Spring reading 2022

This has been a busy semester. I had classes on three different campuses of my college and spent a great deal of time driving. I’m thankful to say, however, that despite a long and arduous semester I was able to get a lot of reading done. Here are the highlights, sorted by genre.

(For the purposes of this post, as usual, “spring” runs from January 1 to roughly the beginning of summer classes, give or take a few days. One tries to stay flexible.)

History

You’ll be Sor-ree! by Sid Phillips*—Sid Phillips may be familiar to readers of EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed or viewers of the HBO miniseries “The Pacific,” in which he was a secondary character. You’ll be Sor-ree! is his memoir, originally published privately and circulated among friends and family in the late 90s. Phillips combines terse narration of the harshness of Guadalcanal and Peleliu and the horrors of combat with a wry wit and an insistence that, despite it all, these young Marines occasionally laughed and had fun. It’s not as powerful a memoir as his best friend Sledge’s, but it conveys more clearly than any other book I’ve read the youthfulness of the teenagers and twenty-year olds who went to war in 1941, many of whom never came back.

Copse 125, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Basil Creighton—Ernst Jünger is best remembered today for his memoir of First World War infantry combat Storm of Steel, but in the mid-1920s he also published this memoir, which is based on a single month of his war diaries from the summer of 1918. Slower paced and more philosophical, filled not only with the nitty-gritty of trench life but also with the musings of a dedicated young officer in tough circumstances, Copse 125, in its stalwart tribute to guts and endurance, is also reflective of the humiliations and uncertainties of the postwar Weimar Era. A thought-provoking, insightful, and gripping window into the experience of the trenches.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—An excellent succinct history of the Second Reich, from its origins in the nationalist unification movements of the mid-19th century to its collapse and destruction at the end of the First World War. For a book of its size, I was astonished at how much Hoyer fit in, with the book straddling the political and military, the economic and commercial, the imperial, the ideological, and with some space left over for individual personalities (Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II especially) and German culture. Culture proves especially important, as one of the book’s major narrative threads is the artificial shaping of a unified “German” culture out of the disparate and diverse cultures of the 39 states of the former Holy Roman Empire for political purposes.

The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy, and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream, by Charles Spencer—A readable, well-paced popular history of the reign of Henry I and the disastrous consequences of the sinking of the White Ship, which went down in 1120 with only one survivor. Among the drowned was Henry’s only legitimate son. The subtitle misleadingly suggests the whole book is about this event; in fact, it tells the whole history of Henry’s reign and the beginnings of the Anarchy, a period of contested rule directly caused by this fatal accident.

General non-fiction

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and thought-provoking look at one of the most bewildering characters to appear in The Lord of the Rings and a passionate defense of the good and the beautiful. Full review on the blog here.

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, by Jed Perl—A good short meditation on the tension between creative freedom and adherence to artistic tradition, a tension that gives vitality to art, whether painting, architecture, music, or writing. I especially appreciate Perl’s insistence that art should not be used for mercenary political purposes, an insistence we need more than ever.

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—Murray’s previous book, The Madness of Crowds, appeared just before the world went into lockdown and the United States spent a summer tearing itself apart. (The edition I read included an afterword added in the wake of the summer of 2020.) This, his follow-up, is a direct response to that explosion of ideological furor. Murray characterizes wokeness and its repercussions as a moral panic akin to the Salem witch trials or the Satanic Panic, an analogy that has crossed my own mind more than once in the last few years. He catalogs sustained, systematic attacks on Western culture, philosophy, ideals, art, and civilization writ large in several specific areas, including race, religion, and history (an excellent chapter of particular interest to me). Interspersed with these chapters are “interludes” on narrower topics, the most incisive and damning of which concerns the West’s obsequious relationship with China. Where The Madness of Crowds suggested forgiveness as a way forward from the insanities already gripping the West before the pandemic, here Murray argues that a blinkered ideological resentment has caused the last few years’ upheavals and he encourages—insists upon—gratitude as the antidote. Absolutely correct. This is an excellent book—well-written, sharply observed, carefully structured and argued, and its diagnoses and prescriptions spot on. I just wonder how many people who don’t already agree will listen, much less change.

Against the Tide, by Roger Scruton, Mark Dooley, Ed.—A very good collection of journalistic pieces on a variety of topics spanning fifty years of work. This will probably become my go-to suggestion for introducing people to Scruton, as the fifty-odd essays, op-eds, and personal reflections collected here are short, accessible, and often witty. (An interesting coincidence: Murray, in The War on the West, quotes from the final piece in this collection, a poignant meditation on gratitude that was Scruton’s last published work in his lifetime.)

On the Passion of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, trans. Joseph N Tylenda—A worthwhile devotional work organized as a series of prayers of thanks for every stage of Jesus’s suffering and death, from his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane to his entombment. Quite moving and convicting throughout. Read over Good Friday and Easter weekend, which I would highly recommend.

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, by Russell Kirk—A meditation on the decay of cultural norms, especially in literature and politics, with special attention to the philosophical “abnormities” that evacuate both of meaning and morality. For me, this accurately hit the sweet spot between culture and politics. This was rich enough that I mean to revisit it soon.

Fiction

Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson—A vividly written and moving short novel set in Reconstruction Texas. You probably know some of the story. You probably also know what happens to Old Yeller. It’s still absolutely worth reading.

Slow Horses and Dead Lions, by Mick Herron—The purest enjoyment I got out of my reading this spring. I got into Herron’s Slough House series courtesy of my friend JP Burten, who described them to me as “John LeCarre crossed with ‘The Office.’” Sold. Intricately plotted, well written, briskly paced spy stories with plenty of twists and surprises and suffused with wry, often dark humor, this has become my new favorite fictional series. I already have Real Tigers, the third, and look forward to reading it.

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, by Alexander McCall Smith*—The second installment (unbeknownst to me at the time I listened to it) of the misadventures of Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a set of loosely interconnected short stories about a German philologist of the Romance languages whose academic intrigues and public embarrassments are made hilarious by his combination of pomposity and excruciating politeness. A real hoot.

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—An impulse buy at my local used book store, this novel by a now almost-forgotten writer was a fun, wittily written mystery in which the question is not who killed the narrator’s obnoxious Uncle Titus, but who is going to kill him. I read this to my wife at bedtime for a couple weeks and we both really enjoyed it.

A Lost Lady of Old Years, by John Buchan—One of the earliest novels by Buchan, this one follows ne’er-do-well Francis Birkenshaw, the dissipated scion of an austere Highland clan, on a series of adventures and misadventures through the Jacobite Rising of 1745, culminating in the Battle of Culloden and its aftermath. Somewhat slower-paced and with a less proactive main character than in many of Buchan’s later books, but still vividly realized and enjoyable.

Kids’ books

Macbeth, adapted by Bruce Coville, illustrated by Gary Kelley—A very good picture book adaptation of my favorite of Shakespeare’s tragedies, with beautiful and often genuinely spooky illustrations. Coville incorporates enough of the Bard’s own language (and Macbeth is eminently quotable) to give a flavor of the original while making the plot understandable to kids. Really enjoyed introducing mine to this story.

Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin—A beautifully illustrated picture book retelling of the story of Cædmon, a shy cowherd who miraculously received the gift of song and the boldness to sing about God to his friends. Nice attention to detail and realistically rendered early medieval settings, including a cameo appearance by St Hild of Whitby. A nice introduction to a famous story from Bede and the Anglo-Saxon period for kids.

The Second World War, by Dominic Sandbrook—Part of Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series, which includes The First World War and Alexander the Great (both of which I own and mean to read soon) and forthcoming volumes on Cleopatra and the Vikings. This is an excellent narrative retelling of World War II for young readers (approximately 9- to 12-year olds). Sandbrook judiciously selects ordinary people—children, civilians, grunts—as point of view characters for the action and also provides good, age-appropriate introductions to the major figures of the war, especially Churchill and Hitler, as well as genuinely global coverage of the war. He manages to include not only the big events in Europe and the Pacific but the broader context, including the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and 30s and Japanese aggression toward China in 1930s. I look forward to sharing this with my kids as they reach the age where they’ll be able to read and appreciate it.

Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections: Castle—Another excellent medieval picture book, this one a layer-by-layer cross-sectioning of a thirteenth-century castle during a siege. Every picture is loaded with fantastic details, and each two-page spread also has side bar illustrations and explanations of specific topics like vassalage, food and drink, medieval games and entertainment, and crime and punishment. My kids and I have enjoyed leafing through this one and finding new things hidden away every time.

Disappointments

Fatelessness, by Imre Kertész, trans. Tim Wilkinson—Based on the author’s experiences as a teenage prisoner and slave laborer at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, this is a curiously muted and dull book, with individually involving scenes of great vividness set in a great stretches of discursive exposition. And lacking most of the conventions of fiction, such as dialogue, it barely qualifies as a novel. I am still unsure about whether this was intentional or a problem with the translation, Hungarian being a notoriously difficult language. I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it, at least not as a novel.

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan—You know how certain kinds of people criticize Tolkien? Saying that he over-describes insignificant details, has indistinguishable underdeveloped characters, gets lost in his own lore, lards his writing with awkward archaisms, wanders down too many plotting rabbit trails, generally goes on too long, and is tedious, simplistic, and derivative? Those criticisms aren’t true—of Tolkien. But they describe Robert Jordan 100% accurately.

Rereads

I continue my project of making myself revisit good books I’ve read before. Most of these I’ve listened to on Hoopla or Audible during my commute. Lemonade out of lemons. As usual, audiobook “rereads” are marked with asterisks.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*—A Bond continuation novel that Faulks wrote in imitation of Fleming’s style, mostly successfully. Especially interesting for its pre-Revolution Iranian setting.

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*—A succinct handbook of traditionalist conservative thought in the tradition of Burke. A much-needed corrective to whatever it is that “conservatism” is today. Full review from 2019 on the blog here.

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman*—A helpful and thought-provoking study of what “nationalism” means in a country with none of the usual sources of national identity.

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—Far and away the best thing I reread this spring; almost certainly the most rewarding reread I’ve ever undertaken. A real masterpiece. Related blog reflections on finding hope in McCarthy’s work here.

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*—The book that got me into Paul Johnson; a witty and engagingly written popular introduction to the Father of Philosophy, with careful—perhaps too much—attention to his life and times.

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien—Read to my children for bedtime. One of the highlights of my seven years as a dad.

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*—A sci-fi action classic clearly inspired by the author’s experiences in Vietnam, but also startlingly prescient in many ways. Not only action-packed, with all the trappings of good intergalactic, time-dilating space travel and alien combat you could want, but also thoughtful and moving.

On the horizon

I’m very much looking forward to the summer, as my schedule is considerably more relaxed (no commuting between campuses for a few months) and my wife and kids will soon be on their break. I’m currently halfway through with Simon Callow’s Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived, about a quarter of the way into the mammoth Stalin’s War, by Sean McMeekin, and have just started And the Whole Mountain Burned, a war novel set in Afghanistan by combat veteran Ray McPadden. And I have lots more lined up.

Hope y’all have a restful summer full of good books, too. Thanks for reading!

Three storytelling tips from Aristotle

I just finished revisiting Aristotle’s Poetics via an excellent new translation by Philip Freeman, titled How to Tell a Story, part of Princeton UP’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. It’s been at least a decade since I last read the Poetics, but it’s striking how much of Aristotle’s insight remains applicable despite the drastic differences in art and literature between his day and our own.

The entire book is still worth reading, and I’d certainly recommend Freeman’s translation as the clearest and most accessible version I’ve yet encountered. As a sample, here are three of Aristotle’s ideas about storytelling that I found particularly striking on this readthrough. Think of them less as “tips” than as reminders:

Narrow your scope

Don’t attempt to get the whole world into your story, much less the entire, all-encompassing narrative of a huge event. Start with a discrete, limited plot that fits in as a part of the whole and build outwards from there. Aristotle goes for the greatest available example from his own day:

And so, as I said earlier, Homer’s inspired excellence in respect to other poets is clear in this respect as well. Although he has a beginning and end, he doesn’t try to cover the whole Trojan War in the Iliad. If he had, the plot would have been much too large and impossible to comprehend in one story. Instead he covers only one small part of the war, though he uses the episode on the catalogue of ships and other such episodes to work in other incidents.

Compare Tolkien’s thoughts, in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” on how the Beowulf poet situated that epic’s narrow set of events within a wider world, and how Tolkien himself did this in The Lord of the Rings.

Consider the strengths and limitations of your medium

Perhaps the last quarter or so of the Poetics is taken up with Aristotle’s adjudication of a debate surrounding two rival poetic media: epic and tragedy. He does not denigrate either medium but carefully examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of each, noting, for example, that

Epic has a special quality which allows it to be longer. In tragedy the plot cannot of course cover simultaneous actions at once since there is only one stage. But epic, because it is a narrative, can cover many actions taking place at the same time. If these simultaneous actions fit together as a whole, they can make an epic a powerful story. Thus epic has the advantage of variety and a diversity of episodes that contribute to its grandeur. Tragedy lacks this variety and can grow dull and tedious, causing many tragedies to fail.

That said, Aristotle is concerned that stories be presented in the medium most suited to the events that occur in them. He draws another example from Homer:

If someone tried to put the scene from the Iliad onstage in which Hector is pursued by Achilles around Troy, it would look ridiculous, with actors standing around while Achilles tells them to stay away. But in epic, this works perfectly well.

Not all stories are suitable for all media. Consider the phenomenon of “unfilmable novels.”

Don’t overexplain

This one is a bit trickier, as the passage below is presented by Aristotle as a counterargument in the tragedy vs epic debate that he is preparing to refute. Nevertheless, I think Aristotle’s imaginary debate partner raises a valid point:

If the more tasteful art is always superior and what appeals to a better kind of audience is always best, then it’s perfectly clear that art that displays everything is more lowly and common. Those who practice such art assume that the audience is incapable of understanding anything the actors don’t make very clear onstage through movement and gesticulation.

There’s a lot going on here, not least that Aristotle is teeing up his final, unassailable arguments in favor of the superiority of… tragedy. A perspective I pretty strongly disagree with, and for reasons articulated earlier by Aristotle himself. But the incidental argument that poor quality storytelling overexplains is a sound one regardless of medium or genre. If you’ve ever complained about a movie “spoonfeeding” the audience or a novel tediously overloading its readers with expository “info dumps,” you’ve noted a literary flaw first described over 2300 years ago.

Give your readers credit—or at least the benefit of the doubt—and don’t insult their intelligence. Your storytelling will be better for it.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, there’s much, much more to be mined from this little handbook. But I think these stood out to me as sorely needed reminders in our age of decadent, diffuse, chaotic, incoherent stories. (Aristotle has a lot to say, for instance, about stories that sacrifice believability for spectacle or plots that go nowhere.) If you want to read, write, and think better about storytelling and art, the Poetics is a good book to start with, and How to Tell a Story is an excellent edition.

Tom Holland vs undue cynicism

English chronicler Matthew Paris’s illustration of the war between Edmund Ironside and Cnut

Last week brought about one of the best podcast crossovers I’ve ever listened to, as Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook hosted Dan Carlin of Hardcore History on their show, The Rest is History. (Repetitious diction, I know, but if there seems to be too much history in that sentence, you will fail to grasp the appeal of these podcasts to their listeners.) Holland and Sandbrook grilled Carlin with ten “great” questions from history, ranging from what-ifs (e.g. What were the CSA’s longterm prospects had it won, or simply not lost, the Civil War?) to amusing would-you-rather questions.

Among the latter was this from Holland (at approx. 22:40 in the second episode): “Dan, you are the ruler of a Eurasian state in AD 1000. So, anywhere in Eurasia. Which one of the following inventions would you choose to have? And you can only have one: gunpowder, the printing press, or the germ theory of disease.”

A fun hypothetical discussion ensued, weighing the pros and cons of having anachronistic knowledge of any of the three, eventually leading to this exchange shortly before they moved on to the next question:

Sandbrook: Germ theory, I mean—I’m thinking about rulers in the year 1000, so, Cnut—
Carlin: Yes.
Sandbrook: Or Æthelred the Unready—
Carlin: Yeah.
Sandbrook: What are they—what are they going to do with the germ theory?
Carlin: Infect the Mercians, you know.
Holland: Well, well, um. Actually, the setting up of hospitals is, uh, caring for the sick is very important.
Sandbrook: I don’t see Cnut doing that, Tom.
Holland: Of course he did!
Sandbrook: Did he?
Holland: He went on pilgrimage to Rome.
Sandbrook: That was for his own purposes. That made—
Carlin: That’s a power move, right there.
Sandbrook: Right, exactly. That’s nothing to do with being kind to people who’ve got smallpox.
Holland: I think you’re being unduly cynical.

And this was after Holland had already pointed out that—contra Carlin’s suggestion that the printing press is necessarily a destabilizing technology that monarchs would only want to suppress—medieval rulers (his example is Alfred the Great) were great proponents and supporters of literacy.

It’s not much, but while I like and respect and enjoy all three of these guys’ work, this is why I love Tom Holland.

History post-Gibbon, post-Marx, and most especially post-Foucault is a deeply cynical discipline, and a certain kind of comfortably modern historian constantly projects that cynicism backward onto his subjects. To stick with the time period in question, pick up a book on Edward the Confessor and you’ll be hard pressed to follow his life story because the narrative will repeatedly bog down in parsing which chronicler is secretly supporting which side of whatever dispute. Further, these assertions about the biases of sources usually have to admit huge caveats later, as when source X, described as obsequiously toadying to Bishop Y, nevertheless strongly criticizes him for A, B, and C. These contradictions or exceptions seem never to raise doubts about whether this elaborate backroom politicking has been perceived accurately—or whether it’s there at all.

Surely it’s best to interpret historical figures’ words and actions as sincere at least some of the time. Cnut wrote a lengthy letter about his purposes for going to Rome, including negotiating ecclesiastical matters for the English church and repentance for his own sins. He must have meant some of that. Probably more than a modern person would guess. Compare my thoughts on modern historians’ judgment of what is and isn’t “likely” from last fall.

At any rate, bully for Tom Holland, and for Sandbrook and Carlin for being serious and enthusiastic students of history, even if they take theirs with a pinch more cynicism than is due. This two-part podcast series is fun, amusing, and wonderfully wide-ranging, and at several times also turns into a serious and thoughtful discussion of the historian’s art. It’s well worth your while.

In memory of Corporal Phillips

This is my old M41 field jacket, which I’ve shared photos of before but probably never really talked about. This is a reproduction item I found at a now-defunct army surplus store in Westminster, SC and saved up to buy when I was fourteen or fifteen. The 1st Infantry Division “Big Red One” insignia and WWII-era corporal’s chevrons I got from Medals of America (which was also the first place I ever heard of Fountain Inn, SC, where I now live).

Why the Big Red One, and why a corporal? Because this was the jacket that belonged to one of my first serious fictional characters, Cpl John Phillips.

Cpl Phillips was born in 10th grade keyboarding, a class in which I quickly outstripped our weekly typing exercises and was left with free time. A lot of free time. I would run out the clock hammering away at you-are-there scenes of the first wave at Omaha Beach—climbing down net ladders from their transports into Higgins boats that pitched and yawed in the heaving Channel; riding in to the smoking shore, some laughing, some throwing up; dashing into hell down a steel ramp; and working up the beach, through the wire, up the bluffs, and inland, scraping together what ad hoc forces they could along the way; culminating in the destruction of a German pillbox defending one of the beach’s critical draws. Cpl Phillips told me all about it, dispassionately, in great detail. He was my narrator.

Over my last three years of high school I spun out Phillips’s entire wartime career—from Oran and Sicily to the Hürtgen Forest and the Reich itself—and wrote two whole novels about it, both set in Normandy and the bocage, with its fortress-mazes of hedgerows.

Phillips’s stories owed a lot to the grunt’s-eye view stories in Stephen Ambrose and the first-person present-tense style of All Quiet on the Western Front, and were heavy on action, especially inspired improvisation in the face of surprising reversals. They were juvenilia in the purest sense—sincerely, straightforwardly imitative, learning by copying, and almost sweet in their naïve tough-mindedness and their desire to simultaneously shock, thrill, uplift, and move.

I spent a lot of imaginative time with Cpl Phillips. And well into college I’d occasionally check in with him mentally. He was born in 1920, and while I never got around to writing down all of his adventures or exploring all of the tragedies that befell his platoon, it really was like visiting an old family friend to think back and say, yes, Phillips survived the war, and got back to his wife Katherine, and he’s still alive and well at 82 (high school graduation). Or 87 (college graduation). Or 90 (grad school graduation).

But of course that would make him 102 now, and Phillips was too much of an average joe to have made it that long.

Suddenly this jacket, which I got in high school and added accurate patches to and actually wore around a lot (I was even cooler then than I am now, you see), has somehow become an heirloom to me, its original owner. So when I think about this fictional character, about whom I haven’t written a word in twenty years, a little part of me grieves. Were he real, he would have died sometime since he first told me those stories. And of course he was real enough to me.

Part of the curious and melancholy magic of imagination, of storytelling—even when those stories have never seen (and never will see) the light of day.

Not to end on a downbeat note, of course. Because in another part of me, Cpl Phillips is still alive and kicking, still cleaning his Thompson submachine gun, or sleeping in his foxhole, or swapping stories with Pfc Friday and Pfc Brown, or writing yet another letter home to Katherine.

Let me offer this as a coda: While Phillips himself has been minding his own business and I’ve mostly left him alone, his platoon commander did show up in Dark Full of Enemies, where he’s placing Pfc Grover Stallings under arrest in the Big Red One’s camp in southern England six months head of D-Day. That’d be 1/Lt Roberts, who I’m sad to say went on to die in late June of 1944 despite Phillips’s heroic efforts to carry him to an aid station. (I did mention All Quiet on the Western Front as an inspiration, didn’t I?) And let me here apologize that, on his way into the plot of Dark Full of Enemies, Pfc Stallings stole his pistol. Roberts may have died in my imagination, but the last time we see him alive in that novel he’s young, irritated, overawed and a little bewildered by the arrival of a Marine in the OSS, and still hasn’t discovered the theft. Though I’m sure Phillips and everyone else will hear about it later.

I’m sure they’re still laughing about it.

Difficult art and striving upward

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I recently read about the collapse of “cultural aspiration,” the desire of people to seek out, encounter, and enjoy the excellent in literature, music, art, architecture—you name it. Sooner or later I’m going to write at length about that essay and some of my thoughts on what has brought about this collapse. But part of it is surely resentment, the envy endemic to populism.*

Two items I’ve been reflecting on re. that essay and this cultural trend:

Item one—this blog post on “accessibility” in literature. The key passage:

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand—repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

Item two—from Letter 215 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, an incomplete draft of a letter on children’s books and aiming higher than one’s station, so to speak, in one’s reading:

We all need literature that is above our measure—though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time. But the energy of youth is usually greater. Youth needs then less than adulthood or Age what is down to its (supposed) measure. . . . Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life. But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in the right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Charges of “elitism” have always seemed, to me, to be a Trojan horse for becoming complacent. It begins by assuring yourself that failing to measure up to the standards of snobs is okay and ends with denying that there is any qualitative difference between the bad and the excellent. And so people who could enjoy the best are not only happy but congratulate themselves for staying put and reveling in the mediocre (or worse).

A final note: All my favorite books I have discovered either by 1) intentionally finding something reputed as good and stretching myself to understand it or 2) taking the recommendations of good friends who have already done #1.

Food for thought.

*Cf. CS Lewis in his essay “Democratic Education”: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you,’ is the hotbed of Fascism.”

Let us use it against him!

I am here fulfilling my obligation to have thoughts about Twitter’s change of ownership. I mostly find the “black hole of discourse” surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of the company hilarious. Such nonevents as a corporate takeover should primarily amuse us if we take note of them at all, especially when they are accompanied by such hysteria and hypocrisy. There’s a great Evelyn Waugh novel waiting to be written about this whole thing.

I’m struck that the two best things I’ve read about this come in the form of lists—in one case, theses. I present these as reading recommendations and conclude with one actual personal thought.

First, a friend passed along a post from Matt Yglesias’s blog Slow Boring entitled “Twenty-three theses on Elon Musk and Twitter.” Yglesias considers the odd transformation of Musk into the left’s current Emmanuel Goldstein, some technical problems of both Twitter and Musk’s Mars colonization project, and what consensus, moderation, and free speech mean in a medium like Twitter. I don’t agree with all of it, but Yglesias brings some seemingly unconnected subjects together in an interesting way and I’ve been pondering his post for several days. A sample:

The concept of “free speech” on Twitter strikes me as inherently problematic due to the platform’s reliance on algorithmic amplification and suppression of certain tweets. There are completely valid and understandable business reasons for operating that way, but free speech is fundamentally about neutrality with regard to content, and the fact is that Twitter is not a neutral platform, not a dumb pipe, and not a utility-type information-disseminator. I would in some sense like them to operate that way, but they don’t. And given that they don’t, the question of what they do and don’t promote is a valid thing to scrutinize.

Second, via Alan Jacobs’s blog, novelist Robin Sloan posts a shorter, broader list of thoughts on the same topic. Unlike Yglesias, who notes both technical problems presented by the way Twitter works as well as his own enjoyment of the platform in spite of it, Sloan is overtly critical of Twitter as a medium and a technology. Yglesias notes Twitter’s tendency to become a time sink; Sloan condemns its narrowness, the stranglehold it gets on the imagination of those who take up residence there:

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

Precisely correct. Twitter is not real life.

Sloan asserts that the best-case outcome for everyone is the “MySpace-ification” of Twitter, the “total abandonment of the platform.” (Jacobs on his blog a few days ago: “Elon Musk could become the world’s greatest hero by buying Twitter and then immediately shutting it down.” Endorsed.) I gave up Twitter cold-turkey five years ago this fall and Sloan tells the truth when he writes that:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

As it happens, the Coen brothers have shown us what to do when we unwittingly invite this kind of creature into our homes. But of course Musk is not going to destroy Twitter, and it may be decades before it gets MySpace-ified.

Read both Yglesias’s and Sloan’s pieces. I’ve gotten a lot out of them.

I can’t add anything to the political and culture war over Musk’s purchase of Twitter that hasn’t already been said, but let me note my support for free speech and my skepticism of technology, much less “content moderation,” as a solution. Everyone arguing about this seems to flatter themselves with the thought that Twitter will be good as long as they, the good people, have or take it under their control. But the problem isn’t misinformation on Twitter, the problem is Twitter. The temptations of a technological medium like this one, regardless of who owns or controls it, are part of the problem. For a parallel case of the temptations presented by technology, read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Bomber Mafia, which I reviewed here last year, and take a while to think about it.

In the end, what all of this sound and fury sounds like to me is just so much debate over, having decided not to destroy it, how best to use the Ring to defeat Sauron.

The Northman

Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth in The Northman

Every once in a while I leave the theatre after a movie and, as I cross the parking lot, realize that I’m… not groggy, exactly, but disoriented. A little out of it. Like the real world has become strange to me, like I’ve been gone a long time. The nearest thing I can compare this sensation to is waking up from a deep sleep and a very convincing and involving dream.

The Northman is the first time I’ve had that sensation in many years.

As I’ve written here before, calling a movie “immersive” is a marketing cliché but in this case it’s true, and not far into the story it swallowed me up utterly.

Amleth, Prince of Denmark

The Northman tells the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), the only son of the Danish king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). At the beginning of the film, Amleth eagerly awaits his father’s return from the raiding season. Aurvandil sails back with a fleet laden with loot and slaves and celebrates uproariously with his son, queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), kinsmen, and hearth-companions, but he broods as well over the need to prepare young Amleth for the responsibilities of manhood—chiefly defending his family and people or, as another character puts it later, “kindness to your kin [and] hatred to your enemies.”

The king takes Amleth through an arcane nightlong rite of passage and rewards him at the end with a neckring and pendant, a sign of his new status. But as they leave the temple where they had passed the night, the king’s bastard half-brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang) ambushes and kills the king. Amleth, witness to his father’s murder and the depredations of the warriors loyal to Fjölnir, sees his mother being borne off by his uncle before he takes a boat into the open sea, vowing revenge.

“Years later,” as the film tells us, Amleth lives among a band of raiders plundering their way up and down the rivers of the Rus, modern-day western Russia and Ukraine. After a bloody raid on a Slavic village, Amleth overhears a group of slavers divvying up their wares for shipment to distant markets and customers—Uppsala, Kiev, and an exiled king named Fjölnir. Amleth probes for information. Fjölnir was one of several petty kings unseated and driven out by King Harald Fairhair of Norway and lives in Iceland now. “He killed his brother for nothing,” Amleth’s fellow raider tells him. “Now he’s a sheepfarmer.”

Amleth, driven on by the prophecy of a seeress (Björk) he meets in the ruins of the Slavic village he just helped destroy, seizes this opportunity to embrace his fate and seek revenge. He steals Slavic clothing from a corpse, cuts off his hair, and joins the cargo of the slave ship heading for Iceland.

Along the way Amleth meets a prophetess named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is not fooled by his disguise and, upon arriving in Iceland, he insinuates himself into the slave population of his uncle’s farm. There, he observes his uncle Fjölnir, who is not just any sheepherder but a goði or chieftain and priest of the god Freyr, his mother Gudrún, and her two sons by Fjölnir, and bides his time, working his way up and searching steadfastly for the right moment to avenge his father and rescue his mother. And it soon proves he will need supernatural help.

If any of that sounded familiar, it should. “The Northman is Hamlet,” as James Berardinelli puts it in his review. Both stories originate with the medieval chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, who told the story of Amleth and his quest for revenge in his Gesta Danorum or History of the Danes. Shakespeare did his own thing with the story. What The Northman’s writers and director have done is set it in a hazy part of the Viking Age (the film begins in 895) where a fictional family could fit in and fashion the story into a “lost saga.” And all of the best elements of the Icelandic sagas are here: murder and revenge, seasons of raiding in the Baltic, dueling, outlawry, mountaintop swordfights, violent contact sports, as well as magic, cursed weapons, and ghosts worked without blinking into the workaday life of an Icelandic farm.

Eerie, involving, and exciting, not to mention brilliantly acted and staged with plenty of grim surprises throughout—it’s great.

Kindness to your kin

The Northman is so dramatic and involving and so loaded with nice details that I could easily turn this into a trivia section or bullet list of things I liked or simply noticed. But to keep this review manageable, I’m going to focus on three fairly broad things that I liked about the film.

First, the film is technically excellent. This is no surprise for a film from Robert Eggers, but it bears mentioning. The cinematography, sound, music, and sets are all outstanding, as are most of the costumes (about which more below). It’s also clear that a scrupulous attention to historical detail went into the design and construction of everything shown onscreen, and while it’s not perfect (no historical film will ever be), it’s the best the Viking Age has ever looked in a movie. I especially liked the cinematography, which has a pervasive gothic atmosphere and is dark and moody where appropriate—especially a scene in which Amleth has to visit a, shall we say, hostile location in order to obtain a sword—but also lets some sunshine and green pastures in. The film has a texture that sells everything in it as real, even the most hallucinatory parts.

Second, I appreciated the film’s heavy emphasis on religion. You might get the impression from other modern Viking stories, like Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels or that Kirk Douglas movie that I can’t help but enjoy, that the Vikings were essentially boisterous frat boys or laddish soccer hooligans with a tendency to kill people and occasionally mention Oðinn. Not so here. Religion is, realistically, central. The ulfheðnar with whom we first find the adult Amleth raiding in the east stage elaborate rituals ahead of their attacks; Fjölnir becomes, as I mentioned, a priest of the grotesque phallic god Freyr, and we see several rituals underway in the temple that is his responsibility; and we see parts of Norse funerals and other rites.

The Northman also presents us with a religiously diverse Norse world. Slavic slaves engage in hedonistic nature worship and Fjölnir’s farm has a number of Christian slaves—a realistic detail made all the more powerful by its subtlety. And there are both cultural gaps (one Icelander’s attempt to explain the Christian god underscores how little the Norse understand it) and cross-pollination, not to mention rivalry within even Norse heathenism. The chief deity in Aurvandil’s temple is Oðinn, while Fjölnir honors Freyr. This gives us an unusually realistic picture of unsystematic and ritual-oriented worship.

Much of the scenes of Norse religious ritual are, of necessity, speculative reconstructions. As Jackson Crawford has noted, the Christians who eventually wrote many of the stories from the Viking Age down apparently didn’t have much of a problem with mythology but weren’t going to include a how-to on sacrificing slaves to Oðinn. But Eggers and his team’s speculations seem reasonable to me, and unabashedly present the Vikings as weird. To us.

And that’s the third and final aspect of The Northman that I want to praise: Eggers refuses to soft-peddle the Vikings. Right from the beginning we see the key role slave-trading played in the Norse world, the extremes to which raiders would go to bring home a haul of good cargo, and the human cost of this much-romanticized lifestyle. (Watch a Slavic family try to slip their children out the backdoor of their hut when the Vikings arrive and see if your breath doesn’t catch just a little bit.) The film depicts horrific violence bluntly but not gratuitously, with some of the worst violence left to the imagination. This, too, captures the spirit of the sagas, which report shocking murders and mutilations with an almost journalistic blank face. And the principles guiding the characters—kindness to kin, hatred for enemies, honor, and, above all, fate—are their principles, not ours, and are not softened or adjusted for a modern audience.

What The Northman presents is a world in which violence and ruthlessness exist alongside admirable qualities, a juxtaposition anyone who has read any of the sagas will recognize. Even our heroes behave in ways modern people would find off-putting if not deplorable. And that’s a good thing. The Northman takes us entirely outside ourselves, into a world that doesn’t affirm us. In addition to entertaining, thrilling, and chilling us, it should also disturb and challenge us—as any good-faith encounter with the past should.

Hatred for your enemies

As I mentioned, the movie isn’t perfect, but I can dispense with most of my complaints briefly. For one, there’s probably too much yelling. If you watch it you’ll see what I mean. For another, while Eggers wisely dials the perverse ambiguity of The Lighthouse way down, there’s still perhaps a pinch too much of it, but most scenes in which this plays a role work just fine. And there are the inevitable lapses in historical accuracy or intrusions of anachronism. Most of these are minor or easy to miss—such as a shaman wearing the Ægishjálmur, a symbol popular among neopagans but most likely originating hundreds of years after the Viking Age, inscribed on a piece of birchbark on his head—but they’re there.

My biggest complaint was one I anticipated with the release of the first trailer back before Christmas: I’d still like a little less dirt on everybody, a little more hair care, and a little more color in the clothing. The costuming shows us a sharp distinction between different groups—slaves, warriors like the ulfheiðnar in the Kievan Rus, and nobility like Fjölnir—but the contrast may be a little too sharp. The Northman doesn’t reach Monty Python levels of gloom, filth, and matted hair, but it dabbles in all of those things. In a film that otherwise evinces such care in presenting historical people on their own terms, this seemed like too much of a concession to the Game of Thrones aesthetic.

But if that’s my biggest complaint, count me happy.

Conclusion

Throughout this review I’ve been more concerned with how The Northman brings us into its at simultaneously familiar and strange world, and what I appreciated about the filmmakers’ approach. But let me here, at the end, acknowledge again the outstanding performances by the cast and the surehandedness of Eggers as a director. Forceful, moody, well-acted, and completely involving, The Northman is an artistic masterpiece.

Cormac McCarthy and hope

Despair of or longing for hope? Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men

This spring I finally reread the very first novel by Cormac McCarthy I ever read—Blood Meridian. This is the worst possible place to begin in McCarthy’s body of work, but it was the one I had heard of and I slugged away at it over several months one summer in 2005 or 2006. I finished it as befuddled as I was impressed, but it stayed with me, and it only grew in my estimation over the years as I read more and more of his work and figured out who McCarthy was and what he was doing in that most baroque and bleak of his novels.

Rereading it was a revelation. I had intended to write a long review and appreciation here, but this has been the busiest and most difficult semester I’ve worked through in a while and that project never came to fruition.

But as I was reading about Blood Meridian I came across an admiring but not uncritical piece on McCarthy from Chilton Williamson Jr at the Spectator. After summarizing a few of McCarthy’s most nightmarish novels, giving special attention to Child of God, which has turned off more than one of my friends to McCarthy’s work, Williamson makes this striking argument in his conclusion:

I do not think it farfetched to imagine that McCarthy means to suggest the ability of art to conquer insanity and evil by raising them to a higher level, or power. If that is not indeed his intent, the sole plausible alternative is that McCarthy is a nihilist, which I do not believe. Nihilists are without hope. Yet, ‘People without hope,’ Flannery O’Connor thought, ‘do not write novels.’

Bringing Flannery O’Connor into it only set the hook deeper, of course.

This passage, delivered almost as a throwaway observation in the wake of Williamson’s summary of the most disturbing highlights in Child of God, caught my attention because as long as I’ve been reading McCarthy’s work I have heard and seen him called a nihilist, and just as long it has been my intuition that McCarthy is not.

What is more, I feel like this should be rather obvious, especially so in his two most recently published novels: No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). Both are violent picaresques in which men flee evils that implacably pursue them across barren and desolate lands, and both end in the heroes’ deaths. Each has more than its share of the bleak and disturbing, not least The Road, which features, among other things in a landscape marked by some kind of apocalypse, cannibalism.

But the entire point of The Road is also hope. That’s precisely because it concerns preserving life into the next generation. The bleakness only emphasizes how important this remote and unlikely hope is and makes it shine all the brighter. Indeed, the most important and often-repeated metaphor at the heart of the book is that the unnamed father and son are “carrying the fire,” saving what they can—not least each other.*

And it is striking to me that the image of “carrying the fire” also appears in the conclusion of No Country for Old Men. Here’s Sheriff Bell’s concluding reflection on his father, which comes at the end of a novel marked throughout by greed and lethal, merciless violence:

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

Making a fire “somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold,” a spot of light and warmth built from the preserved remains of the past despite the dark and cold—if that’s not an image of hope I don’t know what is.

But the final piece of evidence is the very bleakness and violence in McCarthy’s novels. Evil in McCarthy’s work always is evil, and while it is often random and casual it is never presented indifferently. Indeed, the characters most indifferent to and animalistic in the violence they inflict, as in Glanton’s crew of scalphunters in Blood Meridian or the various cartel thugs in No Country, are the most clearly and purely evil. Everyone else is mixed, whether Judge Holden, a titan of both intellect and perversity and the most clearly Satanic figure in any of McCarthy’s books; or the Kid, in whom “broods already a taste for mindless violence” on page one but who learns nonetheless what good and evil are; or Llewelyn Moss, a seemingly straightforward working man protagonist who sets the plot of No Country for Old Men in motion by stealing and running and only keeps it going by refusing to give up his loot.

None of this would matter to a nihilist, and as O’Connor put it in the line quoted by Williamson above, “People without hope do not write novels.”

What I think McCarthy might be more interested in is guilt and sin, and it is only true to life that everyone and everything is tainted with it. And only when one is indisputably, bluntly, violently confronted with one’s need for hope can hope be made clearest and most enticing.** Per Sheriff Bell, you’ll love the fire more if you know how dark and cold the night is.

There’s certainly more to consider here, and I don’t pretend to have reached the bottom of this. But I think Williamson is right to contend with those who characterize McCarthy as a prophet of meaninglessness and despair, and to suggest, even in passing, some of where McCarthy may hide those elusive and flickering embers of hope.

You can read Williamson’s entire piece on McCarthy at the Spectator here. I was pushed to finally reread Blood Meridian by an appreciative but in many ways wrongheaded essay on the novel at the LA Review of Books, which you can read here.

*I read The Road as a single college senior when it was first published. I reread it a few years ago as the father of three. If you’re a father and take your duties at all seriously, read and reread The Road. Here are some thoughts from when I reread it a few years ago.

**Here’s Flannery O’Connor again: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

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.

Robert Eggers and the art of constraint

The New Yorker published a very interesting long profile of filmmaker Robert Eggers last week. Eggers is the writer and director of three films, including The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, which is due out in less than three weeks. While I found the artsy ambiguity of The Lighthouse too self-reverential and pretentious, I’ve deeply admired both of his previous movies for their attention to historical detail, dialect, setting, and atmosphere. I look forward to The Northman for those reasons, especially since this film will tell a story in my personal wheelhouse.

The whole profile is worth reading, but I wanted to draw attention to two things about Eggers’s craft that I particularly appreciate.

Against Scooby-Doo materialism

First, a point made obliquely, not by Eggers himself but by director Alfonso Cuarón:

Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Gravity and Roma, read Eggers’s screenplay of The Witch in 2013, when the movie was still in development. “I was just in awe of it,” [Cuarón] told me. “I was, like, more than anything, curious.” Cuarón observed that, unlike other filmmakers, who treat the magical or the symbolic as breaks from normality, Eggers makes no such distinction. “It’s as if those elements are as natural as the weather. And people coexist with those elements as a matter of existence,” Cuarón said. “There’s no question about the existence of witches. There’s no ulterior explanation. . . . It was just witches.”

This, indeed, is one of my favorite things about The Witch as well. There’s no ambiguity, no explaining away, and no revelation of fakery at the end (what I call “Scooby-Doo materialism”), just the grim reality that this evil is real, and a real threat. Eggers presents all of this on the characters’ own terms, as people of their time and place and background understood them. I wish more historical films could nail this the way The Witch does.

In addition to selflessly getting modern assumptions out of the way and presenting an alien world as it understood itself, this storytelling technique or philosophy can also have dramatic power. Presenting the supernatural as frankly and doubtlessly real was my plan going into my novel No Snakes in Iceland, in which a 10th-century Christian Anglo-Saxon living in heathen Iceland is recruited to kill a draugr or aptrganga—a corporeal ghost. Unlike The Witch, however, it takes a while for the supernatural to show up, so that it is a surprise when the ghost does appear and does wreak havoc in inimitable Icelandic fashion. More than one reader has told me that the ghost being real, as described by the parade of characters assuring the narrator that it is, was like a plot twist in and of itself.

For artistic constraint

I also appreciate the profile’s attention to Eggers’s artistic restraint and constraint. This theme runs through the entire piece but is especially clear in a few places, as when Eggers’s Northman co-writer Sjón, an Icelandic poet and novelist, talks about situation their film’s story in the middle of a real time and place:

Writing The Northman with Eggers, Sjón imagined the script as a missing saga. Most of the story takes place in the year 914, during the early settlement of Iceland but before the founding of the Althing, the parliament, in 930. “There is still a certain kind of lawlessness,” Sjón said. “I realized that we could slip in a family there, that settled early and then just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

Working within rather than against the history, finding gaps where you can “slip in” a story that will mesh with known history—this is exactly right, and is the approach I worked through for the novel I’m still revising, which is set in the hazy borderlands between the Anglo-Saxons of the Migration Era and the British kingdoms of what is now Wales in a period without a lot of firm documentation.

As I hinted above, Eggers also constrains himself to the viewpoint, beliefs, priorities, and practices of his historical subjects. Eggers is not apparently a religious man, but he presented the bleak Calvinism of The Witch’s Puritan characters fairly. In The Northman he apparently presents the Vikings with uncomfortable accuracy, refusing to step in and editorialize on behalf of modern sensibilities or to (more insidiously) soften their attitudes:

On a bad day, you’re in the tenth month of the edit and you’re trying to deal with notes from a test screening in Texas, where the audience was befuddled by the Nordic accents, character names like Leifr Seal’s Testicle, and the unsettling moral outlook of tenth-century Iceland. “None of those things are changing,” Eggers said, while Ford was processing footage of the young Amleth, hiding in a forest. He started to laugh. “Like, those things can’t change. And those are kind of the biggest obstacles.”

Again, an audience unsettled by contact with an alien world is probably a good sign. Or so I hope, since this is something else I’m dealing with in my current manuscript.

That’s story and setting. Here’s another passage on Eggers’s filmmaking technique. After describing the precise and minutely planned storyboards and utterly minimal camera movement, the essay’s author turns to The Northman’s stars, Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy:

During the first two weeks, in which Amleth [the protagonist] mostly labored on a farm, Skarsgård felt conflicted by the filming process. “I’m not used to working in that way,” he said. “There was a moment where I was, like, I could either freak the fuck out . . . because you feel like: Well, there’s no space for me to explore my character. I’m a robot.” But Skarsgård chose to submit: “You play around with it, and then small details will then open up, like a flood of inspiration, and suddenly you’re in it.”

Taylor-Joy, who was working with Eggers for the first time in six years, realized how much of her conduct on set derives from their work together. “Who I am, or how I identify as a performer and a collaborator, really does come from ‘The Witch,’ ” she told me. “If you come onto a movie that’s already been storyboarded . . . and you know that’s the way the film’s going to look, I actually find that incredibly liberating,” she said. “I can do my own version of this dance within the parameters that have been set. And I’ll end up with something more interesting[.]”

Modern artists, be they poets or novelists or painters or sculptors or architects or composers or filmmakers, bridle at constraint and are skilled at developing ideological schema to justify casting it off: formal poetry, representational art, realistic sculpture, classical architecture—these are all inauthentic, clichéd, bourgeois, repressive, eurocentric, racist, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam world without end. These are all excuses for ill discipline and chaos. They also obscure bad art. A cynical man would say that’s the whole point.

But real art, like real love, embraces limitation and constraint—even purely artificial, arbitrary ones. Perhaps especially the essentially arbitrary ones. Why fourteen lines for a sonnet, or common meter for a ballad, or rhyme at all? (In two novels now I’ve intentionally limited my vocabulary based purely on etymological considerations no one may even notice. But it matters to me and to the story.) Eggers is an object lesson in the value of rules, order, and form. He doesn’t have to shoot his movies the way he does, but he and his actors all benefit from his willing submission to constraints, even finding themselves, as Taylor-Joy puts it, liberated, freed to explore creatively with a space that wouldn’t exist without those constraints.

Or as a wise man once put it, rules and order “give room for good things to run wild.” That was Chesterton on Christianity, of course, but even more to the point is this on art itself: “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

This is wisdom Eggers clearly and rightly intuits, and I’m grateful that he’s let it shape his artistic sensibilities so profoundly. I hope he uses his powers for good.

Conclusion

I’ve written on self-imposed artistic constraints before in reference to historian John Lukacs and, of all people, Jerry Seinfeld. You can read all of The New Yorker’s excellent profile of Eggers here.

John Buchan's nightmare

John Buchan (1875-1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, during his time as Governor General of Canada, c. 1935

I’ve been reading a lesser-known early novel by John Buchan called A Lost Lady of Old Years. Buchan is most famous for his “shockers”—what we would now call thrillers—especially the espionage adventure The Thirty-Nine Steps and its first sequel, a World War I thriller set in the Ottoman Middle East, Greenmantle. The novel I’m reading is clearly an early work (he published at the age of 24, having written it during his last years at Oxford), but it’s highly enjoyable and got me interested in Buchan the man again. That led me to “‘Realism colored by poetry,’ rereading John Buchan,” a marvelous essay at The New Criterion. This is an insightful appreciation of Buchan’s work as well as an examination of the man himself. Just the ticket.

But a passage in that essay, quoted from Buchan’s memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, which was published posthumously in 1940 after Buchan’s death in Canada earlier that year, really caught my eye in an unexpected way.

In a chapter near the end, where Buchan reflects on the meaning of civilization in the context of an era of world wars and mass slaughter, he pauses over the idea of “a return to the Dark Ages.” Buchan doesn’t let the snide shorthand of this medieval stereotype go, pointing out the “many points of light” that glowed fervently through the most dislocated and chaotic phases of the period, and concludes that such fears were unfounded.

But—

While Buchan “did not dread a return of the Dark Ages,” he did have profound civilizational worries in another direction:

My nightmare, when I was afflicted by nightmares, was of something very different. My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.

He then describes his nightmare—a world of globalist technocratic mastery combined with soullessness and dissipation—which I quote in toto:

But suppose that science has gained all its major victories, and that there remain only little polishings and adjustments. It has wrested from nature a full provision for human life, so that there is no longer need for long spells of monotonous toil and a bitter struggle for bread. Victory having been won, the impulse to construct has gone. The world has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Would that be the perfecting of civilisation? Would it not rather mean de-civilisation, a loss of the supreme values of life?

In my nightmare I could picture such a world. I assumed—no doubt an impossible assumption—that mankind was as amply provided for as the inmates of a well-managed orphanage. New inventions and a perfecting of transport had caused the whole earth to huddle together. There was no corner of the globe left unexplored and unexploited, no geographical mysteries to fire the imagination. Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere there were guest-houses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and filling-stations. What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement. The raffish existence led to-day by certain groups would have become the normal existence of large sections of society.

Some kind of intellectual life no doubt would remain, though the old political disputes would have cancelled each other out, and the world would not have the stimulus of a contest of political ideals, which is, after all, a spiritual thing. Scientists and philosophers would still spin theories about the universe. Art would be in the hands of coteries, and literature dominated by petites chapelles. There would be religion, too, of a kind, in glossy upholstered churches with elaborate music. It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart. The soil of human nature, which in the Dark Ages lay fallow, would now be worked out. Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz existence what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and the philosophers and poets? A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality, would in truth have killed that personality. In such a bagman’s paradise, where life would be rationalised and added with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity Fair with Mr. Talkative as the chief figure on the town council. The essence of civilisation lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal universe. It makes no difference that a mechanised universe may be his own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends become its master.

As pure and prophetic a dystopian vision as anything in Huxley’s Brave New World, and one that I think has mostly come true. Compare Buchan’s description here of the kind of people produced by this nightmare world—comfortable but idiotic, cosmopolitan but deracinated, knowledgeable but unwise, busy but fruitless—with those described by Ernst Jünger in The Forest Passage, which I blogged about here earlier this year.

More if you’re interested

The novel I’m reading, A Lost Lady of Old Years, is set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and a fun read so far. You can read the essay that directed me to Buchan’s memoirs at The New Criterion here. And Buchan’s Memory Hold-the-Door is available in its entirety here. And to go slightly further afield, some friends and I talked about Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps on a podcast a few years ago. You can find that here.

When Muggeridge met Chesterton

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) at work; GK Chesterton (1874-36) reading in Brighton, 1935

Yesterday at our local used book store I snagged a one-volume copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography. It’s rare to find any Muggeridge books—at least at the bookstores I most often visit—so I was excited to run across this one. And in leafing through it I found this marvelous anecdote near the very beginning, in which Muggeridge describes his childhood encounter with GK Chesterton:

Chesterton, complete with pince-nez, about the time of the scene described by Muggeridge

[A]s a child, a writer was in my eyes a kind of god; any writer, no matter how obscure, or even bogus, he might be. To compare a writer with some famous soldier or administrator or scientist or politician or actor was, in my estimation, quite ludicrous. There was no basis for comparison; any more than between, say, Francis of Assisi and Dr Spock. Perhaps more aware of this passion than I realised, when I was still a schoolboy my father [Labour politician HT Muggeridge] took me to a dinner at a Soho restaurant at which G. K. Chesterton was being entertained. I remember that the proprietor of the restaurant presented me with a box of crystallised fruits which turned out to be bad. As far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory. I observed with fascination the enormous bulk of the guest of honour, his great stomach and plump hands; how his pince-nez on a black ribbon were almost lost in the vast expanse of his face, and how when he delivered himself of what he considered to be a good remark he had a way of blowing into his moustache with a sound like an expiring balloon. His speech, if he made one, was lost on me, but I vividly recall how I persuaded my father to wait outside the restaurant while we watched the great man make his way down the street in a billowing black cloak and old-style bohemian hat with a large brim.

This child’s perspective is wonderfully evocative. And it also reminds me of a passage from Chesterton’s own work—The Man Who was Thursday, when undercover policeman Gabriel Syme reaches the meeting of the highest anarchist council and encounters the terrible and mysterious Friday:

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

There is a great deal of wink-wink self-parody in Chesterton’s work (cf. Innocent Smith in Manalive), but it had never occurred to me that those parodies might include the gargantuan—and ultimately quite surprising—Friday. Something I’m going to consider next time I read it.

Muggeridge concludes his anecdote on a note of nostalgia tinged, as all real nostalgia is, with melancholy:

I only saw him once again. That was years later, shortly before he died, when on a windy afternoon he was sitting outside the Ship Hotel at Brighton, and clutching to himself a thriller in a yellow jacket. It, too, like the pince-nez, seemed minute by comparison with his immensity. By that time, the glory of the earlier occasion had departed.

As it happens, I’ve seen two photos of Chesterton in Brighton from 1935, the year before he died: one of him walking down the seafront across the street from the Old Ship Hotel and one that closely matches Muggeridge’s description of Chesterton reading (see also the top of this post).

Like I said, two wonderful and vividly realized reminiscences. Looking forward to reading more in this book.