The long view of the long ships

Robert Ferguson's recently published omnibus history of the viking era [The Vikings, A History. published by Viking, appropriately enough] gets two thumbs up. If I were to teach my dream course on Northern European Life and Literature (a combo of Monks, Monsters, and Manuscripts and Swords, Sails, and Serpents), this would be one of the base texts for the course (I should dream up that syllabus and post it for feedback). The scope of the book is broad--chronologically, geographically, and topically. The general flow of the narrative starts before the 'insular big-bang' of Lindesfarne in 793, but works its way forward ending with the gradual incorporation of Sweden into European (Roman) Christendom in the 12th century. The chapters move from theater to theater--generally concerned more with the Vikings abroad than at home, but as Ferguson makes clear, the story is easier to tell when there are multiple sorts of sources, literary as well as archaeological. (Though the details of the narrative thread is lost in the North, the light is better on Watling Street, etc.)

Ferguson's strength as an author is his deep familiarity with the literary sources as well as with the archaeological record, successive historical treatments, and contemporary or near contemporary chronicles and annals. He makes measured and meaningful use of the truer sources (the poetry) to illuminate other sources. From a teaching perspective, the great virtues of the text are three-fold. First, Ferguson tells a coherent tale that helps the reader keep the big picture in view as the successive threads unfold and intertwine. Second, he let's the loose ends show so that readers can see where conjecture replaces relative certainty. He acknowledges differences of opinion among experts, generally without grinding anyone's particular axe. Third, he models a respect for the various types of sources, giving (in my interpretation) some pride of place to the work of the poets.

The only drawback to the book is probably inevitable: in covering so much, there is little time to tarry with anyone's favorites. (How can we hear so little of Egil Skallagrimson?) No unreasonable or unacceptable gaps appear, however. The one possibly controversial aspect of the interpretation implied in the work is the framing: for Ferguson, the grand sweep of the story is defined by the gradual cultural and religious transition from a separate and independent Nordic community to a post-heathen, at least nominally Christian set of societies, each integrated into larger European society. His parting view of Odin from Snorri's biography of Olaf Trygvasson--as an old man trying to smuggle horse steaks onto the King's table--is a poetic touch. Some might question the choice of making the religious shift the central organizing principle--but I think it works.

Read on--and don't forget to write!

Norse Gods get an upgrade

Too Human is the title of an upcoming game in which the player will be taking on the role of Baldur, one of the Aesir. However, these gods are not all they are told to be in the mythology. Instead of being actual supernatural creatures, they are cybernetically enhanced humans. Baldur [son of Odin] is seen as being insufficiently advanced, and is thusly labeled "too human."

Wikipedia informs me in its article:
In Too Human, the Norse gods are cybernetically enhanced humans. Baldur, son of Odin, is one of these gods and it is his duty to protect the human race from an onslaught of an advancing machine presence determined to eradicate all human life.
The story chronicles the ongoing struggle between cybernetic Norse gods, the invading machine presence and mortal men, it features many Norse gods and characters from Norse mythology including Thor, Loki, Odin, Heimdall, Freyja, and Mimir. Yggdrasil: the tree of life acts as a gateway to an alternate world known as Cyberspace that is accessed through the advanced technology of the gods.The human gods are using cybernetic implants to supplement their own abilities, thus becoming more machine like. Conversely, the advancing machine army is harvesting human blood and limbs in an attempt to become more human.

Until the game is released, later this month, there will be little more for me to say about it. Also, I do not have a 360, the creator's platform of choice, and will have to wait to steal...er...borrow my brother's in order to have a chance to play. The game is being released in trilogy format, further slowing my understanding of it's use of the actual mythology. What I ask here is this:

By bastardizing mythology with technology and turning it into a video game, are we exploiting our cultural pasts for sheer entertainment, or are we, perhaps, utilizing a modern medium to bring our culture's elder foundations to a new generation? Or is it both?

In conclusion, I leave you this, because it was the only non-mature trailer I could find that was of decent quality.

And I thought it was funny.

Recommended Call for Submissions...

Over at the blog Modern Medieval, Matthew Gabriele (a professor of Medieval/Renaissance Studies at Virginia Tech) has posted a sort of "Call for Submissions" to a project he wants to develop: a sort of "blog forum about what medieval studies and/ or medievalism has to offer a wider public." He especially has asked for voices from academics and non-academics (and non-medievalists) alike. Because of the nature of our small thought community here on this blog as well as our backgrounds, our current work, and our general interests (both collectively and individually), I think this call is especially appropriate for us all to contribute.

Take a look at the call for submissions, with Gabriele's overall proposal and aims, and consider contributing to this discussion. The initial deadline (next Friday) for thoughts, short essays, etc. may be close--and some of you have the habit of dropping off of the earth for amounts of time--but I think all of your thoughts would really help foster some great dialog, since this is something we've worked on before together both formally (such as the Education conference some of us presented at) and in our musings on this blog.

No excuse for tardiness. Moving on.

Marvelous.

I have just finished reading [rereading most of it as I went] the essay on the Marvelous in Le Goff. I am still not entirely sure where he is coming from or where in the world he may be going. True, in the first circuitous definition of imagination, he picked and pulled to at least form an idea, if not a solidified concept, but in this chapter I felt as though he did actually define the marvelous quite clearly. Somewhere between the words, perhaps, slipping behind a handy h right when you turn to look, like that spook behind the pillar next to you.

The one connection I managed to maintain is that the marvelous is something natural, something old. It is not magic because magic, in the Christian sense at least, has been sourced outside the world itself to Satan [who then could be sourced to God but a bastardization of holy power and everything kind of jumbles itself around in a mental tussel with no clear winner in my head, but that is unrelated to this conversation]. It is not miraculous because that, too, has the implied source, though in God. So marvels are of nature. How does one then define nature and manage to diferentiate between when something that happened was either miraculous or marvelous?

I was interested in his dredging up of the literature and lore of the knights and lower nobility, which brought to mind Once and Future King, The Faerie Queene, and Dante [yes, in that order, though the first and second are hardly as applicable as the first and the latter two are both based in some overt form of Christianity. I did not see fit to include Phantastes, though it also was sluiced in], bringing with them the images [which Le Goff believes is also an important part of the marvelous] of a sword coming from a lady in a lake, and a tree that is bleeding.

And here is where my thoughts trailed off into bafflement...comment. Question. Answer. Something.

Medieval fish sticks--not again!

Nothing changes more than history. The reputation of the Vikings seems to be in a state of constant flux. Thanks to archaeologists of the codfish trade (another in the ever-expanding set of niches for medieval geneticists), it begins to appear that some of the poor Norse were just long-distance fishmongers (think Amazon grocery delivery a-la 10th century). This opens a whole new set of possibilities for interpreting the prayers for protection from the Northmen! It's interesting, but as an explanation for Viking mobility in general, well, it sounds a little fishy.

Yea, I've been to Vinland, only it should have...

I had never heard of novelist Thomas Holt, but I picked up his Meadowlands in some Swedish-American bookstore somewhere (probably at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis) because of its subject. Meadowlands is a novelization of the Vinland Sagas told from the perspective of two 'regular guys' who crewed the ships of 5 voyages from Greenland to Vinland. They recount their adventures to a Greek civil servant whom they are accompanying, as members of the Varangian Guard, on a trip across Greece.

The re-telling is pretty faithful to the accounts in the Sagas and is pretty effective in getting the reader to think in some detail about the lives that are sketched so sparingly in the source material. What was it like to sail on small ships packed with people and material? What was it like to be cooped up in a turf-built house throughout the dark winter? How did the regular folks view the families in charge? What would it have meant to be part of the fatal, fraught last expedition? The narrative voices sound a little like 20th century English working-class types, but that's as good a way to get into the social space as any, I suppose.

The frame and some of the dialogue between the narrators and their Greek auditor are good reminders that the Norse of the 11th century were connected both to the end of the European-known world and to the most sumptuous center of European power; they were culture watchers as well as travelers and traders, and Holt, the author, seems to have done his homework well. He represents the Norse view of the world and of human significance in contrast with the Mediterranean; the reflective moments challenge the question of interior considerations (motivation) versus the consequences of actions. Holt also plays with the problem of oral transmission; both narrators are eye-witnesses, and should have virtually identical perspectives, and yet...

The book has an interesting 'what could have been, if only' twist at the end when Harald Sigurdson (the silent junior member of the Varangian trio of guards) weighs the potential risks and benefits of conquering England or settling Vinland. Recommended for pleasure reading.

For what it's worth, I hate Thomas Holt. He was born in the same year I was and has written nearly 40 historical novels. Ah well, fate goes always as it must! mlp

Not dead yet!

After a week of the creeping misery [also known as a sinus infection of sorts], I have finally regained my mental prowess [though none more than already had, don't expect much] and thusly am finally approaching the bench for a report on Le Goff [whose name still makes me giggle inwardly]. I apologize for the delay. And the fact that this is just a bit on the intro, as my brain still has no focus power, and I didn't make it to the Marvelous just yet.

Anywho.

Let me join both of Mark and Brandon in congratulating/thanking Le Goff for poking out of the historical boundaries into a broader realm. There is great truth behind his statement that "the life of men and societies depends just as much on images as it does on more palpable realities...the imagination nourishes man and causes him to act" (5). It brought to mind a quote from Lewis in which he states that "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." To imagine and create is an imperative for man, for whatever technical or philosophical reason and to separate any examination of man that goes beyond the physiological from such a thing would be silly. Incomplete, as it were. As Le Goff says, "a history without imagination is a mutilated, disembodied history" (5). [I liked page five.]

Outside of that, I would just like to attempt to clarify his definition of the imagination as, though he provided three "nots," he did not set it outright for me to see. Kind of like trying to set up a square pasture with three fences--the proverbial cows are guided in a direction but are set roaming after a certain point. Or maybe it is just me. Bear with me as I basically walk through what he says.

What is imagination, then? Le Goff sets it next to three similar concepts with which it may be confused and proceeds to separate them. The first was "representation" which he defined as "the mental image of an external reality" (1). Put simply enough, it is a mental construct of something in the physical reality, his example being our idea of a cathedral as gleaned from art or literature. Imagination, he states, "is more comprehensive than representation. Fantasy is nto limited by the intellect" (1). Symbolism [add the lisping, elongated s there, Brandon!] is applied when the object in question is used to make "reference to an underlying system of values," a process possibly involving the imagination, but not imagination itself (1). Lastly is ideology, the imposition of a conception of the world, possibly upon an image of some sort. Ideology and imagination again are simlar with a fuzzy boundary, but ideology is a preformed notion that will, when applied to either, distort temporal and imagination based reality.

My conclusion is that this reality he is attempting to describe is one completely created through the "inner" sensibilities, which he notes are often linked to the divine or supernatural (6). The presentation of these worlds are creations are unique historical realities in and of themselves; "aesthetic values and ideas of beauty are in themselves historical constructs" (4). These, being their own self-contained entities, cannot be interpreted through the same lens as techincal historical documents, which may still have small applications of the imagination through set up and presentation, etc.

Does this make sense, and can you help further the concretization of these thoughts with comments, gentlement [and Mandy, if she has time]?

I am looking forward to see how all this comes together in the essays. And I again apologize for my tardiness and incomplete reading. [sheepish]