Consideration of Works Past: The Broken Sword

 

I had trouble with Lord of the Rings.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Fantasy often just escapes me. I rarely find it compelling. This is my own character flaw, and I don’t suggest it’s any kind of literary judgment. Everybody’s different. 

 

I was in college, and my friends (both of them) were all saying how I had to read Lord of the Rings. It would make me grow three inches taller, improve my love life, and allow me to reach enlightenment. I went to the bookstore, looked on the shelves, bought The Two Towers, went home, and read it.

 

I know The Two Towers is the middle section in what was intended to be one, very large book. It’s like starting King Lear with Act II. Surprise: I didn’t find it compelling. In my own defense, you have to read Lord of the Rings and Appendix B all the way through to understand the scale of the work. I was in college. Hm. Read Lord of the Rings or study thermodynamics. Every week a quiz, every week a chance to fail. Or read three hundred thousand words of fantasy. 

 

Thermodynamics, every time.

 

Then, I happened on Henry Beard and Douglas Kinney’s very fine parody, Bored of the Rings, which I very much enjoyed. But, as I hadn’t read Lord of the Rings, I didn’t get it in depth. So, I went back to Lord of the Rings and read it using BOTR as a reader’s guide. Okay, now I understood what people were trying to tell me. I still wasn’t a Lord of the Rings fundamentalist. (I never finished The Silmarillion, for example. I’ve read the Bible, thanks. I don’t need to read it twice.) 

 

That said, Lord of the Rings had all of the things about fantasy I have trouble with: angelic elves, noble princes, valiant peasants, and a dark evil lord. I really liked the dwarves and how Legolas and Gimli became close friends despite the long antagonism between elves and dwarves. There’s a novel I’d like to read.

 

That’s not a problem with The Broken Sword. (See? This is a post about The Broken Sword.)

 

Note: I’m going to discuss some essential spoilers.

 

The Broken Sword is a fantasy by Poul Anderson that is, at minimum, inspired by Norse mythology. It is the story of Skafloc, a human child taken by Imric the elf lord before he can be christened. He is replaced by a half-elf, half-troll changeling who is named Valgard. The broken sword of the title is a mythic weapon delivered by the Aesir (Possibly Odin. It’s not so clear.) as a birth gift to Imric for Skafloc. Imric is not keen on this. The gifts of the gods are often two-edged.

 

First, the morality of the elves is not even close to angelic. Leea, Imric’s wife, nurses Skafloc as a baby and later is his lover. In a magical ritual, Imric rapes a troll woman he has kept prisoner for close to a thousand years, creating Valgard. 

 

There are three main characters in the novel. Skafloc, the foster child of the elves. Valgard, the changeling son foisted on Orm and his family. And Freda, one of the daughters of Orm. 

 

The story resembles a Greek tragedy in that by the end of it, no one is left standing. The hint is that the entire tale is a product of the Aesir plotting to get the broken sword remade. The destruction of the three main characters and all of the elf and troll kingdoms is just collateral damage to their machinations. 

 

And they are so destroyed. Valgard finds out his heritage and throws in with the trolls in their long enmity with the elves, sacrificing his family in the process. Skafloc leads a raiding party against the trolls that proves disastrous, but he manages to escape with some of his troops and Freda. The two of them fall in love. (Yes. They are brother and sister. Which doesn’t mean much in elf culture.) 

 

The trolls attack the elves and win. Valgard becomes a lord in the very same kingdom that Imric had ruled. But his own knowledge of who he is eats away at him.

 

Skafloc and Freda discover who they are and it breaks their relationships. In despair, Skafloc manages to get the broken sword reforged and uses it with great success against the occupying trolls. The sword kills anyone nearby whenever it is drawn. Freda goes back to her village and, now pregnant with Skafloc’s child, manages to begin a new life. Then, Skafloc shows up and his sword kills her new possible husband. Freda throws him out of the house and subsequently gives birth to Skafloc’s child. Odin comes and takes it away.

 

With nothing left, Freda decides to seek Skafloc out after all. Skafloc, meanwhile, is locked in mortal combat with Valgard when Freda finds him and calls out his name. Distracted, Valgard kills him. But the sword, tossed from Skafloc’s dying hand, kills Valgard. Freda is left alive but mad.

 

There is nothing left of these people’s lives but ground glass.

 

Now, remember, I read this right after I read Lord of the Rings.

 

Anderson, here, was the anti-Tolkien. 

 

The Broken Sword was considerably shorter than Lord of the Rings. It was also nasty, brutal, and bloody. For all the bloodshed in Lord of the Rings, it’s an astonishingly clean fantasy. The Broken Sword is filled with disembowelments and the cleaving of skulls. The deaths of your brother troops are unfortunate but expected—there’s little mourning. There is also no redemption. People do bad things, enjoy bad things, and often succeed because of those bad things. 

 

Let us recall the setting of this, as far as I was concerned. The Broken Sword was first published in 1954—the same year that Lord of the Rings started being published. Anderson rewrote The Broken Sword in 1971. 

 

I read Lord of the Rings in 1972. Subsequently, I read The Broken Sword. The Vietnam War (US version) had been going on for years. (1972 was, coincidentally, my year for the draft. I was not drafted.) The accounts of the My Lai Massacre were published in 1969. The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971. Every night, Walter Cronkite reported the events of the war on the news. (Nixon’s reelection also happened in 1972, but that was after I read these two books.)

 

Is it really such a surprise in that particular context that I wasn’t quite so interested in Lord of the Rings but gravitated to The Broken Sword? In The Broken Sword, war was portrayed graphically. There was nothing noble about it on either side. This was not the forces of right against the forces of darkness. These were brutal grabs for power from both sides. There was no moral high ground anywhere to be found. 

 

I have rarely written of any sort of war. For one reason, I don’t feel qualified. 

 

For another, I think it’s hard to write about war without romanticizing it, either for the good—see Lord of the Rings—or the bad—see The Broken Sword. 

 

We’re seeing that right now. Orange Voldemort and his ilk are describing utterly brutal acts as if the perpetrators were merely defending themselves against evil, paid agitators. I like what Stephen Colbert said about them. The Nazis weren’t afraid to show their faces.

 

Cheese Ends, 20260113, Depression Edition

*Sigh.*

 

Normally, I try to put up optimistic, interesting science up. Things that show how important the human brain is to understanding, medicine, health, food, shelter. Good things, you know?

 

But so much bad stuff has been coming across my desk that I haven't had the heart to represent it.

 

Until now.

 

After all, we need to understand the bad stuff right along with the good, right?

 

It's no secret that Orange Voldemort doesn't like wind projects. Maybe he was scared by a whirligig as a child. Regardless, he's been going after wind projects ever since his first term. 

 

At the beginning of his second term, he tried to stop wind projects. Courts reversed him. He declared them a menace to national security. One of them, Revolution Wind, was run by a Danish company, Ørsted. They took OV to court and as of early January, won in court. Cheers all around. However, it's not clear if the Ørsted's court victory supersedes the Department of Defense shutdown. So, yay? Oh, no? 

 

Going on in that vein, it's been pretty clear the big pollution offender in power generation is coal. How forty thousand coal workers manage to over balance close to 300,000 jobs in solar and a comparable number of jobs in wind (both are the fastest growing part of the jobs economy) is beyond me. Maybe we don't have enough lead and mercury in our diet. 

 

But, OV said he'd bring back coal power whether or not we needed it. It's pretty clear we don't. But facts don't sway this administration and the OV has ordered a Washington plant and a Colorado plant to remain open. Both were scheduled to be retired. They don't have to even burn coal. They're just there for emergencies. After all, just because coal is the second most expensive source of power (right after nuclear) and by far the dirtiest, that's no reason to not to keep them open. Right?

 

But OV wasn't done yet.

 

Probably the most important single organization trying to address the climatastrophe is the IPCC. It has its flaws—not as many as its most ardent critics seem to think but it is a human run organization in the semblance of a democracy, so it has flaws. But the OV is withdrawing from it. Along with a whole bunch of other similar organizations. 

 

It's amazing how that Chinese hoax keeps making the ocean hotter.

 

The OV has his allies both in Washington and elsewhere. Recently, Utah is trying its darndest to limit solar farms. Utah has been estimated to require a lot more energy in the next five years. Solar has been shone to be the most economical and battery cost keeps going down. But the Utah legislature (aided by the governor) has decided to make using solar more difficult. I have some coal plants to sell them. But the customer has to pick them up.

 

A good portion of the new power requirements are coming from data centers who are supplying powers to LLMs. LLMs are trained on relatively good data. They're not trained on the entire internet with all its lies, misinformation, bigotry, and hatred. (What a surprise we get LLM hallucination.)

 

Well, more good news. Big uptick in publications. No increase in quality of material.

 

I have my own ideas about how effective LLMs can be and how they are being used. I haven't talked about them here because the subject is incredibly polarizing. If I'm going to get pilloried, I want to get pilloried for something important.

 

But putting out slop in science is everybody's problem.

 

I can hear my two readers say: enough, already. There must be some good news.

 

Yes, there is.

 

When the OV tried to break the backs of university research by cutting back NIH overhead fees, it was taken to court. An appeals court just agreed that he couldn't do that. See here. The OV had tried to restrict grant applications from anything that hinted of diversity. (E.g., research into prostate cancer for African Americans.) The ACLU has announced a settlement has been reached. The grant applications have not been approved but they must be reviewed a bit better. 

 

And, finally, a sulfur-sodium batter has been demonstrated in the lab that has a good repeat rate and high charge density using incredibly cheap materials. The downside? It's in China.

 

I really liked the country we used to have.

 

State of the Farm: Winter

One of my two readers recently complained about the cold where she lived and wondered why the hell we live in the Bitter Hellhole that is the northeast. She's not alone. My sister asks the same thing. She wants to retire to Panama.

 

Well, I was born in Southern California near Los Angeles. This makes me lucky since I have no federal or state requirement to want to live there.

 

I'm not a fan of the cold. My residence pattern starts near Los Angeles, jumps to north Alabama, skips up to the Pacific Northwest, drops to Missouri, and ends up here in said Bitter Hellhole. 

 

Winters in Missouri are not to be sneezed at. (Unless, you are experiencing it there. At which point, one's nose drips continuously and the winter is, in fact, sneezed at.) The wind rolls down from Manitoba and the Dakotas along with Iowa and Minnesota and will peel your skin like an orange. I found this out the first winter I spent at college. I had only a cloth coat and could tell which way the wind blew by the way my nipples crinkled up. 

 

I spent a portion of my tuition money at the Army/Navy Surplus and wore a snorkel parka suitable for McMurdo Station. After that, I wasn't cold any more.

 

Which is, in part, my point. Cold is something that can be managed. Snow is something that can be managed. Once I got the hang of it, I found I like the winter here. It's a matter of technology and engineering. 

 

Today, for example, we are in a temperature downswing. We got up to 27F and it's going below 20F by sunset. The wind has been averaging about 5mph with a peak so far of 23 mph. We started the day with falling snow that stopped around 10:30 AM and I went out to snow blow.

 

Snow blowing takes about two hours. A little more if we were stupid enough to leave the cars out. I've been here for coming up to fifty years and my wife is a native and we still sometimes forget. 

 

Upper twenties but strong wind. That meant I wasn't going to use jeans and a jacket to snow blow. Instead, I'd use the insulated coverall—what I call the "spacesuit." But it was too warm for insulation inside. Just a hat and a hoodie. 

 

I find the problem is usually getting too hot rather than too cold. In this case, I used a regular baseball cap and good gloves—good gloves are probably the most important component. And boots.

 

Here's the picture: we have a good 150 foot driveway, two turn arounds, a path to the wood pile, a path to the greenhouse, a path to the vents for the furnace and the heatpump. Plus, a couple of paths here and there that I don't immediately need—to the brush pile, the garden, the different trees I have to prune, etc. The idea of the latter is that you cut the trails you'll need eventually on the chance there isn't a thaw between now and when you need them. I've been hard schooled on neglecting winterly duties.

 

We have the Rule of Two in our household: any essential appliance, service, or capability needs backup. We need power—when we first moved into  our house we lost power about every other month. So, we have a backup generator that we can plug into the house circuit. We also have a wood stove to cut down on burning gas as much as we can. We have two cars. We have two snow blowers. Each snow blower has both electric and crank start. I check them every year.

 

We have a checkered history with snow blowers. Our first one was gifted to us by my father-in-law when we moved into our house. It was small. The impeller was engaged with a foot lever and ran until it was physically disengaged. It was only about 10 inches tall and 18 inches wide. That winter we had snow storm after snow storm. They were still skiing up in New Hampshire in June. The following year we bought the Dynamark, a big 8 horsepower machine that we've kept in good repair for better than thirty years. But one winter, it had problems and we were back to using a snow shovel and our FIL gift. I figured we would need another one.

 

This time, I thought, we'd buy the best one we could. We bought an Ariens and for nine years it was essentially a back up for the Dynamark. It either quit working, needed repair, or just wilted in the face of real snow. We sold that one and tried a Toro. That one just whimpered.

 

I finally found review articles that talked about the way the different snow blowers were built and their intended weather. That pointed us to a Troy-Bilt about five years ago. Troy, New York, is just north of Albany and a little higher latitude than we are. It is just within the lake effect band from the Great Lakes so we figured it would be close to the same weather we have. Sure enough, we got it and haven't looked back.

 

This is not anything approaching an endorsement. My point is that to get the right snowblower for us required research and effort. Like finding the insulated coverall. Like finding the right gloves. Like deciding on the Rule of Two.

 

After snowblowing, I came in to lunch and a fire in the wood stove. Messed around and then came up here to write this down.

 

Living in our corner of the Bitter Hellhole takes thought and effort but it's a task I enjoy, so it's not much effort at all. 

 

But this is how such things are done. You have a problem. You try a solution. The solution fails or is inadequate. You refine the solution. If that doesn't work, you find a new solution. I didn't have much money and so I found a coat at the Army/Navy store. The coats I had weren't adequate for snow blowing so I found a coverall. You fix the problem. You don't discard the entire effort and say "winter is a Chinese hoax." 

 

That said, we're financially secure, own our own home, and can plan for these sorts of things. Many people in Massachusetts and other areas of the North East are not so well off. The weather is one of many things that requires resources people may not have. However, Massachusetts does have a welfare system and heating supplement plans. The government puts its money where its policies are. Obamacare was originally Romneycare which derived from Nixoncare. Massachusetts is not anywhere close to a perfect state—it's too damned expensive, for one thing—but it is also as good a state as I've lived in anywhere and better than most. 

 

I fret about other states where their representatives don't seem to care about who they represent. Mike Johnson in Louisiana, for example. Or Tommy Tuberville for Alabama.

 

But good things happen, too. Like the red tail that I accidentally scared out from the chestnut until he landed in the persimmon tree, shaking his tail and glaring at me. Eventually, he figured I was beneath his notice.