Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. 1975; Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Mariner, 2021.

I am not sure whether it is because of the original material or the quality of the translation—likely both—but this is great reading!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the earliest extant tales in English concerning King Arthur and his knights. While it and the poem Pearl were likely written by a contemporary of Chaucer, the English dialect was significantly different from Chaucer’s London English. It is much closer to Anglo-Saxon, so for most readers a translation really helps. Here are the opening lines in the original:

Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at troye
þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondez and askez…

Here is Tolkien’s translation:

When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrand and ashes…

Definitely more recognizable!

Now critics have written much about Sir Gawain the Green Knight. Even this edition contains a preface by the editor, an introduction by the translator, and the text of a J. R. R. Tolkien lecture on the subject.

This is not going to be any literary interpretation then, but a mere review of sorts for the reader, with perhaps a little appreciation for Tolkien. (If I just say Tolkien, I am referring to J. R. R., not his son Christopher, who edited this collection.)

Tolkien gives some reasonable evidence that Chaucer knew the poem if not the poet, but the dialect they spoke was notably different. One near contemporary would write that one could travel twenty miles in England and not be able to understand the dialect spoken in the new place. Chaucer is more or less readable to the educated modern reader. The poetry in this volume would not be so.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are found on the same medieval manuscript book, and there is good reason to believe they were written by the same anonymous poet, often called the Pearl Poet. The two poems are quite different, however.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has elements of many of the Arthurian stories, namely courtesy, courtly love, and magic. When reading it, we are reminded that both courtesy and courtly love have the same root, court. Courtesy is the behavior or actions one would be expected to take in the court of a king or nobleman. Courtly love is the formal relation between a man and a woman who are members of a court and expected to chastely honor one another.

The tale begins with some magic. An exceptionally large knight, all dressed in green, with green skin and a similar green horse shows up in Arthur’s court with a challenge. Without going into too much detail, none of the knights (Lancelot, Bors, Bedivere, Agravaine, Iwain, and Lionel among others) want to accept the challenge, so Arthur takes it on himself. The test is dangerous, and no one in the court really wants the king to do it. Finally, Arthur’s young nephew Gawain says he will accept it, even though he will probably be killed in the attempt.

After some serious magic—I will leave the reader to discover what it is—Gawain realizes that in one year, he has to go to the Green Knight’s castle to take the second half of the challenge. He must arrive by New Year’s Day. As the following Christmas approaches, Gawain sets out to try to find the Green Knight and his castle.

He finally is welcomed by a nobleman who says he knows the Green Castle. He invites Gawain to spend a few days with him celebrating the holidays. The nobleman (we find out near the end his name is Bertilak) goes hunting every day for three days, but he insists that Gawain stay at the castle and entertain the ladies of the court. Again, without going into too much detail, the ladies of the court provide pleasant diversion but also temptation. This creates real tension in the story. What if the expectation of courtesy or courtly love conflict? What if either behavior conflicts with the Biblical moral code?

Tolkien’s own commentary notes that “Gawain is forced to draw…a distinction between ‘sin’ (the moral law) and ‘courtesy’” (128). I note that in this story the young Gawain is not the libertine we meet in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other later tales.

The poetry here is very lively. The poet clearly observed hunts and enjoyed them. On the first day there is a deer hunt led by the nobleman. As I read this, I could not help thinking of the description of fox hunts in The Eustace Diamonds. On the second day the lord and his men hunt a formidable wild boar. And on the third day there is indeed a fox hunt. Meanwhile back at the castle, the tension mounts.

Finally, Gawain sets out for the nearby castle of the Green Knight. The “castle” turns out to be a cave in a hill, more like the Hörselberg in the story of Tannhäuser, a courtly story made famous in more modern times by a Wagner opera and an Aubrey Beardsley novella. Gawain does meet the challenge, but not in the way he was expecting. There really is a surprise ending—sorry, no spoilers here!

The tale is divided into four “fits” or cantos of distinct stanzas with a varying number of lines. The first fit is set at Arthur’s Court (at Winchester here, not Camelot) when the Green Knight shows up. The second is Gawain wandering the British countryside till he finally comes to Bertilak’s castle. The third and longest fit describes his stay at Bertilak’s with the hunting and feasting at the castle. The fourth fit describes the second encounter with the Green Knight at the Knight’s place.

The stanzas are very distinctive, too. Most of the lines follow the older Anglo-Saxon or Old English alliterative style. Though he sometimes changes which sounds alliterate, Tolkien is careful to keep this up throughout. Notice in the second line of the poem translated above, the line still alliterates but instead of repeating the b sound, it alliterates with f. Still, the narrative poem reads here like a short novel.

The final four lines of each stanza are shorter and instead of alliterating, they rhyme abab. The poem, then, has elements of both the older English—think of the alliteration of Beowulf—with the rhyming which was becoming more standard, especially as courts took on French styles of singing. Tolkien masters this as well, so the poetic quality comes through even to a modern ear.

We are reminded that Tolkien himself was a medievalist. His commentary that accompanies the poem is worth reading and very helpful. Unlike many critics, even in his day, he does not try to impose a more contemporary worldview, but takes the work at face value. We are also reminded that his Middle Earth was a medieval world. His love of such things comes through in his novels, his translations, and in his scholarly work. That, plus his skilled writing, makes these writings appealing even to those who have no interest in medieval literature.

At the same time, his own commentary on the poem hints at what makes his storytelling so effective:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it receives part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with great fairy-stories—of which this is one (110, author’s emphasis).

One could say the same thing about the legendarium of Middle Earth.

Pearl

Pearl is the second poem Tolkien translated in this book. While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight could be considered a short epic of four “books,” Pearl is a visionary poem. While quite different in style, it has echoes of Dante’s Paradiso.

Again, Tolkien does a great job of translating the poem into modern English so that it reads like a narrative. Yes, it is devotional. It even has elements of hymns. But it mainly tells a story.

Like The Divine Comedy, it is told in the first person. Like Dante, too, the poet’s role to some degree is as a passive observer. But like Dante in his poem, the Pearl Poet reacts to things and carries on conversations. In this poem, Pearl is the poet’s Beatrice.

Like Dante at the beginning of his poem, the Pearl Poet is distressed, even depressed at first. In his case it is not because of exile; it is because his own young daughter named Pearl has died. (Tolkien notes in his commentary that some do not take this literally but see this simply on a symbolic level. He explains why he takes it literally. Pearl is no mere symbol but a real person.)

Indeed, there is a tone at the beginning not unlike Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son.” Both poets not only miss their child, but they wonder about purpose—both a purpose for their own lives and why God would allow one so young and innocent to die. While Jonson answers that question in a few lines, the Pearl Poet takes a hundred and one twelve-line stanzas.

The stanzas themselves are very tightly written. They clearly have more influence from French style than Old English. Each stanza has an ababcdcdefef rhyme scheme. Also the first line of a stanza takes a phrase from the last line of the stanza before it. The stanzas then are arranged in groups of five (one group of six) that have the common lines, so there is a thematic order to the poem.

As with Dante’s, much of this poem records a supernatural vision. The poet gets taken into Heaven where he sees many things and people including his daughter. Much of the poem consists of ethereal descriptions of what he sees. More of the poem, though, relates the conversation between the poet and Pearl, his daughter in Heaven. There are numerous allusions to the Bible, often naming the book of the Bible where the teaching or story is found.

Ben Jonson says God took his son from him at an early age because he had been turning his son into an idol. He also asks, “Will man lament the state he should envy?” Similarly, the poet and the reader understand that daughter Pearl now lives in a far, far better place. As St. Paul tells us: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Corinthians 2:9 KJV, cf. Isaiah 64:4 KJV). The poem, too, especially as it is translated for us, is a thing of beauty, as is the better place it tries to describe.

Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo is by far the shortest of the three narrative poems translated by Tolkien in this book. It has a little over 600 lines, so it really is a short story compared to the other two. Most readers can tell that the hero’s name suggests Orpheus, and, indeed, this is a medieval, courtly recasting of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This poem appears in various forms in three different manuscripts and may have been written as much as a century earlier than the other two poems. Tolkien tells us that it was probably translated from the French into Middle English.

In our story Orfeo and Heuridis are already married. He is a good king ruling a mythical England, not unlike Arthur. He also is a skilled harpist. One day while resting outdoors with her ladies-in-waiting, Heuridis suddenly disappears. The king is so distressed at his loss, that he gives up his throne and his riches to go on a quest to find his queen. He lives the life of a poor begging minstrel. As with Orpheus in Ovid, his music enchants even trees and animals.

A loyal retainer takes over the throne as a steward. Orfeo gets him to promise that if he ever returns with his wife, that he will return the kingdom to him. After roaming for ten years, Orfeo discovers that Heruidis was taken captive by faeries (that is the way Tolkien spells it here—though not in his commentaries). One can guess the rest of the story. He begins singing and playing his harp. He is so moving that the king and queen of the faeries grant him his wish. Let us just say that it has a happier ending than the original Greek myth.

One thing stuck out to this reader. The medieval kingdom has been ruled by a caretaker, a steward, for ten years. What happens when the legitimate king returns after spending time with woodland faeries? Hmm. One can wonder how much this inspired the story of the Stewards of Gondor and Aragorn and the elves in The Return of the King…

Sir Orfeo is fun to read. From all three of these works we see reasons why Return of the King continues to be an Amazon bestseller.

P.S. Speaking of Amazon, when is Season Two of The Rings of Power coming out?

M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green. Death of a Spy. Grand Central, 2024.

Well. we were right. The most recent Hamish Macbeth book we reviewed suggested that even though Mrs. Beaton died a few years ago, we have not seen the last of Hamish Macbeth stories. Mrs. Beaton still gets the header on the book cover, but it seems as if Mr. Green wrote the whole story.

This continues the tale of Death of a Traitor. We noted that in that story, Hamish found an encrypted note which implicated three men of the Scottish police force, Daviot, Anderson, and Blair. Death of a Spy moves that thread along. It is no spoiler to say that the death occurs in the first pages of the novel. We may not know right away that the person had been a spy, but since it is nearly the only death in the whole story, the mystery begins immediately.

The staged traffic accident does not occur in Hamish’s bailiwick, but an American acquaintance of his reappears—James Bland. In a previous novel, he appeared as a well-connected tourist, but now we see that he is some kind of special agent. Indeed, his name echoes James Bond, except, uh, blander. His cover is that he is a Chicago policeman on an exchange program with Scotland assigned to accompany Hamish in Lochdubh. Still he shows up in the office of Daviot, Hamish’s boss, with a classified letter referring to the Official Secrets Act.

Yes, Daviot, Anderson, and Blair are above suspicion—at least with respect to official secrets—but there are a dozen other names on the list that need to be examined. It turns out four have died, a fifth is the victim at the beginning of the story, but Bland wants Hamish’s help to track the others down. And in each case there is the mysterious “Boss” who seems to have an undue influence over everyone.

There is a lot of action. Hamish and Bland travel from Glasgow to the Britain’s northernmost point tracking down leads and interviewing people. In Glasgow they have a run-in with the Macgregor gang. Not surprisingly, the sleazy Blair seems to have a connection with them. At another point, Bland realizes they are being tailed. They visit a nuclear reactor that is being deactivated and a Navy ordnance base. Their appearance surprises some people, and other people appear out of nowhere and surprise them.

Meanwhile things are hopping in Lochdubh, Hamish’s home village. A burglar has broken into a number of homes. A few victims get a good look at him, but no one fitting his description is in town. A prominent tattoo should make the ID easy. He is clever. At one point he robs the Italian restaurant where co-owner Lucia stabs him. He grabs her knife and hurls it into the loch. No blood evidence.

And the stone bridge on the only road into Lochdubh has washed out. Hamish rescues the grocer Mr. Patel who is stuck on the bridge and manages to get an engineering crew to begin rebuilding the bridge the next day and put in a temporary structure in the meantime. The crew of seven disrupts things a bit in town as they like to visit the pub after work each day.

The site supervisor is a woman who takes a shine to Hamish. She enters the Tommel Castle hotel arm in arm with Hamish only to be greeted by Priscilla and Elspeth and Claire. Priscilla and Elspeth are both former fiancées of Hamish. Priscilla happens to have come from London to visit her family who runs the hotel, and Elspeth has come from Glasgow to report on the bridge outage. Claire is Hamish’s current flame who has been waiting for half an hour for a date with Hamish that he forgot about with all the goings-on. Hamish just cannot get it right with women…

There is a lot going on in this story throughout the Scottish countryside. Most of the recurring characters from previous tales show up, the three policemen and three women mentioned before, most of the regular townspeople, Blair’s wife Mary, Daviot’s secretary Helen, among others. This is less a mystery than some and more of a action-adventure or thriller, but readers should get a kick out of Death of a Spy. We understand that while others may consider Hamish lucky in the way he solves crimes, we see that he really is pretty savvy.

Donna Andrews. Lark! The Herald Angels Sing. St. Martin’s, 2018.

Just recently I mentioned Donna Andrews’ Christmas mysteries, and this one shows up at my house. (Books have a way of appearing in unusual ways sometimes.)

Lark! The Herald Angels Sing does not have as much about birds as Owl Be Home for Christmas, but what it does say is right on. There also is not much of a mystery, as I will explain.

During a Christmas pageant rehearsal at the Caerphilly, Virginia, Episcopal Church, someone leaves a real baby in the stage’s manger. There is a note attached saying that a local entrepreneur Rob is the father. The note suggests the baby girl is named Lark, hence the title. Rob is the brother of our narrator, Meg Langslow, who was planning to pop the question to his longtime girlfriend Delaney on Christmas. Needless to say, Delaney is upset and no longer wants anything to do with Rob.

In this case, the embedded ornithology lesson has nothing to do with larks, but with American Cowbirds and Eurasian Cuckoos. Like Lark’s mother, these birds lay their eggs in the nest of other birds.

The one real mystery, the true identity of Lark, is solved pretty quickly. However, just because there is no mystery does not mean that not much happens. The tale gets crazy.

We learn that the baby’s real father is a government whistleblower whose life is in danger. Janet,the mother who wrote the note, wanted to deflect attention from her husband, so she chose the name of the one single young man from Caerphilly she had heard of.

We learn that the corrupt government of neighboring Clay County has arrested Mark the father and has framed him for murder. The mother and her girlfriend are terrified. Much of the story, then, is how Meg digs into the story of Michael and develops a plot to set him free and get state and federal help in dealing with corrupt Clay County. (I could not help thinking of Boss Hogg from the old Dukes of Hazzard television show—a bit stereotyped but one could see the possibilities for a story.)

Things get more complicated as two different groups of men from Caerphilly try to help and all end up in the Clay County jail. Some cars, including Meg’s van, get towed away into Clay County even though they were parked in Caerphilly. A corrupt federal agent tries to thwart any plans of getting the feds involved—Mark is an accountant who uncovered lots of graft in the Clay County books. Oh, yeah, as a couple of Clay County thugs come to Caerphilly looking for Janet, they break into the women’s shelter with a pistol and a shotgun.

Eventually, Meg leads a group of female carolers to the rescue. I have not decided whether the conclusion is funny, clever, or unbelievable. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted, whenever we read or watch fiction we engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. For this story, I am not sure I was able to completely suspend my disbelief at its conclusion. Having said that, if you like suspense novels with a touch of humor, Lark! The Herald Angels Sing may be just what you are looking for. Andrews knows how to keep us turning the pages, even if the result might be something you would find on the Hallmark Channel.

M. C. Beaton. The Potted Gardener. St. Martin’s, 1994.

As readers of this blog may know, we have enjoyed several Hamish Macbeth stories we have read. We thought we would try the other series by Mrs. Beaton, namely something about Agatha Raisin. Here goes.

As I started reading The Potted Gardener, I honestly did not care for Mrs. Raisin. She came across as on the rude or testy side. However, as I got accustomed to her, I began to see the humor. She used to live in London and now lives in the small Cotswold village of Carsely. There is a bit of the fish out of water sense, and although she is in her fifties, she has developed an schoolgirl crush on James, a neighbor who is a retired Army colonel.

Things get interesting as another urban transplant comes to town, Mary Fortune. She is an attractive divorcee—Agatha’s husband left years ago, but they never divorced. Ms. Fortune (misfortune?) is a skilled gardener. She becomes active in the local Garden Club along with James, the retired colonel.

Agatha, who really knows little of gardening, decides to join because it is clear that something is going on between Mary and James. To call her is jealous is putting it mildly. Agatha has a plan, though. It involves building a high fence in her back yard and then planting a bunch of fresh plants from a nursery the night before the big garden competition. There is a catch. A former co-worker has arranged all this, so she has to un-retire and go back to her Public Relations firm for six months. (Some of the funniest parts involve her PR hiatus.)

At some point it becomes clear that James and Mary are no longer seeing each other as much. We also learn from others in the town that there is a certain two-faced quality about Mary. She can be charming and friendly, and then come up with a zinger or veiled insult. Even the vicar’s wife admits Mary may be unkind.

And then shortly before the gardening open house in the village, someone begins sabotaging gardens. The roses in one garden are painted black overnight. Another night all the goldfish in a small garden pond are poisoned. And so it goes. And then Mary is murdered and hanged in her garden. The manner in which she is hanged is a bit bizarre. Let us say that that inspired the book’s title: potted literally, not inebriated.

By this time, Mary has managed to offend a lot of people in town. In other words, everyone seems to have a reason not to like her. Still all the slights seem relatively slight—not causes for murder. Agatha and James discover her body, and soon they begin to do their own amateur sleuthing with the help of local police officer Billy Chang. To illustrate Mary’s character, she has called Billy a chink: Not kind, not the first time he has been called that, rude, yes, but not the type of insult that would lead a normal citizen to murder.

We learn that Mary has a grown daughter who is a student at Oxford. She and her stand-offish boyfriend come to town. It seems Mary had not gotten along with her, either.

This is more of a cozy than the typical Hamish mystery. There is no criminal enterprise or hard-nosed crimebuster, but a retired, slightly nosy matron and her village friends. She is observant, and she knows people. That, along with sprinkles of Beaton humor, make this one a light but entertaining mystery.

Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose. 1983; Translated by William Weaver, Everyman’s, 2006.

A friend recommended The Name of the Rose to me over thirty years ago. Chris, wherever you are, I finally read it!

I see why he liked it. It is very rich, allusive, and exotic. It is set in a time that even people in Italy seldom study or remember: the fourteenth century. This is about a hundred years before the invention of the printing press and nearly two hundred before the Reformation. Things in northern Italy, where it is set, have not changed much since the fall of Rome, but change is coming.

Friar William of Baskerville, our main character, uses spectacles to read. Now they had been invented some time before, but were still uncommon. Some of the monks at the abbey where he is staying consider them almost magical. As he arrives at the monastery, he tells some hostlers where a certain horse has escaped by reading hoofprints in the snow. Yes, he comes across as a medieval Sherlock Holmes. He gives credit to Roger Bacon, whom he has read and is seen as the originator of inductive reasoning (a.k.a. the scientific method) used today. Baskerville has less respect for William of Occam, whom he knew from Oxford.

The story is told by Baskerville’s traveling companion, a novice named Adso. Adso respects and admires Brother Baskerville and wants to learn from him. He asks him many questions and usually takes what he says at face value. In other words, he is a Watson to William’s Holmes.

Baskerville is a former inquisitioner and member of the Franciscans. The monastery is Benedictine, so there is both some mutual respect and also some rivalry. In the background are a number of groups trying to discover “genuine” Christianity including the Fraticelli offshoot of the Franciscans and the radical followers of Fra Dolcino. The Dolcinites would be considered heretical; the Fraticellis, reformers within the pale but suspect by some.

Other groups such as the Waldenses are mentioned as well. Like Chaucer in England, who sympathized with the Lollards, there are reformers everywhere it seems. The Church itself is worldly and political, but it would still take another two centuries before the Reformation would be institutionalized. But the seeds are there.

At one point the real Inquisition shows up. Unlike Baskerville, the inquisitioner from Avignon (based on historical figure Bernard Gui) is more interested in consolidating power and ecclesiastical order rather than discovering truth. Remigio, the poor monk snared by Gui, “now wants death with all his soul” (436)—not unlike Winston “He loved Big Brother” Smith. Plus ça change… (Interestingly, the story begins by the author’s tale of how he discovered Adso’s manuscript that includes a visit to Prague in 1968. He ends up trapped for a while after the Soviet army invades the country.)

Much of the tale, though, is intellectual. The abbey has one of the best collections of books in Europe. At one point it is compared to the Library of Alexandria. But no one is allowed in the library except the librarian and his one assistant. There is a catalog, but the librarian, perhaps under direction of the abbot, can decide what books can be checked out and by whom. Some are never allowed to be checked out.

As Baskerville says, “Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten” here (200). Adso observes:

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks. (208)

Adso and Baskerville sneak into the library one night, seeking both information on some books but also trying to solve one of the murders. The library turns out be arranged like a labyrinth. As a result, they are almost trapped in the library—if the librarian or abbot were to catch them there, they would be dismissed and probably the crimes would never be solved.

We meet monks from many parts of Europe including France, Spain, Germany, England, and Italy. (One thinks of The Magic Mountain, or how “all of Europe” contributed to Conrad’s Kurtz.) One is the old blind monk Jorge de Burgos, whose name suggests Jorge Luis Borges. That could tell the reader the kind of story The Name of the Rose is. And, yes, Borges’ most famous collection of tales is entitled Labyrinths, and one of its best known stories is “The Library of Babel.” The novel is allusive, but not all the allusions are to the Middle Ages.

As best I could tell, all the religious movements referred to were historical. So were the books mentioned. I do wonder about the some of the Arabic texts, but they could be authentic. I recognized a few titles. I was reminded of the books read by Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Some were invented by Poe, but others such as Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell really exist. Some of the mystery here revolves around an ancient philosophical text known to have existed but lost to history, kind of like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Found (see Martin’s Harvard Yard).

The Name of the Rose is a gothic novel and a murder mystery, but it is clearly much more. It is not so much an intellectual challenge as an intellectual feast. What is truth? What is the nature of God? Can we really know what is true? What is objectivity? What did the ancients know that we have lost? What do we know that they did not?

There are many sayings in Latin and a few in other modern languages. Having taken a year and a half of Latin in college, I was able to muddle through most of the Latin. The French was fine for me. When I was stumped by a German quotation near the end, I discovered a web page that contained English translations of all the foreign quotations. I do recommend this to readers: “Translations to Accompany The Name of the Rose.”

The introduction by David Lodge to the Everyman’s Edition covers the story quite thoroughly. Because he says so much well, this review defers to his. I do recommend his advice to the first-time reader to stop at page xiv of the Introduction until after reading the novel to avoid spoilers. It also helps to reader to be familiar with the Bible, especially Revelation and the Gospel of John, though there are allusions to many books of the Bible including the Apocrypha.

This book is a gem. I confess being a little disappointed a the very end, only because it seemed to terminate in a kind of postmodern vagueness instead of a more typically Medieval point of view (think of Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, or especially Boethius). The author drops enough hints, though, about what will happen, if, as in a whodunit, we pay attention. It will keep readers thinking and keep researchers investigating. I am glad to have read it. It might even be worth a second look.

Spencer Quinn. Up on the Woof Top. Forge, 2023.

After some patient waiting, we finally got a chance to read the latest Chet and Bernie mystery from a local library. Any readers of our blog should note by now that we are fans. Up on the Woof Top does not disappoint.

Readers can probably tell by the title that this mystery is set at Christmastime. Bernie Little, the detective, and Chet, our canine narrator, happen to attend a book signing by Dame Ariadne Castle. Miss Castle may be based on Donna Andrews or David Rosenfelt with some Dame Agatha Christie. She has made a successful career writing Christmas mysteries. In fact, her latest one is number 99 in the series. As can be told from her title, she is British, but she spends about half the year in the United States at a ranch in the Colorado Rockies that is a kind of Santa’s village she calls Kringle Ranch. She has a number of lodges or chalets there and keeps it decorated for Christmas year-round. She also has nine reindeer on the premises.

Chet makes an impression on her at the book signing, so when one of her reindeer is missing, she contacts the Little Detective Agency for help. Like other writers who have become institutions, she has a staff who also live on the premises including Chaz LeWitte and Georgette Eliot. If Georgette’s name sounds suspiciously like a certain nineteenth-century English author, I suspect that is no coincidence. The lodge Chet and Bernie stay in at the ranch is called the Cratchit House. There are other characters named Wordsworth, Missy Havisham, Sikes, and Pelgotty (Peggotty?), and some of the action takes place on Mt. Murdstone.

They arrive at Kringle Ranch in something like the fifth Porsche that Bernie has owned (we lost track, they keep crashing). Not only is the reindeer gone, but soon Chaz is missing as well. Chet and Bernie, thanks in part to Chet’s nose, do find Chaz—unconscious at the bottom of a cliff known as Devil’s Purse. As Bernie does some more sleuthing, we learn that some thirty or forty years ago Miss Castle’s fiancé was murdered and his body discovered at the same location.

The story gets interesting and complicated. Miss Castle is also having a struggle with writer’s block. She usually cranks out three or four novels a year, now she is stuck. She thinks it might because of the missing reindeer. Chet and Bernie will indeed crack the cases of both Chaz and the deer as told by Chet’s usual hilarious narrative style. Oh, and it looks like Bernie is getting serious about his latest girlfriend, Weatherly.

I have one quibble with this novel. I am beginning to see a pattern among the perpetrators in some of the recent Chet and Bernie stories. Mr. Quinn seems to have fallen into a kind of Hollywood stereotyping trap. As soon as I first read about one of the people in the story, I said to myself, if Quinn is following that stereotype I have noted in his recent books, this person is going to be the criminal. Sadly, I was right. Sad, not because it was too easy for Bernie to solve—it wasn’t—but because of the Hollywood typing convention. Next time, surprise us!

Daniel A. Poling. Your Daddy Did Not Die. Greenberg, 1944.

Readers who are familiar with tales of World War II may recall something of the four Immortal Chaplains. The American troop ship Dorchester was on its way to Europe in late 1942 with about 900 soldiers on board. It was early in the war when German U-boats were big trouble for the Allies. A German torpedo sank the ship. About 300 men survived. As the ship was sinking, the four chaplains assigned to the troops—one Jewish, one Catholic, two Protestant—gave their life jackets to other soldiers and went down with the ship, praying together.

One of the chaplains was Clark Poling. Your Daddy Did Not Die was written by Lt. Poling’s father as a kind of memoir about his son to Clark’s three-year-old son, Corky. It is homey and sentimental. I can recommend it as a good sketch about what life was like for the middle to upper middle class in the United States from 1910 until the beginning of World War II.

We learn a lot about the Poling family. It is honestly a little hard to keep track of everything. Clark’s mother died when he was a preschooler and his father remarried a widow with her own children. It seems, then, there were six children in the family, and maybe one born afterwards. If it seems a little hard to note this for sure, it is partly because the story is largely told in a nonlinear, rambling style.

The author himself was a fairly high-ranking (if such a term applies) clergyman. He was the assistant pastor for many years for Norman Vincent Peale, published Christian Herald magazine, and was a leader of Christian Endeavor, a ministry for church youth leaders. We get a sense of what mainline churches were like in the first half of the twentieth century. Religious belief and membership was pretty much taken for granted. I could not help thinking of Will Herberg’s acclaimed 1955 sociological study Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Back then, every American was one of those three religions. Atheists and skeptics were Communists or (before the war) Fascists.

No reader can seriously question the author’s faith or the faith of his son, but we note a generational shift. Clark and his brother Daniel, Jr., who was also a pastor, were the seventh generation of clergymen in the family going back to the Puritans. Clark’s grandfather was a Baptist missionary to Oregon who worked in rural areas and among Indians. The author calls him a Fundamentalist, that is someone who subscribed to the teaching of The Fundamentals, including the atoning work of Jesus alone for salvation and the complete inspiration and infallibility of the Bible.

From his tone, we sense the author was less strict. His son had doubts about parts of the Bible such as the virgin birth of Jesus, but still believed in God and in the Christian religion. We can see in this the gradual shift of emphasis in many mainline churches that continues until the present.

There is no real theme to the book, but there are fond memories of the fallen chaplain. We learn, for example, that in the war a greater percentage of chaplains were killed than any other army corps except for the Air Corps. They were often in harm’s way but were noncombatants. Readers can appreciate the family’s sacrifice. While Lt. Poling did have about two years with Corky before he left for Europe, he never did meet his daughter whom his wife was carrying when the Dorchester went down. As they say, freedom is never free.

Lt. Poling had only been in the army about a year when he was killed. That was true of two of the other chaplains as well. However, because of his job, he got to know hundreds of soldiers during that time. Some people, especially mothers, often worry that the rough life of many soldiers would corrupt their sons. He observed that young men who were raised well and had positive character traits still had them in the service. Their experiences would affect them, yes, but their basic personalities, whether for good or evil, would come forth in the military as much as any other occupation.

From what I have seen, that is still true today. To mothers I would say, if you want your sons to become men, the service is a good option. Yes, there are great risks, but at the same time it truly tests their character. I still recommend the military experience for any young man who can pass the physical.

Above photo is of the 1948 Immortal Chaplains Commemorative Postage Stamp. I believe Lt. Poling is second from left. Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.

F. M. Luzel. Contes Bretons: Recueillis et Traduit [Breton Folk Tales: Collected and Translated]. 1870; Wikisource, 2021.

I recently heard of François-Marie Luzel for the first time. As some readers of these pages may know, I studied folklore and oral transmission in college and have an interest the Grimm Brothers tales (märchen to scholars) as well as ancient epics. Since starting this blog, I have noted Joseph Campbell’s work. Luzel was the Grimm brother of folk tales of Brittany. He spoke the Celtic Breton language, which is very similar to Welsh. A Breton and Welshman can carry on a conversation with one another with nearly 100% understanding. Luzel then translated the folk tales he collected into French. This collection contains six tales, all somewhat reminiscent of folk stories from other places, but with a clear connection to Brittany and France.

Luzel tells us that most of the tales were told by more than one person as he was doing his research. He included what he considered the most representative details of each story with some endnotes describing certain variations. In other words, we can read this as a scholarly collection, but for most of us, we read it as a collection of clever fairy tales. While children can appreciate them, they were probably meant for grownups as were the Grimm tales. And at least one tale has a postscript telling us that the story really happened…

The first tale, “The Giant Goulaffre,” combines a number of typical folk tale elements. Indeed, when our two heroes enter the giant’s castle, the giant first becomes aware of them from their scent: “I smell the odor of a Christian, and I want to eat him!” (257) says the giant, not unlike “I smell the blood of an Englishman…I’ll grind his bones to make my bread” in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” We understand that many animals have a better sense of smell than humans, so this illustrates the animalistic or savage side of the giant.

The main character of the story is a young Breton named Allanic, the only son of his widowed mother. He wants to explore the world to find his fortune, as so many young men in such tales do. He also is skilled musician, playing the pipes. For some of his adventures, he has a dancer friend who accompanies him. (It makes me wonder if Mat and Rand in The Eye of the World were inspired by this or a similar tale.) They outwit the giant to escape his hunger and end up in Paris serving the king.

When the king hears of Allanic’s escapade with the giant, the king sets him back on two quests to regain items the giant has stolen from the king. Allanic is able to very cleverly outwit the giant—indeed, he gets the giant to kill his own wife and daughters. It is no spoiler to say that at the end, Allanic gets to marry the king’s daughter because of his loyalty, bravery, and cleverness, not unlike the ending to many other fairy tales.

“The Man with Two Dogs” is more magical. This also involves an enchanted castle, and our hero is able to outwit evil devils, who also want to devour Christians. He gains the help of a captive princess. In this case, he is actually eaten three times, but each time a piece of his body is left behind so that he is magically recreated, the third time from only a fingernail. In this case our hero is Jean, the son of the king, but Jean is usurped by his older sister and her husband, so there are also three trials to regain his rightful throne. Once again, the cleverness of both the hero and heroine as well as the magical abilities of the two dogs is able to save the day.

The hero of “The Godson of the Holy Virgin” is, as in the first tale, a poor boy who does well. His parents are old when he is born and ask the parish priest to be the godfather of their son because the father had been tricked by a troop of devils to give them his firstborn son. Because he is a priest, the godfather says the boy’s godmother must be the Virgin Mary.

As the boy, Pipi, comes of age, he also must go out on some adventures and overcome those devils. He does so with the help of the Blessed Virgin and a holy book she gives him (presumably some Scriptures). In this case he also helps free the daughter of sorcerers. Their wedding, we are told, was attended by a great-great grandfather of one of the storytellers, so we know that the story really happened.

“Jesus Christ in Lower Brittany” begins by telling us that one time “Our Savior Jesus Christ once had made a tour of Lower Brittany, accompanied by St. Peter and St. John” (816). This is more of a clever moral story with echoes of the Greek myth of Philemon and Baucis. In this case, the lonely widow they bless has to learn a lesson, to distinguish between what God can do and what happens to humans who try to imitate God apart from Him and their own desires. Like the other tales, there is some humor, though in this the humor is more lighthearted. They three travelers teach a similar lesson to the cook of a lord. Both episodes have echoes “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in those lessons.

“The Two Sons of the Fisherman” may be the most magical of the stories here. A fisherman and his wife have twins after being childless for a long time. When one twin comes of age, he wants to seek his fortune. He does, and ends up rescuing a princess in a castle whom he marries. But then trouble begins. Without going into too much detail, this is the second story that involves a deadly “wheel of razors.” (Were they trying to imagine a deadlier circular saw?) Brother number two ends up rescuing brother number one in a heady triumph of good over evil.

“The Miller and His Lord” may be the cleverest of the stories. It is probably the funniest. A miller owes his lord rents but is unable to pay them. Unfortunately, the lord shows no mercy, so the miller leaves for the nearby town with his one valuable possession, a cow. He is attacked by robbers. He escapes, but the cow is captured, killed, and eaten by the thieves. While the thieves are resting after their repast, the miller gets into the cow skin—its head and horns are still intact—and scares the robbers off. He gathers all the money left behind that they have robbed from others.

He is now able to pay the landlord the twenty écus he owes. The lord asks him where he got the money, and he said he sold the hide of his cow for a hundred écus. The greedy lord then slaughters all he cows in his own herd and takes the leather to the town, expecting a hundred écus per hide. The people there laugh him out of town. The miller shares a few other supernatural secrets which his lord believes. Ultimately, the lord loses his wife and his wealth. Without going into detail, the additional devices are equally clever. Towards the end, the positions of the miller and greedy lord are nearly reversed.

One recurring image or idea is that all the protagonists except in “Jesus Christ in Lower Brittany” have to overcome or face three challenges. In the case of “The Man with the Two Dogs” there are three trials followed by three more different trials. There are certain other recurring elements, especially the triumph of clever young men and the helpfulness of high-ranking but endangered young women. and, of course, there is the general triumph of justice over injustice. Readers who like fairy tales will definitely enjoy these. While I read them in French, they have been recently translated into English. Have fun!

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not page numbers.

Jonathan Cahn. The Josiah Manifesto. Front Line, 2023.

This past year we happened to see a television interview with Jonathan Cahn on his latest book, The Josiah Manifesto. It sounded intriguing, and when we saw that one of the local libraries had a copy, we were able to read it. It certainly suggests something about the power of God, and that He truly observes what is going on in the world.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is largely a study of the biblical concept of Jubilee and how that applies to things going on today. The second part is the titular manifesto, a call to action based on the figure of King Josiah in the Bible.

The concept of Jubilee is that every fifty years the nations of Israel and Judah were to restore things to their original state among the people. That meant property that had been bought and sold was to revert to its original owners, that any slaves or indentured servants were to be released, and that any debts were to be forgiven. Cahn basically sees this as a restoration to the way things were and a way to start from the point that God intended.

Without going into too much detail, he notes a couple of “jubilees,” fifty year restorations of justice from injustice. The most important which he discusses at length is the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the court ruling that legalized abortion on demand in the United States. The restoration of protection for the vulnerable babies in the womb was fifty years after the original ruling.

He notes also that in 1970 the first two states in the Continental United States legalized abortion: New York and Washington. In 2020 they were the two states most in the news over Covid-19. The first case in the country was in Washington and the most and deadliest cases were in New York. To him this is not coincidence.

As a biblical parallel, he notes that the first of the ten plagues of Egypt under Moses was the Nile River turning to blood. This paralleled the drowning of babies in the river when Moses was a baby. “…the waters of the Nile would turn to blood just as the blood of the Hebrew children had once reddened its waters.” (126)

He notes that the United States and a few other nations finally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, fifty years after Israel began ruling there in 1967. Cahn also speaks of an interesting series of events after fifty years of Communism in Cuba, events which he observed.

The second part is the actual Josiah Manifesto. Cahn sees King Josiah of Judah as a leader of a nation in a condition similar to that of America and most of the Western world. When Josiah became king, the nation had been ruled by a succession of ungodly rulers who promoted idolatry—including child sacrifice—and persecuted and killed the prophets. Josiah rediscovered the Hebrew Scriptures and restored worship of the true God and a just government.

King Manasseh, Josiah’s grandfather, had embarked on a campaign to further the worship of foreign gods, to erect pagan shrines and altars, and to bring the practices of the pagan world into the land. In its initial stages it could be championed in the name of tolerance, acceptance, freedom, and openness to the new.

But once things were legitimized, established, and enshrined, the banner of openness and tolerance was withdrawn and replaced by an iron rod of coercion, oppression, persecution, and cultural totalitarianism. It is no accident that Manasseh is recorded as having “shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another.” [see II Kings 21:16] It was the inevitable flip side of the coin. It was inevitable that the same culture that called evil good would call what was good evil. If one embraces evil, one must end up waging war against the good. (194)

The Josiah Manifesto, then, becomes a study of Josiah and how people in today’s world, especially the West, can promote justice and recover a lost worldview. Throughout, it exhorts the reader to trust in God. There are few specifics, but a general call to be courageous and stand for the truth.

The more a culture departs from the ways of God, the more revolutionary it will be to walk in them. Every godly act will become a revolutionary act. Every godly word will become a revolutionary world. And every godly life will become a revolutionary life. The people of God must increasingly live as a revolutionary people. Those who follow Messiah must increasingly return to their first of all states, the state of revolution. (206)

A culture that has fallen from God will always seek to justify its altered state by altering standards, redefining values, and reframing reality. (225)

But, as Joshua would have said, the righteous are to “be strong and of good courage.”

The righteous must ultimately be defined by that which they stand against but by that for which they stand. Their lives must bring forth healing, restoration, salvation, and redemption. Their impact on the world must be positive. They must love in the face of hatred, bless in the face of persecution, return good for evil, and manifest heaven in the face of hell. (239-240)

It is impossible for a universe to come forth out of nothing, for a sea to part in two, for a man to shut up the heavens, for a virgin to conceive a child, for the dead to rise to life, for a weak and broken band of disciples to change the world, and for a nation that has been dead for two thousand years to come back to life. But God is the God of the impossible. And those who follow Him, especially in times of adversity and impossibilities, must live against the odds, above the laws of the natural, and by the power of the impossible. With God all things are possible, and nothing will be impossible. (271)

May it be, Lord. May we be found faithful.

The last chapter brings the two parts of the book together. Without creating any spoilers, let us just say that it reminds us that, regardless of what seems to be going on, God is still on His throne.

Wilson H. Faude. Hidden History of Connecticut. History Press, 2010.

Hidden History of Connecticut is for Connecticut residents and those who are visiting the state. While each short chapter describes a historically significant event or person, each includes some location or landmark that the reader can visit. In most cases, these places are not well known, even to the average resident of the state.

The landmarks include some historical houses and buildings. Many chapters deal with artists who lived or settled in Connecticut such as Frederic Church or the “Harvard Five” architects. You will not find the Mystic Seaport or any university museum here. There are, however, descriptions of the New Britain Museum of American Art—the first museum in the country dedicated just to American artists—and the Florence Griswold Museum which housed a large artists’ colony a hundred years ago.

We also learn of certain significant historical events. Most people in the state are aware that Connecticut, when it was a colony, had the first written constitution of any government in the world. Here we learn a little more about it and especially the famous, if legendary, story of the Charter Oak.

The meeting in Connecticut in 1780 between American and French military leaders including Washington and Rochambeau would lead to the success of the Revolution a year later. The author believes this would have led to annual celebrations and re-enactments in many places, but Connecticut tends to be low-key. So it is with the house of Oliver Ellsworth in Windsor who proposed the Connecticut Compromise which saved the American Constitution.

An easily-overlooked set of plaques commemorates the Washington-Rochambeau event. That is all. An even easier-to-miss plaque notes a meeting in 1976 between William Buckley and Ronald Reagan that gave some direction to Reagan’s eventual successful presidency as well as some direction for Ronald, Jr., in pursuing ballet.

While some historical places are known for festive Christmas celebrations, Hidden History of Connecticut tells of at least four places that have interesting Christmas presentations of one kind or another that are often overlooked. This includes the Butler-McCook and Harriet Beecher Stowe houses and the Boar’s Head Festival, all in Hartford, and the Hill-Stead House in Farmington.

There are many more gems and touching stories. Some perhaps more trivial than others, but all noting historical curiosities and interesting places to visit in the Nutmeg State.