Various pics

This one goes with Grim's story of the Marine carrying his girlfriend up the mountain. Semper Fi, she says. Indeed.

And here is a little Belle Heures teaser. I didn't forget you guys and risked life and limb taking pictures with my cell phone, whilst evading no fewer than three minders in the exhibit. I felt so Mission Impossible. (I just went to a translation site to be cute and put that in French for effect and don't you know its spelt the exact same way?!)

This might be the one that I took through a magnifying glass they supplied. The aureola have real texture and look as though they were painted yesterday, though my little cell phone camera cannot reflect the true skill used.

And another one taken of two Mourners they had near the Belle Heures stuff.

And this is a little bit of information related to the conversation we were having about traditional religious orders. It's from the newsletter of a group of cloistered monks I support.

Grim's Hall Book Club

Grim's Hall Book Club:

It's been a while since we had a book club entry. While I suppose Zelda's Ogre counts as reading, in a sense, it would be a good idea to get back to the business of reading some underlying classics.

I've been reading Parzival this summer, one of the last major Arthurian texts that I hadn't read before. It fails my basic test of reading material for GHBC, though, which is that there does not appear to be a free version online. I suspect that it's not even available at most of your public libraries, except perhaps through interlibrary loan, as the story -- once the most popular tale in Europe -- has fallen out of fashion.

We could do some more of Plutarch, if you like. Some of the Norse sagas make for excellent reading, and I'd like to tackle at least a few of those over the next few years. Some of you may have other ideas. Let's hear them.

Cyborgs

Scruton on Cyborgs:

Roger Scruton takes on an old debate of ours, and looks forward:

The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in the moment of truth, to a paroxysm of disappointment and misanthropy. Both of these do violence to our nature. The first condemns us to the life of unreason; the second to the life of contempt. Human beings may not be as good as the shallow optimists pretend; but nor are they as bad as the prophets and curmudgeons have painted them.

In order to see human beings as they are, therefore, and to school oneself in the art of loving them, it is necessary to apply a dose of pessimism...

That is the beginning; but what happens when we can change human nature? He appears to be pessimistic about that as well. Yet he is pessimistic in an odd way; this pessimism is required for us to be happy.

The transhumanists believe that we will replace ourselves with immortal cyborgs, who will emerge from the discarded shell of humanity like the blessed souls from the grave in some medieval Last Judgement.
The transhumanists don’t worry about Huxley’s Brave New World: they don’t believe that the old-fashioned virtues and emotions lamented by Huxley have much of a future in any case. The important thing, they tell us, is the promise of increasing power, increasing scope, increasing ability to vanquish the long-term enemies of mankind, such as disease, ageing, incapacity and death....

We are not, and cannot be, the kind of posthuman cyborgs that rejoice in eternal life, if life it is. We are led by love, friendship and desire; by tenderness for young life and reverence for old. We live, or ought to live, by the rule of forgiveness, in a world where hurts are acknowledged and faults confessed to. All our reasoning is predicated upon those basic conditions, and one of the most important uses of pessimism is to warn us against destroying them. The soul-less optimism of the transhumanists reminds us that we should be gloomy, since our happiness depends on it.

Confer with the piece from Mr. Dalyrymple, below. The idea is that redistributing resources cannot make people happy, because happiness comes from the development of internal virtues. It cannot even make them "not poor," as the failure to develop those virtues will strip them of whatever wealth you redistribute to them. What it can do, as in the case of the islanders with the phosphorous, is destroy them: it can undermine the virtues they do have by removing the scarcity that demands and regulates those virtues. Disaster follows.

This would appear to be the same concept, but pointed not at "the poor" but at all humanity. It seems like it might be right, too, on the same terms. Aristotle held that happiness (eudaimonia) was an activity, specifically rational activity in accord with excellence. The concept of "excellence" rubs up against failure: after all, you are judging what is excellent by comparing it with what is not.

This kind of life is perhaps a good example of what would 'justify us in having a child' according to Mr. Singer. What if we could promise that the child would never grow old or weak, nor be hungry, nor suffer pain or danger? Well, wouldn't the child be horribly bored with such an eternal life? Where then is the joy, the eudaimonia that Aristotle spoke of? How does the child excel if there are no challenges?

No matter, you might say; emotions are really "in" the brain, so we will remove the concern that you would be bored and unhappy by simply arranging to stimulate the appropriate pleasure centers. You will be perfectly happy and satisfied, forever.

That, then, would be for Mr. Singer a justification of the child's life. What kind of person would we be, though? What would that do to our moral nature? What would we do with such lives, and such freedom?

I suspect the answer is "nothing." If that is the case, Singer is wrong: the child may as well not have been born at all.

Confer

Confer:

Against spirituality in academia:

The kind of research Poloma and her colleagues propose, however empirical and peer-reviewed, seems to come as an affront to centuries of purported progress in disentangling natural science from supernatural belief. Depending on whom you ask, Templeton represents either the hijacking of nothing less than the meaning of life, or the restoration of its luster, which has been dulled by politics and cynicism.

In favor:

So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!

Of course, it would be impossible to get agreement on universal sterilization, but just imagine that we could. Then is there anything wrong with this scenario? Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off.

Of course, Singer doesn't intend to argue for the importance of God in philosophy; and the Templeton scholars don't mean to be an argument against it. Yet each of them seems to do a good job of forwarding their opponent's position.

Editing the Mind

Editing the Mind:

We can now edit photographs far better than ever before. What happens when can edit memories to go with the new photos? Turns out, we already can.

She's preparing a report on a new experiment involving U.S. military personnel in survival training. First, the trainees were brutally interrogated. Then, through bogus photographs, their memories were altered so that they could no longer identify their interrogators. The experiment is an inadvertent blueprint for getting away with war crimes. Loftus worries about who will use it.

Everyone will.

I imagine they were

I Imagine They Were:

Mr. Daylrymple writes:

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense; it resulted from the various kinds of squalor—moral, familial, psychological, social, educational, and cultural—that were particularly prevalent in the country (see “Childhood’s End,” Summer 2008).

My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists.

Doubtless. Nevertheless, he makes a good case. Eric will probably recognize the truth of his remarks on the sudden alteration of people from subsistence to rentiers.

The Blade Show

The BLADE Show:

So today I went down to the BLADE Show, the annual exposition of Blade magazine. It was all the way down in Atlanta, but I went anyway because some of my association were getting together to play.



Described as "the world's largest knife show," it had some truly impressive entries from craftsmen and artists as well as industry leaders. I was impressed to see that almost every table was either a major manufacturer or an independent knifemaker of significant skill; there were also some supply dealers. What there wasn't was pawn shops, for the most part, or people peddling trash such as you get at gun shows (one reason that I have not been to a gun show in several years; another reason is that I believe I have a sufficient number and variety of guns for the various tasks that I encounter requiring them).

Of special interest to me were Albion Swords and CAS Hanwei. I met "Tinker Pierce," who has designed their latest range of swords for western martial artists. He provided a couple of test models of his longsword, blunt, which you can see being used above. They performed better than expected! After an hour of vigorous practice, there were no nicks on the blade, and the fittings had not loosened at all.

Albion invited me to handle every one of their main production line swords, and spent quite a while with me talking through the differences in the models. I was highly impressed, especially with the stunning difference in handling qualities between their type XIIa and type XIIIa war swords. These things read like they should be very similar in characteristics, as the stats are similar; both are made of the same monosteels, as well. The main difference is the taper line. Yet the XIIIa is a wholly different creature in the hand.

It was a very good time.

War Posters

History And Now

History and Now:

Did the Founders have all the answers?

If a "tea party" event is where the disaffected go to protest the present, his classes are where they go to ponder the past. Participants include members of "9.12" groups inspired by conservative commentator Glenn Beck, Republicans, home-school groups and people affiliated with militias.

Here in Springfield, the day's students sipped coffee and chewed on peppermints while seated at folding banquet-hall tables. They included a lawyer, a farmer, a local politician and a project manager for a construction company.

What I find most interesting about the courses is that they represent a return to history as it was taught some decades ago. That is, the focus on "the Founder's supposed immorality" that we find in modern histories is intentionally laid aside; and, perhaps because the founder of the course was a minister who was also an anti-Communist, there is instead a focus on the Founder's faith and spirituality.

On that subject, I think we might honestly say that the Founding was of two minds: there were quite a number of Deists and others for whom faith was not what we think of today when we ascribe devotion to someone. Yet that faith was not dead: Deists, if they did not believe in a God who intervened, they believed in a Creator who had some intentions in making the world (such that he 'endowed' humanity with 'certain inalienable rights,' such as life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness). If they did not believe that God would help us, they believed that God had made us free -- and had not done so for no reason.

There were also many Founders, particularly at the state and local level, who were intensely devout in a sense we would find more recognizable. The modern historians have lost that sense, in their focus on exploring Deism; Deism was important, and we should try to understand it, but much of the focus on it is a reflection of the modern scholar's taste. So too with the Founders' 'immorality,' some of which was certainly real; but the focus on it is mostly about the modern scholar, and not the real importance of the thing being described at such length and with such focus.

If these new/old classes go too far in playing down those things, that is the normal reaction in historiography. History as a discipline goes through waves of praising and condemning the same people or events, as the field cycles this way and that. Anyone who has followed historiography on any given topic knows the truth of this. This is why a truly balanced and sober history is such a gift, and so worthy of praise.

Of course, journalists are also guilty.

Today, reverence for the Constitution and the Founding Fathers is an important part of the militia movement. Taylor's work has been embraced, for instance, by members of Oath Keepers, a group of current and former police and military personnel who renew their oaths to the Constitution, and call themselves "guardians of the republic."

This strange detour into militias (and inability to recognize that the Oath Keepers are not a militia!) is plainly a product of the fears of the reporter. Citing the "milita movement," which is like five guys in Oregon, is just a weird hobby horse. Would the Washington Post endorse: "Today, reverence for the Koran is an important part of the terrorist movement"? Of course not; they would say that the statement slanders the Koran and the millions who reverence it without being connected to terrorism in any way.

Ultimately, the Founders weren't right about everything. Slavery is the obvious choice of an example of something they got very wrong, although it is also sui generis, and therefore has limited use as an example. Certainly, however, there were other things that they did not get right.

Too, there are other things that they got right for their time and place, but that we no longer find quite right for America as it exists today. For example, birthright citizenship made perfect sense for them at the time; but in an age when it is easy to get on a plane and fly around the world, so that anyone with a plane ticket can essentially purchase citizenship for their child by vacationing at the right time, it may no longer make sense. Another example is military appropriations; the Constitution hedges against a standing army by refusing to allow for more than a two-year appropriations of funds for one. The ship has sailed on the question of whether or not we'll have a standing army, however; and more, the army has proven to be not the fearsome force that the Founders worried about in their era, but one of the strongest pillars of our Republic.

Where the Founders weren't right, however, they gave us Article V to let us change the things that we need to change. Adjustments to our basic law that are approved in that mode enjoy broad support and legitimacy. More, the strength of the process prevents rapid alteration of society's shape, requiring careful deliberation over years before making major alterations. This prevents social instability, and ensures that momentary enthusiasms among the voting public do not undermine the fabric of the nation.

That's one lesson we need for today. The Constitution provides specific, limited powers to the Federal government. Any time it wants to do something new, it needs to ask for new authority. If we learn just one thing well, let us learn a way to require the Congress, the Executive and the Supreme Court to respect that principle.

South Carolina's Strange Election Year:

Crush at BLACKFIVE writes about an attempt to lie about a veteran's combat record, in a South Carolina election.

According to official documentation, Connor – a recipient of the Bronze Star and the combat infantryman badge – has been described by his superiors as “a fearless, consummate combat leader” who “performed well under intense enemy fire and always led his men from the front.”

Beyond that, I have personally spoken to soldiers who have served “in action” with Connor, and in one instance Connor literally had to fight with his pistol against fanatics with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades who were trying to wipe out a convoy (Connor was leading) with a series of complex ambushes one-after-another for 4.5 miles of isolated highway in Afghanistan.

This is exactly the kind of garbage that would vanish in an instant if these lies were subject to the old sanction. How fitting it would be if a lie like this was answered by an opportunity to face "a fearless combat leader" on the field of honor.

Another thing we would see a lot less of is vicious attempts to slander ladies. These people making accusations of unchastity towards here are not fit to duel. A gentleman would not say such things about a lady in public even if they were true. As these are dogs as well as liars, they would not merit the honor of a duel; they deserve only to be driven from the state with a horsewhip.

The elected officials pretend to the status of gentlemen, however, and ought to be answerable to actual gentlemen. There are plenty of oak trees in Charleston that would be perfect for this occasion.

This Is The Moment

A Moment in History:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.

It was an impressive speech.

Venite a Laudare

Venite a Laudare:

Venite a Laudare
Per amore cantare
L'amorosa vergene Maria.

When I was younger, I used to say that I would convert to Catholicism if they would go back to Latin masses. It appears that people who are currently young feel the same way:

Pope Benedict's critics had hoped Summorum Pontificum would disappear without a trace. It hasn't. His apostolic constitution authorizing wider use of the Traditional Latin Mass continues to bear fruit, some of it annoyingly visible to these critics.

Far from just a sop thrown to aging traditionalists, as some liberal bishops cast it, Summorum Pontificum has proven popular with the young. As Pope Benedict noted in its accompanying letter, the Traditional Latin Mass is old in origin but new in appeal: "young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction, and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Sacrifice particularly suited to them."

Explaining exactly why that should be the case is difficult, but it is plainly the case nevertheless. J. R. R. Tolkien captured something of the issue with his use of the elvish tongues he invented in situations in his novels where Latin would have been employed by a Medieval writer. Of course, Tolkien was a master of languages, of philology, and so his inventions have very solid foundations. They may be as good as organic languages; indeed, I suppose in some sense they might be better than organic languages. (Cassandra, in particular, will want to follow that link and read it through.)

It's not just that, though. As the link mentions, the return to tradition is broader.

These younger Catholics are attracted to traditional spiritual practices such as Eucharistic adoration and Marian piety; they have a generally positive attitude towards authority, especially the papacy; and they’re less inclined to be critical of church teaching....

Marian piety, which is what this hymn is about, is plainly a useful and beneficial feature of Catholic tradition. It's not shocking to find that it is attractive to anyone -- somewhat like the mysteries of language, it has a clear power even if it is hard to say exactly what that power is.

The attractiveness of the other things is not so obvious. Nevertheless, this seems like a positive sign. (H/t: Dad29.)

The Assassins

The Assassins:

Killing by suicide has a history, in Shi'a Islam, that has passed into legend. The legend has real roots in history:

Even the most powerful and carefully guarded rulers of the age—the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs, the sultans and viziers of the Great Seljuk and Ayyubid empires, the princes of the Crusader states, and emirs who ruled important cities like Damascus, Homs, and Mosul—lived in dread of the chameleonlike Assassin agents. Known as a fida'i (one who risks his life voluntarily, from the Arabic word for "sacrifice"; the plural in Arabic is fidaiyn, or the present-day fedayeen), such an agent might spend months or even years stalking and infiltrating an enemy of his faith before plunging a dagger into the victim's chest, often in a very public place. Perhaps most terrifying, the Assassins chose not only a close and personal manner of killing but performed it implacably, refusing to flee afterward and appearing to welcome their own swift death.

This is the interesting part of the article, though:

They developed a means of attack that negated most of their enemies' advantages while requiring the Assassins to hazard only a small number of their own fighters. As with any effective form of deterrence, the Assassins' targeted killings of hostile political, military, and religious leaders eventually produced a stable and lasting balance of power between them and their enemies, reducing the level of conflict and loss of life on both sides.

The article clearly wants to bring the Medieval facts forward, as an analogy to our present time. Now, for our modern conflict, "targeted killing" is what we usually use to describe our drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. This is likewise aimed at "hostile political, military and religious leaders," as among the Taliban.

Is it an effective form of deterrence? Will it inexorably produce a "stable and lasting balance of power"? That seems far more questionable.

Yet assume for a moment that it was the case. Would this not make assassination a moral weapon of war? After all, it kills few (and fairly precisely), risks few lives on your own side, and is (we are assuming) an effective deterrent that leads to stability and relative peace.

The argument against assassination, at least in democracies, is that a core function of the democracy is to provide the citizens with the leadership they choose. Killing their elected leader is, in effect, to deny their sovereign status; it is a more serious offense against them than to kill a soldier (the theory goes), because it strikes at the root of what makes the state legitimate and valid.

The counterargument to that is to point out that it is only natural that the elected politicians who write the laws should view the assassination of elected politicians with a special horror. Yet I can't think of a single elected politician whose life I would trade for most any soldier I have had the honor of knowing. It is the function of the soldier, of course, to hazard his life for the politician. That fact, however, means that the sort of people who choose soldiering are on average better people than the sort who choose to pursue political power, with all that entails.

The Assassins were better enemies than our current foes, who seek to wage war not on politicians but on people. Suicide bombs in a marketplace are no moral weapon at all; they target neither soldiers nor politicians, but innocents. In part this is because our enemies are weaker than the Assassins ever were. If they had the strength to strike at our elected officials, they would do so; terrorism is the best they can manage.

Does that suggest that we should wish for stronger enemies? We're likely to get them, thanks to current policy.

Ah, Italy

Ah, Italy...

One of the joys of studying history, anthropology, or any similar discipline is you get to read things like this.

For generations of Venetians epic fist fights atop neighborhood bridges were a celebrated tradition. Beginning in about 1600, from September to Christmas each year rival clans would gather en masse at small bridges without rails and throw punches with the goal of knocking the opponents into the cold and sewage-strewn canal below.

These "Wars of the Fist" were frowned upon if not outright outlawed by the ruling Council of Ten, but tolerated as they marked a big improvement over the earlier tradition of fights with deadly sharpened and fire-hardened sticks. Legend has it that in a stick battle in 1585...

A legendary stick battle!

In any event, this is one of those things that helps you understand why Italian politics is the orderly, sedate affair we've come to expect.

Robin Hood 3

Robin and the Tea Party:

I keep telling you folks, this is the greatest movie ever made. I'm only joking a little bit. Look at the reactions it produces!

Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, writes in the Boston Globe that this Robin Hood is “A big angry baby [who] fights back against taxes” and that the movie is “hamstrung by a shrill political agenda — endless fake-populist harping on the evils of taxation.” You wonder what Professor Rotella teaches his students about America....

At the Village Voice, Karina Longworth dismisses the movie as “a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement” in which “Instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual as he wanders a countryside populated chiefly by Englishpersons bled dry by government greed.” Gotta love those scare quotes around “liberty.”

Uptown at the New York Times, A. O. Scott is sadly disappointed that “this Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties...

Michael O’Sullivan’s Washington Post review: "Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood”... feels like a political attack ad paid for by the tea party movement, circa 1199. Set in an England that has been bankrupted by years of war in the Middle East — in this case, the Crusades — it’s the story of a people who are being taxed to death by a corrupt government, under an upstart ruler who’s running the country into the ground."

...

"Whatever one may think of Scott’s newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the “libertarian rebel” played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the “rob from the rich, give to the poor” cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution….The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin’s chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs’ role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of loathing by peasants and commoners. [In other books and movies] Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit permitted to nobles and strictly forbidden to the lower classes in medieval England; in other words, he is opposing privilege bestowed by political power, not earned wealth."

I've written occasionally about how artistic visions, visions of beauty, underlie our ethics and our politics. Getting the aesthetics right is the key to getting the ethics and the politics right. You start with a vision, a vision of what it is to live well and nobly.

This vision is exactly right. When it comes out on DVD, buy a copy for everyone you have any occasion to give a gift. Spread the word, as they say.

Zeralda's Ogre, Post II

Idiots

Idiots:

Here is a fellow who speaks kindly of those who have shown little cause to merit the kind words.

But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”...

Lenin famously referred to Western sympathizers of the Soviet Union as “useful idiots.” Anyone familiar with Yglesias or Klein’s oeuvre recognizes that they are hardly “idiots,” however. That’s what makes their credulousness so strange and disturbing.

I lived in China, from 2000-1. In a spirited tour, one might miss the fact that people are being forced from their homes, and their homes being destroyed in the next instant. Perhaps that is unimaginable to them, given their own context. Yet it is the case. (The report errs in suggesting that dao means destruction; what it means is "movement," or "way," in the sense of Daoism, the philosophy of the road, of constant change. Destruction is simply the implication of movement; your home is about to move.)

I saw families huddling beneath tarps strung from the last remaining wall of a toppled home. The PRC is ruthless, whether or not it is wicked. It is amazing that these "progressives" do not see, and cannot know.

La Sarabande

La Sarabande:

A man crawls over himself, mouthing strange words in strange tongues; but close your eyes, and listen.



Madness, or genius? Form your opinion now: we will talk about this again, soon.

Riding the Mountains

Riding the Mountains:

Yesterday's post from Alaska showed some of our country's most majestic beauty, as it appears in the hard and high mountains of the north. Today I will show you some of the beauty that lies in the lush green mountains of my own home.

We began the day with a hike at Amicalola Falls, the tallest waterfall east of the Mississippi river. This was where I was married, eleven years ago this month, and a place where I spent many happy days as a boy. I have never seen it more lovely than yesterday, verdant and throwing off cool mists. The name seems to come from the Cherokee um-ah-eolola, "Sliding Water."



A story: some years ago when I was more interested in distance running, I used to run up the mountain there. Once while doing so, I met a young man carrying his girlfriend on his shoulders up to the top. As I passed him, I said, "Semper Fi, Marine." He said, "How did you know I was a Marine?" I just waved at the girl on his shoulders, and continued running up the trail.

We finished hiking there by midmorning, and still had many miles to travel before getting home. We took the road through the mountains, US 76, which goes through Hiawassee, a town located around an artificial lake built within a bowl wholly surrounded by mountains. From there the road passes into the federal lands and the national forest, before returning to Georgia in Rabun County (home of Rabun Bald, a mountain said by the Cherokee to be inhabited by fire demons).

From there, we traveled to Tallulah Gorge, a majestic canyon.



It was a good day for a long drive, punctuated by hikes to relieve the exhaustion of riding. Now, alas! Back to work.

Olav Trygvasson

Eric notes that Osprey Publishing is offering a limited edition of Angus McBride's print. Some of you may be interested:

The painting depicts the last moments of the battle aboard the Long Serpent, after the breaking of Einar Tambarskelver's bow, but before the King gives way and leaps overboard to his death. When Einar's bow broke, it made so loud a crack above the din of the fight that the king cried to him, "What burst there so loudly?" Einar answered: "Norway, king, from thy hand." The king broke out fresh swords from his sea chest before the final fight, but as he passed them out his men saw that blood was running down his arm.

Across the aft thwarts,
Olav's men must yield;
The hard-striking prince
Urged on his heated carls.
When warriors had locked
The bold king's ship-ways
The path of weapons
Turned against the Vendslayer.

There are many good poems surviving about Olav (also romanized "Olaf"). Most of them originate in his own court skalds. Here is one that has been anglicized in form -- the Old Norse poems do not rhyme, but alliterate.

Olaf's broad axe of shining steel
For the shy wolf left many a meal.
The ill-shaped Saxon corpses lay
Heaped up, the witch-wife's horses'1 prey.
She rides by night: at pools of blood.
Where Frisland men in daylight stood,
Her horses slake their thirst, and fly
On to the field where Flemings lie.
The raven-friend in Odin's dress --
Olaf, who foes can well repress,
Left Flemish flesh for many a meal
With his broad axe of shining steel.

Not all of them do, however! One of the finest poems in Old English considers him. Olav Trygvasson was the Viking leader of the expedition that led to the Battle of Maldon.