Into the Archives: Lunacy and Piracy

Matthew Looney in the Outback: A Space Story (1969), by Jerome Beatty Jr. (Illustrated by Gahan Wilson) Avon/Camelot, 223 pages.

“Because of tense conditions between moonsters and earthlings, moon man Looney is sent to establish a peaceful colony on a new planet. Sidetracked to Earth, he discovers that a bomb will soon destroy the world and decides to try to prevent the holocaust.” – Google Books.

“Jerome M. Beatty Jr. (December 9, 1916 — July 31, 2002) was a 20th-century American author of children's literature. He was also an accomplished feature writer for magazines. Beatty served in the United States Army, achieving the rank of corporal, and is buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery.” – Goodreads.

Okay, I got this book in the mail on Friday, but due to circumstances I only read a little bit of it over the past few days. It is a Third Printing, from after 1973 (the first printing was in 1969, the year we actually landed on the moon) and while it has some wear and aging is in good condition. As of today, I’m only about a third of the way through, but I intend to spend the rest of the day polishing it off.  After I finish, then (in time) I will read Matthew Looney and the Space Pirates, then rest a while until I consider getting the Maria Looney books. After I read Outback and Space Pirates, I am not sure if I will publish a full review of them or a meditation on the Matthew Looney books. All I can say at the moment is I think this book definitely would not benefit if read as a ‘standalone’ but does well enough as part of a continuity.

Before I began working on this entry, I went back to see what I had written about the Looney books before and was a little intrigued to discover how my memories and understanding of them evolved over time. I went from almost forgetting about them to thinking I had read two or three of them to realizing I had only read one of them back in the day to learning more about the series and the author himself. It has been an interesting exercise in childhood and cultural memory, analysis, and tidying up loose ends.

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Paperback/‘Softcover’, November 22, 2021, 368 pages, Reaktion Books) by Tom Shippey

Laughing Shall I Die explores the Viking fascination with scenes of heroic death. The literature of the Vikings is dominated by famous last stands, famous last words, death songs, and defiant gestures, all presented with grim humor. Much of this mindset is markedly alien to modern sentiment, and academics have accordingly shunned it. And yet, it is this same worldview that has always powered the popular public image of the Vikings—with their berserkers, valkyries, and cults of Valhalla and Ragnarok—and has also been surprisingly corroborated by archaeological discoveries such as the Ridgeway massacre site in Dorset.

“Was it this mindset that powered the sudden eruption of the Vikings onto the European scene? Was it a belief in heroic death that made them so lastingly successful against so many bellicose opponents? Weighing the evidence of sagas and poems against the accounts of the Vikings’ victims, Tom Shippey considers these questions as he plumbs the complexities of Viking psychology. Along the way, he recounts many of the great bravura scenes of Old Norse literature, including the Fall of the House of the Skjoldungs, the clash between the two great longships Ironbeard and Long Serpent, and the death of Thormod the skald. One of the most exciting books on Vikings for a generation, Laughing Shall I Die presents Vikings for what they were: not peaceful explorers and traders, but warriors, marauders, and storytellers.” – Amazon.

Tom Shippey is of course one of the best-known and highly regarded scholarly authorities on Tolkien and his works, but before that he made his career as an expert in Norse literature, be it Old English, Icelandic, or Scandinavian. I got this book in the mail (late Saturday afternoon) and while otherwise engaged gave it a quick riffle and read a few sample passages. I was immediately hooked by the highly readable style, more reminiscent to me of a bardic retelling rather than an academic treatise, although his skillful weaving of facts from scattered sources shows the deep learning that has gone into this work. I can hardly wait to get into it. It strikes me that this is a volume that might well appeal to my nephew Joey (his nickname is ‘Viking’, though his interests at the moment are more on the pop cultural level) if we could interest him in it somehow. 

"The fact is that in the Vikings own language, Old Norse, vikingr just meant pirate, marauder. It wasn't an ethnic label, it was a job description. And what this means for us is that if you come across headlines - as these days you very often do - which say something like 'Vikings! Not just raiders and looters anymore!' then the headlines are wrong. If people weren't raiding and looting (and land-grabbing, and collecting protection money), then they had stopped being Vikings. They were just Scandinavians. But while most Vikings were Scandinavian, most Scandinavians definitely weren't Vikings, not even part-time. The two groups should not be confused, not even with the aim of making 'the history of the Vikings' look nicer." - from The Introduction, by Shippey.