I am sure there are moments in everybody's lives when they want to be Vikings. There seems to be some inbuilt love of Vikings that I have seen in many of the people I have known. Is it in the daring ocean exploration that their appeal lies? Is it in the way they discovered America 500 years before anyone else? Maybe it's just the legends about them, the monster slaying, the Epics, and the Norse religion which is so much more exciting than anything one might find in Greece. I'm hoping it's not the whole raping and pillaging aspect of their jobs and the looting of monasteries, because that frankly disgusts me. Just try not to think about it.
For me the appeal of Vikings lies in their favourite drink: mead! I am more than a little fond of this drink, for the warm, sweet taste, the way it dulls your sensibilities in mere minutes, the deep amber colour of the stuff, the way that it's not the most easy alcoholic drink to get hold of. But it's also the history of mead that I enjoy, that it harks back to a time before the Battle of Hastings, when Saxons and Danes squabbled over the lands. Mead belongs in a wooden hall by a roaring fire, with drunken barbarians who know that they're heroes, swearing drunken oaths to equally drunken chieftains and comrades, before finally settling down for a kip in the corner.
So anyway, onto Beowulf. In this Seamus Heaney translation we find much drinking of mead in said mead-halls, oaths of kinship, the battling of great and terrible monsters, hordes of sea-creatures, voyages over the sea in longboats, battles in the mists of time, great heroes of old, sagas within a saga (postmodernism?), and woeful sorrow. Aside from that it has a nice pace, some of Mister Heaney's choices of language are quite good, verging on the poetic, and I found the story rather involving and satisfying. I found the Christian spin on the story interesting; we're quite used to the Norse gods being involved in this sort of thing, yet we find multiple references devoted to a single God and certain Bible references. Not something I was quite expecting from a Viking saga.
If you have any love of Vikings in your soul (which no doubt you will), then there is some reason for you to read this millennium-old story. If you can read the old-English version then so much the better, but from what I've seen and heard of it you'd be better off finding one of the widely available translations; as I say, Heaney's is quite good. It only took me three reading-days to read the whole thing, and I was going slow, so it's not an impossible task like War and Peace, or the Bible.
Wednesday 24 October 2012
Tuesday 23 October 2012
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
I said last post that I would move onto less theologically-laden stuff, yet I found myself re-reading The Da Vinci Code. I can explain this: The Da Vinci Code is a novel, a work of fiction that says, at the beginning, that it is a work of the author's imagination - it shouldn't upset or annoy anybody unless they are in any way religious, historically-minded, or possess any intelligence whatsoever. There. Problem solved.
Except it isn't, because Dan Brown - the writer with a name so generic that it's almost impossible to remember - has wrapped the entire thing in what he claims is fact. For instance one of my partiuclar issues with it can be found in Chapter 28, page 173, where we have Mr. Brown's summary of the Witch hunts in Early Modern Europe: 'During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women', outlining the reasons as solely misogynistic. This is a common account of this period of history that many people find attractive: the Church burning countless numbers of women because they hated and feared them.
I might mention that few witches were burned alive; most would have been executed beforehand. Then I can add that the Church, and to a large extent the Inquisition, were the ones keeping the death rate down; the secular courts were more likely to sentence defendants to death. If the Inquisition or Ecclesiastical courts found people guilty of witchcraft, their preferred tactic was to try to reconvert the defendent back to Christianty.
A more accurate estimation of the death toll, according to Brian P. Levack, was around 600,000 witches, of both genders. Gender ratio was 90/10 for females/males in Britain, 70/30 in Germany, where most of the prosecutions took place, and 50/50 in France. In some areas, Normandy and Iceland to name but two, it was only men who were prosecuted for witchcraft. And there is a big difference between people 'tried' for witchcraft, people 'prosecuted' for witchcraft, and people 'executed' for witchcraft; The Spanish Inquisition, over the 16th and 17th centuries, tried a lot of people for witchcraft, prosecuted a fraction of them, and sentenced a minute number of them to death (the number was less than 20, if I remember rightly). Oh yes, and some of those were acquitted before they were actually executed.
This is the stuff lurking at the back of my brain since I myself studied the topic of witchcraft; which Dan Brown certainly did not. I'm not saying that the figures I give here are totally accurate, because this is not an essay, but just a small look at the sort of things you can discover if you actually look at the topic in question - rather than just take Dan Brown's word for it. Good old Mr Brown shoves this little nugget of outright nonsense in amongst a bewildering array of other historical fictions, so that by the end of the book you end up more than a little incredulous.
However, despite its numerous historical and factual inaccuracies (see: untruths, lies), I can only conclude that it is okay. I don't hold that it is, in the words of Stephen Fry, 'complete loose stool-water', and 'arse-gravy of the worst kind', even though I admire the sentiment. It's just a cheap thriller that got way too much exposure, covering its nonsense with a veneer of 'This is all True!'. It feels as though it is completely constructed of cliches, but at the end of the day everyone loves a massive conspiracy theory, especially one involving the Vatican and two thousand years of history. But it's a novel, something written to entertain, and I am sorry to say it entertained me, even if it was for entirely the wrong reasons.
The story: What's to tell? A dull, somehow sexy author-surrogate figure who is presented as being as grey as a brick (even making Tom Hanks boring, which is a feat in itself) ends up mixed up in a murder-suspect/conspiracy theory about... something to do with the art of Leonardo di Vinci supposedly holding hidden clues about the identity of the biological descendents of some chap called Jesus who apparently did stuff a couple of thousand years ago - wasn't he a guy in the last book I reviewed? - and something something about Swiss bank vaults and how they have to get away from the police and find the buried treasure that could spill the beans on what the Catholic Church don't want everybody to know about. And an albino monk who was the one what did it. And the Knights Templar. Yeah, that's the plot.
Except it isn't, because Dan Brown - the writer with a name so generic that it's almost impossible to remember - has wrapped the entire thing in what he claims is fact. For instance one of my partiuclar issues with it can be found in Chapter 28, page 173, where we have Mr. Brown's summary of the Witch hunts in Early Modern Europe: 'During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women', outlining the reasons as solely misogynistic. This is a common account of this period of history that many people find attractive: the Church burning countless numbers of women because they hated and feared them.
I might mention that few witches were burned alive; most would have been executed beforehand. Then I can add that the Church, and to a large extent the Inquisition, were the ones keeping the death rate down; the secular courts were more likely to sentence defendants to death. If the Inquisition or Ecclesiastical courts found people guilty of witchcraft, their preferred tactic was to try to reconvert the defendent back to Christianty.
A more accurate estimation of the death toll, according to Brian P. Levack, was around 600,000 witches, of both genders. Gender ratio was 90/10 for females/males in Britain, 70/30 in Germany, where most of the prosecutions took place, and 50/50 in France. In some areas, Normandy and Iceland to name but two, it was only men who were prosecuted for witchcraft. And there is a big difference between people 'tried' for witchcraft, people 'prosecuted' for witchcraft, and people 'executed' for witchcraft; The Spanish Inquisition, over the 16th and 17th centuries, tried a lot of people for witchcraft, prosecuted a fraction of them, and sentenced a minute number of them to death (the number was less than 20, if I remember rightly). Oh yes, and some of those were acquitted before they were actually executed.
This is the stuff lurking at the back of my brain since I myself studied the topic of witchcraft; which Dan Brown certainly did not. I'm not saying that the figures I give here are totally accurate, because this is not an essay, but just a small look at the sort of things you can discover if you actually look at the topic in question - rather than just take Dan Brown's word for it. Good old Mr Brown shoves this little nugget of outright nonsense in amongst a bewildering array of other historical fictions, so that by the end of the book you end up more than a little incredulous.
However, despite its numerous historical and factual inaccuracies (see: untruths, lies), I can only conclude that it is okay. I don't hold that it is, in the words of Stephen Fry, 'complete loose stool-water', and 'arse-gravy of the worst kind', even though I admire the sentiment. It's just a cheap thriller that got way too much exposure, covering its nonsense with a veneer of 'This is all True!'. It feels as though it is completely constructed of cliches, but at the end of the day everyone loves a massive conspiracy theory, especially one involving the Vatican and two thousand years of history. But it's a novel, something written to entertain, and I am sorry to say it entertained me, even if it was for entirely the wrong reasons.
The story: What's to tell? A dull, somehow sexy author-surrogate figure who is presented as being as grey as a brick (even making Tom Hanks boring, which is a feat in itself) ends up mixed up in a murder-suspect/conspiracy theory about... something to do with the art of Leonardo di Vinci supposedly holding hidden clues about the identity of the biological descendents of some chap called Jesus who apparently did stuff a couple of thousand years ago - wasn't he a guy in the last book I reviewed? - and something something about Swiss bank vaults and how they have to get away from the police and find the buried treasure that could spill the beans on what the Catholic Church don't want everybody to know about. And an albino monk who was the one what did it. And the Knights Templar. Yeah, that's the plot.
Dennis Wheatley did a similar thing with claiming Fact at the
beginning of some of his novels; he said that there were real Satanists
and Black-Magic practitioners at work across the world, and that he had
witnessed them himself. Somehow this seems about as credible and necessary as everything that Dan Brown did.
The Bible: Overview
With the finality of Revelations, my quest to
read the entire Bible (cover to cover) has been a success. It only took
me a month, as well.
And by the 'entire' Bible, I mean the 66 books and Epistles one normally finds in most versions; none of the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books. I should correct that after a break.
Yes, much of the Old Testament is basically painfully detailed descriptions of the Ark of the Covenant, and the Tabernacle, and of the tedious rituals the priests were meant to perform. This lasts from about halfway through Exodus, all the way through Leviticus and Numbers, until he end of Deuteronomy. Joshua and Judges were a bit more interesting, but they get a bit repetitive after a while. There are good bits in Kings 1&2, but again it gets repetitive, and Chronicles was just a summing-up, as far as I could see, because there was very little new material. Ezra and Nehemiah I really enjoyed; maybe because King Artaxerxes of Persia has a guest appearance, and Ruth was short and sweet, so I liked that one. I found Job quite interesting, Psalms to be a little drab, but pleasant nonetheless, and Proverbs was quite good, if that's how you like your literature, and Ecclesiastes was an unexpectedly amazing find. It is, as far as can work out, a Nihilistic essay on the meaning of life, something I never expected to find in the Bible of all places.
The rest of the prophets I found difficult to understand, except for Daniel; I quite enjoyed that one. I'm still trying to make up my mind on the new testament. The Gospel of Matthew was my least favourite, I'll reveal that much. I think Luke or John were the better ones, and I found Revelations to be quite 'trippy', if I could use that expression for any bit of the Bible. Lots of weird imagery That Could Be Interpreted In A Number of Different Ways.
Anyway, this was my trail of thoughts after reading through the Bible for the first time. Parts of it are worthy of re-reading, but I'll move onto less theologically-laden stuff for the immediate future.
And by the 'entire' Bible, I mean the 66 books and Epistles one normally finds in most versions; none of the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books. I should correct that after a break.
Yes, much of the Old Testament is basically painfully detailed descriptions of the Ark of the Covenant, and the Tabernacle, and of the tedious rituals the priests were meant to perform. This lasts from about halfway through Exodus, all the way through Leviticus and Numbers, until he end of Deuteronomy. Joshua and Judges were a bit more interesting, but they get a bit repetitive after a while. There are good bits in Kings 1&2, but again it gets repetitive, and Chronicles was just a summing-up, as far as I could see, because there was very little new material. Ezra and Nehemiah I really enjoyed; maybe because King Artaxerxes of Persia has a guest appearance, and Ruth was short and sweet, so I liked that one. I found Job quite interesting, Psalms to be a little drab, but pleasant nonetheless, and Proverbs was quite good, if that's how you like your literature, and Ecclesiastes was an unexpectedly amazing find. It is, as far as can work out, a Nihilistic essay on the meaning of life, something I never expected to find in the Bible of all places.
The rest of the prophets I found difficult to understand, except for Daniel; I quite enjoyed that one. I'm still trying to make up my mind on the new testament. The Gospel of Matthew was my least favourite, I'll reveal that much. I think Luke or John were the better ones, and I found Revelations to be quite 'trippy', if I could use that expression for any bit of the Bible. Lots of weird imagery That Could Be Interpreted In A Number of Different Ways.
Anyway, this was my trail of thoughts after reading through the Bible for the first time. Parts of it are worthy of re-reading, but I'll move onto less theologically-laden stuff for the immediate future.
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