if you can’t get wait or simply want more mound-dweller in your diet, please give my novel No Snakes in Iceland a read.

The Northman trailer reaction

Update: You can read my full review of The Northman here. In my review, I don’t address all the nitty-gritty bullet-point stuff that I note in this trailer reaction, but the film is loaded with good details. It exceeded my expectations and was well worth the wait.

I’ve only gotten seriously excited about two movie trailers this year. The first was one I wasn’t expecting—The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne, the trailer for which genuinely surprised me with its atmosphere and cold-wet-asphalt visuals. It also helped that, putting the stink of the Cullens further and further behind him, Pattinson has impressed me over and over as a fine actor. I’m looking forward to The Batman.

But I’m here to talk about the other trailer I’m excited about, one I’ve been anticipating for a long time—The Northman. The first trailer arrived this afternoon.

The Northman is writer/director Robert Eggers’s third film. His first feature, The Witch, stunned me not only with its genuinely creepy atmosphere and grim plot, but its attention to period detail, not only in costumes, sets, and props but even in the way the characters spoke and thought. His second, The Lighthouse, was somewhat too content with non-answers and fart-sniffy archetypal and Freudian mumbo jumbo to suit me, but was nonetheless a visual masterpiece and Eggers’s care for the look, feel, and sound of a period was again in strong evidence. When I learned that his next project was a Viking-era drama inspired by the sagas, I was excited—and somewhat trepidatious. Anyone with a serious interest in the Vikings or the Early Middle Ages more generally is used to being disappointed.

And now that the first trailer is here, I still feel largely the same. Excited. Trepidatious. But considerably more excited.

The Northman appears to tell the story of the son of a Scandinavian king or warlord. After the king is betrayed and murdered by his evil brother, the son goes on the run with the goal of one day returning for revenge. So far so good—classic saga material. You could probably count the sagas that don’t involve revenge on one hand. The son, who as an adult is played by Alexander Skarsgård, seems to spend a while as a captive or slave before allying with a volva or sorceress played by the ever-spooky Anya Taylor-Joy. Here you’re getting some solid stuff from the legendary sagas. And there’s plenty of material that spans both the more nitty-gritty, realistic sagas and the legendary material, especially a few shots of Skarsgård and company wearing wolfskins as they attack some kind of fortification. Is this the climactic battle? Somewhere in the middle, as our Northman fights his way toward his uncle? It’s unclear. But the wolfskins mark him as an ulfheðinn or wolf-shirt, a form of dangerous rogue warrior conceptually similar to a berserkr.

Beyond that—who knows? The trailer is long on atmosphere and striking images but thankfully leaves much of the plot unexplained. I was left wanting more, so the trailer is definitely doing its job.

Other thoughts/observations:

• First and foremost, I’m not seeing any tattoos or fashy haircuts. Already major points in The Northman’s favor. Instead we’ve got heavily bearded but largely well-kempt men and women, as befits a culture famously concerned with appearance and especially coiffure.

• As for other forms of adornment, there are some sensible necklaces and brooches and plenty of rings, and it’s good to see the hero with arm-rings in a couple of scenes. These were the badges of serious warriors across many early medieval Germanic cultures.

• Weapons and armor (about which more below) look interesting, though I couldn’t examine every shot. The hero seems to be wearing a long seax (imagine a Germanic bowie knife) diagonally across his waist in his scenes as an ulfheðinn. A nice touch, one that doesn’t make it into a lot of medieval movies. I’m mostly thankful that the helmets in the trailer look good based on what we know (which isn’t much) and that other armor seems limited to mail shirts. That’s accurate. No anachronistic plate armor or ridiculous leather getups here, thank heavens. See the still from Alfred the Great here to see how badly this can go wrong.

• “You must choose between kindness for your kin or hate for your enemies.” A Viking Age moral dilemma, one not uncommon in the sagas, and a call to be a drengr. (Which, not coincidentally, seems to be the last word chanted in the trailer.)

• Great scenery, especially the glacier in Iceland and some of the sweeping landscapes. Eggers is always very attentive to the environments in which his stories take place, an undervalued aspect of modern storytelling.

• Here’s an iffy one: While what we get in the trailer largely sticks with the muddy doom-and-gloom aesthetic of most medieval movies, it is welcome to see the characters largely wearing nice fabrics (as opposed to burlap or outright rags) and colors. Not just the Norse but everyone throughout the medieval world enjoyed colorful clothing just as much as we do. The Northman’s palette is pretty muted, presumably for artistic reasons as much as that ineradicable image of the Middle Ages as drab, but the young hero’s red tunic and Taylor-Joy’s blue shift were nice touches. I hope there’s more of that.

• Related: When evil uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang) arrives to kill the hero’s father, he’s wearing a “goggle” helm with attached wraparound mail typical of the Vendel period, which directly preceded the Viking Age. A touch of archaism or ceremony for the uncle, then? Also, the drab color palette could be especially purposeful here, as several sagas refer to characters ritually dressing in black to prepare for a premeditated killing. If this is intentional, it shows Eggers has done a ton of homework. I’m hopeful.

• Further related to the Vendel era stuff: Is that Oðinn we get a glimpse of by the fire near the end? His one visible eye appears cloudy. Further, he’s wearing a helmet typical of scenes depicted on Vendel art, which are often interpreted as mythological scenes. Here’s a really similar one. Notice the rods or staffs. Some kind of staff was apparently important for the practice of seiðr, a form of magic or divination that was typically associated with women (see Taylor-Joy’s “cunning” woman) and shameful for men to perform—though Oðinn, notably, practiced seiðr. Is that what’s going on in the trailer? Is that why no one in the scene is wearing pants? Who’s to say at this point, but again, that it suggests these possibilities shows that Eggers isn’t going for the superficial Hollywood image of Vikings.

• Speaking of Hollywood Vikings, there appear to be no shield-maidens, female warriors, or other Hollywood Warrior Chicks™ in the trailer, which is astounding. Hollywood cannot resist throwing that bit of Norse fantasy in. (And I do mean fantasy: here’s a summary of the most prominent example from the legendary sagas.) The only exception here seems to be a valkyrie, about which more below.

• Also: rather more wire-fu than I prefer, especially that over-the-top axe blow at approximately 2:05. Hoping the movie doesn’t go off the rails when the warriors draw their weapons, but there’s little enough here that I’m not too worried yet.

• Other notes on combat: Lots of sneaking in small numbers, especially under cover of darkness. Definitely rings true if you’ve read the sagas at all.

• A few shots I’m particularly eager to see more of: speaking of stuff straight from the sagas, we get what is clearly a glimpse of the burning of a turf long-house. (See the still at the top of this post.) Several other shots seem to show fighting inside the hall, presumably before the whole thing is torched.

• Creepy but 100% realistic detail: Two shots near the end of the trailer appear to show a valkyrie riding through the sky. In the first shot, as she screams, you can see black streaks across her teeth. Numerous skulls from Viking Age burials have exactly this kind of grooving filed laterally across the teeth. Some kind of badge of honor for a warrior? Medicine or magic? Mere personal decoration, like a rapper’s grill? No one knows for sure, but it was cool to see that make it into the movie.

• Eggers loves his dreams and nightmare visions, and I’m guessing the valkyrie and Oðinn—if that is indeed him—might factor into them.

• Finally, I haven’t said much about the cast, but they look great. I’ve liked Skarsgård in whatever I’ve seen him in but remember him primarily as Sergeant “Iceman” Colbert in the mini-series “Generation Kill.” Here he seems to be channeling some of his version of Tarzan, particularly in the ulfheðinn scenes, which look like they’re calculated to show off his abs. Good for him, I guess. Ethan Hawke looks great as a good, wise king and father; Claes Bang—who has suddenly appeared in a bunch of recent American movies, none of which I’ve seen—as a quietly threatening evil uncle. Scar to Hawke’s Mufasa? Taylor-Joy was exceptional in both The Witch and, in something completely different, Emma, and should be excellent here as well. I’m especially interested in Willem Dafoe, whose role is mostly just teased here but, considering Dafoe’s caliber, should be important and not a little weird.

So—The Northman looks like a Viking revenge story taking place on two levels, the first a potentially quite authentic and realistic historical world and the other a dimension of dreams, visions, or the supernatural. That’s my initial reaction, anyway, with a few thoughts, observations, and wonderings. Considering what we get in the trailer, and considering the talent involved, I’m guardedly optimistic. We’ll see. Like I said, medievalists are used to being disappointed (see Knight, The Green), but based on these two and a half minutes, I’m here for it.

Check out the trailer and see for yourself! The Northman comes to theaters April 22 and I guarantee I’ll be there.

Addendum: If you can’t wait for April, as I imagine I may have a hard time doing, please do check out my novel No Snakes in Iceland, which is set in the same world but deals with ghosts and grief and mystery rather than dynastic betrayal.

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.

Black Ships Before Troy

Odysseus leads a peacemaking delegation to Achilles in Black SHips Before Troy, illustrated by Alan Lee

One night last week I closed our copy of Black Ships Before Troy and set it aside. It was bedtime, and I had just read to my six-year-old daughter and four-year old son about the long-fated duel of Achilles and Hector, of Hector’s death, his father King Priam’s pitiful trip into the night to beg for his son’s body, of the weeping of Troy’s women as they washed and dressed the body for the pyre, and the funeral rites performed for the dead prince.

We sat quietly for a moment. At last my daughter, who had watched me intently throughout this chapter, said, “I’ve never seen a daddy cry before.” And then, “That was weird.”

I picked up Black Ships Before Troy for three reasons: first, my lifelong love of the story of the Trojan War and my constant search for good ways to introduce my kids to these stories; second, the fact that it was written by Rosemary Sutcliff, author of much classic children’s historical literature, like her novel The Eagle of the Ninth; and third—and decisively—the illustrations by Alan Lee, one of the great illustrators of Tolkien. The book proved excellent on all three counts.

Despite its subtitle, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad tells the story of the whole Trojan War. Sutcliff gives special attention to the events of the Iliad—which takes place across only a few weeks near the end of the ten-year siege—but Sutcliff bookends the story of Achilles’s rage with chapters that explain the backstory and the war’s ultimate outcome, from Eris’s fatal wedding gift and the judgment of Paris to the construction of the Trojan Horse and the final sacking of the city. Along the way she also incorporates incidents like the arrival of Penthesilea’s Amazons, Odysseus and Ajax’s dispute over Achilles’s armor, and the story of Philoctetes. It’s very well done.

I appreciate two things especially about Sutcliffe’s treatment of the war:

First, she doesn’t oversimplify the parts based on the Iliad. Black Ships Before Troy teems with characters and the plot rises and falls with the tidelike motion of the armies in Homer’s poem, in which the heroes on both sides first drive and then are driven by the enemy. She also includes the actions of the gods—Aphrodite saving Paris’s bacon during his duel with Menelaus, Apollo striking the Achaian camp with plague, Thetis rising from the waves to comfort her sulking son—and thereby preserves a lot of the tone and integrity of Homer’s original.

Second, and relatedly, she doesn’t soften the characters or the action. Her descriptions of things like the capture and enslavement of Briseis or the sacrifice of captive Trojans on Patroclus’s funeral pyre are neither gratuitous nor apologetic; she simply presents Homer’s heroes as Homer presented them, warts and all. This gave me with lots of opportunities for conversation with my kids, especially where deceit and cruelty factored into the plot as it does in so many places. Relatedly, Sutcliff does not stint on the violence of the combat. Again, it is neither gratuitous nor euphemized, but it is clear in this story that this terrible war ends lives in terrible ways, including those of characters we love.

Hence the anecdote at the beginning of this post. Although I was ready for it, revisiting Hector’s death and reading about the grief of a father, a wife, and a whole city while flanked by my children was overwhelming. It made the most moving moments in Homer newly fresh and impressed that story that much more upon my kids.

The upshot is that Black Ships Before Troy presents, on a kid-friendly level, the same themes of heroism and excellence and the same sense of tragedy as the Iliad itself. I had some great conversations with my daughter in particular about the relative virtues of Achilles and Hector—who was more of a hero, and why, and what we thought might happen when the two of them finally met. By about the midpoint of the book she had stopped asking which side was the good guys and which the bad guys but had decided opinions about which characters were good and which bad—a sign of Homer at work.

This is a children’s version but it is not a modernization or ideological reinterpretation, thank God. This is as close as I’ve seen it get to pure Homer for kids. We loved it.

Finally, Alan Lee’s illustrations. The book is lavishly illustrated. There are pictures on almost every page, from dramatic action scenes teeming with characters—picking out who was who in the battle scenes became a fun game, a Mycenaean Where’s Waldo? for the kids—to halcyon scenes of the peaceful times before the war. A recurring statue of Aphrodite proves particularly poignant. Lee clearly worked hard to make the figures, landscapes, architecture, and equipment as authentic feeling as possible, striking a balance in style between what we’ve recovered from Trojan War-era archaeological sites and later Greek fashions. It’s beautiful, and it works magnificently. The pictures evoke a feeling both of gritty reality as well as of heightened myth. Of one scene in which Achilles, newly armed by Thetis in a panoply forged by Hephaestus himself, charges across the blood-flowing river Scamander toward the gates of Troy, my daughter said, “He looks glorious!”

The publisher recommends Black Ships Before Troy for ages 7-10 or older. That’s probably about right if the child is doing the reading, as the language is slightly elevated and consciously old-fashioned. I read it aloud to my two older kids, which gave me a chance to stop and explain new words and refresh them on who was who. My six-year-old got a lot out of it and really responded to the story. My four-year old enjoyed the pictures and the fighting and had favorite characters (Hector especially) but didn’t seem to track with the story. But that didn’t seem to bother him. Both enjoyed it, and I savored the chance to share this with them.

Black Ships Before Troy is an excellent children’s retelling of the Trojan War. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a beautifully illustrated way to introduce Homer to and enjoy one of the great legends of Western civilization with your kids.

Addendum: The illustrated edition of Black Ships Before Troy was apparently out of print for a long time before being reissued recently. This can make it difficult to find the correct edition on Amazon, where used copies are currently listed for over $300. I’ve linked to the correct hardback reissue, which is less than $20, in this review.

The Odyssey XXII-XXIV on Core Curriculum

Odysseus killing the suitors in an illustration by John Flaxman (1755-1826)

Our journey is ended! This morning the final episode of Core Curriculum’s slow read through Homer’s Odyssey dropped, concluding the show’s fourth series. It’s been great.

In this episode, host David Grubbs talks to Coyle Neal, Jay Eldred, and me about the three climactic books of the Odyssey. Among the topics we discuss are Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors and the numerous action movies it reminds us of; whether justice was served in the killing of the suitors and, especially, the slave girls who had collaborated with them; the duel of wits and cunning between Odysseus and Penelope upon their reunion; and the final restoration of order, with a little assist from Athena. There’s much, much more, but this is a good précis of a very rich discussion.

I had a great time on this episode and on all the Odyssey episodes I got to participate in. If you haven’t been following along, I hope you’ll go back to the first episode of the series. These are great discussions and have only deepened my appreciation of some of my favorite books.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s detailed shownotes on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening! And stay tuned for the forthcoming fifth series of the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Core Curriculum!