Ulric

Ulfric

In time long lost not in lore recorded

Ulfric, unforgiving of wrongs oft unsheathed his sword

To right wrongs past. He remembered them all.

Long his wrath was known both wide and far.

At long last he ceased, and his long ships beached,

his sword he sheathed in peace. His spear put away.

He meant to make peace, and more to stay

at hearth and home in rest no helm to don again.

His war raiding behind no remaining bitterness

Did he hold, nor dream that harm from others

Should to him travel through toilsome seas.

Yet wrong he reckoned strength of ruinous hate

the wild wraiths, his rage had wrought him.

A high hall Ulfric soon had built

So to honor honest warriors, those who mightily

had fought for him, and friends also

in fields from home.

Red gold he gave them, A generous king he was.

Yet his generous gold swiftly given away,

was taken and torn away from tender hands

In distant wars long won. Now withered cold

he deemed those deadened hands. Wrong he deemed them.

None who came in kindness whether kin or

Stranger, worn and weary, Ulric would turn away

Far and wide his winsome manner swiftly was spread

Many heard and harkened to hear that name

To know, near enough, where nested their gold

The gold now given was great in records

both great and grim its ghastly trail

was cut and carved all across the North

from hand to hand it had harmfully passed

with boiling blood swiftly and brashly shed

it was horded and harrowed by hateful men,

till Ulfric unmade its owner and unlooked for

brought it, healthy homeward. And handed it

into the keeping and cups of kings and beggars

who came and cared to stay in that kingly hall.

The words of wise bards never was missed

in that great thralldom, as they nobly

told their tales and showed their talents.

His wife he winsomely bedecked in white diamonds

and green gold bracelets and gilded rings.

His sons were sung of in ships and lands

far off for their strength and fine mettle.

He taught them tender peace and in terrible war

he showed them strength. Even so kings

must rule their realms.

One late night, long ago as laughter filled

the mighty hall more than ever, and mirth was overflowing

A runner sought Ulric's ear to render a message

from shore.

Ulric was weak and old, soon weary of life.

He sought to spend his final days in the sun's warmth.

He forgot his fated end.

Warriors with torches swiftly wound their way

toward the teeming hall, greed tore their minds

and forced them forward with fire and steel

to take the gold and torch the hall.

Little time he had, Ulric had not lost

courage or cunning, and carefully directed

where the women should leave, with children and young

Yet his wife would not go, and waited with Ulric

for the fire and blood to fill the golden hall.

The raiders arrived with ravings of hate.

They rushed the iron door, how wrong they were.

They were cut and wasted, by willing blades,

None could match Colwch, Ulric's coldest son.

Of peace he learned the least, now lithe and quick

He swung his sword as death's scythe.

None came through his door.

Ulric's oldest son, Olmar was almost as strong,

but more keen and cunning, his claim was a bow,

he skewered them striving up, to scale the stairs.

None came through that door.

The last, so lore recounts, was soon lost.

By Dallion, who deemed war and deadly things

as hateful and worthless horrors, so he despised them,

And would learn little of war, but luxury he knew well.

A blade cut of his head and carried it away.

In his stead Ulric came, old and stately he stood.

His mighty sword mangled foes again,

his most lovely wife, with spear and sheild

stood at his side. .

In fury the flames were thrown, and fast burned

into the hall, heavy smoke sifted and hung

in the hall, the home of great Housecarls.

The raiders retreated, let the fire wreak its havoc.

Those in the hall took stock,

and deemed it best to dash out

and attempt to flee lest all should die.

Cutting, cleaving from the door was Colwch's blade,

Olmar the oldest was behind, hard on his heels.

They led, none lagged behind with little courage.

The raiders fell and ran before that rush.

Blood and bravery always broke the foe.

But only barely, for Colwch badly

Was wounded to death. They waited

on a high hill, trying to help Colwch,

but cruel steel cut away Colwch's life.

On that hill were they by thanes surrounded.

About brother's body they stood and baited the foe.

Thrice the greed driven thanes surged

up to Ulric's blade and Ulric smote

them down as in days of old but death

would not wait, biding with patience

the time to claim tender lives.

Ulric fell, his final strength forever gone,

Cut and hewn again, his adversaries

dearly paid to deprive him of dearest breath.

Upon Ulric's body died Ulric's wife.

As they lived and loved so were they lost.

All about the aged body his able men defended

Yet one by one they fell wasted and dead.

And dearly were they deprived of dearest life.

Yet the wall was weakened and warriors slain

So long at last was Olwen left

Standing strong and alone sword in hand

brother and father both were sheltered beneath his shield

the raiders withdrew to regroup the wreckage of their force,

none could match the might of Ulric's men.

Once more they marshaled and mustered the few

death had not harvested and harrowed swiftly

the son of strong Ulric. Screaming they rushed

up the hill now heaped with Housecarls

and thickly with thanes and raiders thronged in death

Olwen's bow sang sweet and clear, dealing swift death.

As they clambered over the dead, closing the distance.

Done now, his bow was broken, he beat them back,

Swiftly drew sword and dagger. His shield was broken.

With wounds beset and by warriors defeated,

defeated and doomed, to death he fell,

beside his brother.

Why does Creation matter?

A certain friend of mine, who I respect deeply and look up to, recently told me that as he didn't see why the creation debate was so important. This is something that I believe most people don't think about much, but the literal validity of Genesis one through three is just as important as the literal validity of the Gospels and the rest of the bible. If any part of the bible is not accepted as absolutly true then the entire structure of biblical theology collapses.

If one approaches Genesis one without any preconceived notions about what we should find and reads the text, it could not be said more clearly that God created the earth in six literal days and rested on the seventh. The typical aversion that 'days' in the passage really means ages simply does not hold water because it is impossible to say 'literal day' in Hebrew more clearly than to add 'morning and evening' and a number to the word for 'day'. The examples that are brought up for the word meaning 'age' are interesting on two levels. First and least importantly, they are usually explained in English phraseology. "We say dawn of a new day for mankind, when we mean the begining of a new age", "night had fallen on the era of Rome" etc. What we say and how we say it has no bearing on what and how the Hebrews said things a few thousand years ago. Secondly and far more importantly, of the few examples that are brought from scripture, none contain a number combined with either 'morning' or 'evening'. One must either accept that the Genesis account is true and God created the world in six literal day, or Moses got his facts from the wrong source or used an unfortunate set of words, thus throwing out the whole idea of biblical infallibility all together. You must make your choice.

There are four problems with trying to shove ages into the days of creation.

1. The sequence does not fit. You have morning and evening, light and darkness before the sun is created. The world does not start off as a sphere of rock and dirt, but is covered by water. You have birds flying before there are any creatures walking on the earth, all direct contradictions to the way many naturalists believe that life originated on earth.

2. You have imposed on the biblical text something that is clearing contrary to what is presented, thus destroying the infallibility of the scripture, which leaves you open to a world of problems. A common defense is to say that the days referred to are not necessarily earth days. This might be possible, but with the creation of light and its separation from darkness on day one, and the creation of the 'sun, moon, and stars' commonly taken to mean the planets and galaxies other than earth, you are ripping the text apart to make that claim. Additionally, as one wise man once told me, it's a theory, but where is your evidence?

   1. With the infallibility of the bible destroyed, and the days grown into ages, you have several problems. How do you determine when day means day? Context, most people would reply, but the context in Genesis makes it clear that God is speaking of literal days.

   2. The largest problem of all is that the creation account is God's first appearance to man, and it is wrapped up in his identity as ruler of the universe. You cannot change days into ages of evolutionary progression without loosing some part of god, his omnipotence (death and evil became part of creation and he doesn't like it but he can't stop it) or his holiness (evil is there and he put it there). No longer did God create a perfect, deathless, sinless world teeming with life and joy, with work not as a curse, but as a natural and enjoyable part of life and declare it all good. God created a world full of death, the great engine of evolutionary progression, millions of organisms are rotting and fossilizing before your first fish wriggles his way onto land and gets zapped by the finger of God and provided with a breathing system. At the end of the sixth age of your creation story, God looks down upon a planet already full of death and disease, and declares it very good.

There are three ways that you can progress from this and deal with death and suffering in the world. The first is to accept that God did the best he could, but was simply unable to prevent death and suffering from getting into this world. The problem with this approach is that now you have an impotent God who can't really save us. Besides, once you deny God's omnipotence we are no longer talking about the God of the Bible or any kind of biblical principles or theology.

The second way is to deny God's holiness. Nobody wants to do that.

The third way is to me the most infuriating. It attempts to keep both God's holiness and his omnipotence by saying that God fed the evil into the world on purpose and it's all part of a grand plan. That's fine except for two basic, fundamental problems. First, that's in direct contradiction to the bible (Romans 4:12, 8:18-22, Ecclesiastes 2:23). Second, its in direction contradiction to how the world works. The only thing it fits is a theory.

“It is one thing to say that the God of the bible is horrible, causes death and genocide, and use that as your explanation for not believing. That view is wrong simply on the basis of facts and has its own set of problems, but it is far preferable to a view that God is holy and created death and suffering, for while one mistakes the nature of God for evil and calls it evil, the other mistakes the nature of God for evil and calls it good. When you see the young boy struggling not to cry because his puppy died in the middle of the night, tell him that your God sees it as good. When you see the boy weeping because the girl he just married died in childbirth, tell him that her death is not a result of a broken and abnormal world, but a result of your God's perfect universe. When he watches his strong son who just got a scholarship to play football for a top university contract cancer, and slowly die, killed by organisms invisible to the eye, tell him that God delights in those creatures, and created them to kill.

“But” you protest “death is good, it releases us from this world, suffering makes us better people!” Does it indeed. Show me where! It was suffering that drove Adolf Hitler to his madness, it was suffering that drove the German people to accept him, it was suffering that drove the Russian people into Communism. It may be that for some people, some suffering creates better character qualities, but that does not make a rule. Also, it is a mistake to glorify a thing for that which it creates. You stand like the woman who stood on the bus and mentioned here hope that World War II continued for a long time, because it provided a good job for her husband. Hardly had the words left her mouth when another woman stood up and slapped her across the face. “Don't you ever say that again.” She said, “my husband is fighting over there.”

Now your whole world has changed because you based your faith not on the Word of the One who made the universe, but on the world of a man who has been studying a small piece of said universe for a few decades and has declared in his ultimate wisdom that god was wrong and he is right, the world must be billions of years old, far older than the bible claims. Deriding a faith based on things heard and seen he praises his scientific knowledge, based on faith of things unheard and unseen. His dating techniques assume that he knows the starting point is clean of all decayed atoms which he is counting to determine the age of his sample, and he assumes that the decay rate has been the same since the dawn of time. He ignores the fact that the layers in the rock that he counts as an age apiece have fossil trees growing right up through thirty or forty layers, and if he counts the dark and light rings in the arctic ice that he claims represents a year each, he'll find that the P-38 fighter plane we found a few years ago slipped back in time a century or so and crashed in the arctic around the Revolutionary War.

If we cannot trust God about how the world began, how can we trust him about how it will end. And if we cannot trust him at all, the end of the world is the least of our problems.

Fully Automatic America

I just finished watching "Fully Automatic America" on Youtube. The film was produced by Vanguard, a cultural commentary group that has done a few other presentations on guns before. The film took a look at guns in America and their effect on our culture. The people who produced the film may have been trying to come across as impartial, but when they blatantly ignored the most obvious conclusions and made statements that are patently untrue, it seemed as if they approached the subject with a forgone conclusion. The main journalist, Kaj Larsen, visited a gun range in West Point Kentucky, said of the .50 caliber sniper rifle that "It's actually illegal in warfare to use that against people". The video was posted to Youtube on January 14, 2009. The Barrett M82A1 .50 caliber sniper rifle was first used by the U.S. military in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s. The .50 caliber has risen to immense popularity with American, British, and Canadian sniper teams as anti-personnel weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their potential to make instant one hit kills at ranges exceeding two thousand yards, ranges at which the lighter .300 Magnum has lost most of its accuracy and killing power. The statement that it is illegal to use the .50 caliber against personnel is flat out wrong and points to either a lack of honesty or the most basic research.
Larsen then went on to look at gun violence in Camden New Jersey, which has been listed annualy among the top ten most dangerous cities in America since 2002 by the FBI. Pointing to the large number of guns available on the streets and the ease of obtaining guns in nearby Pensylvannia, he identified the problem with Camden as being the availability of guns. When he asked prominent town citizens they said that the problem was caused by three factors: availability of guns, gangs, and drugs. Larsen did not even mention or consider this in a scientific manner. When you have a common component and you believe the component to be the cause of an effect, you must have the effect in both places where you have the cause. The guns in Camden are nothing like the guns in West Point, Kentucky, where a nine year old was shooting a .50 caliber machine gun. If guns are the problem, the greater availability and lethality of guns in West Point, Kentucky would make that city far more dangerous than Camden. West Point County has a crime rate 84% below the national average. Camden has a violent crime rate over five times the national average. The more obvious conclusion might be that it is not guns that cause crime, but drugs and gangs combined with easy illegal gun access and difficult legal gun access. Larsen also failed to point out that Camden has a history of massive political corruption all the way up to the U.S. Senate level. Gangs and drugs are and always have been causes of crime and instead of looking to find where the problem was, Larsen spent his time trying to prove that guns were the problem.
Continuing in the same vein, Larsen made the comment in another video, about less developed countries in Africa and South America claiming that the massive number of cheap guns has fueled the wars in those countries and that we should stop worrying about WMDs and stop the proliferation of small arms. Larsen completely ignored the fact that small arms are the only defence that millions of people around the world have against oppression and intimidation. He did mention that everyone has a gun to protect their home, but he seemed to forget the words as soon as they left his mouth.
Again, if guns were the problem, then when guns are absent we should expect to see peace. People in Africa and South America have been brutally killing each other since they found out how to sharpen bamboo and stone.

Mr. Larsen and Vanguard did not come to the discussion open minded, but with an ideological ax to grind, and he willingly ignored basic reasoning and research practices that should be employed in any kind of documentary that seeks to deal with important issues.

An Ode to Progress

Onward! Onward, ever we go Onward!
Nothing will do but to go Forward!
Progress must be our only theme
Our parents were fools, and the past obscene!

Where we go,
no one seems to know.
But press forever onward!
If the way is hard
Or strewn with dead an dying,
We shout above the mothers crying,
"Forward! Forward! Never back!"
The only thing we seem to lack
is any idea of where we are going.
But on we go, never slowing.

"Faster! Faster!" comes the call,
"Progress will finally save us all!"
All that's good must be Progressive,
While all our troubles are just Regressive.
What lies behind they will not say,
only that we musn't go that way.

"You'll turn back the clock,
Become a laughing stock!
For all that's good we must go on!"
So looking back is frowned upon,
But when we look ahead,
All we see are mounds of dead.

But onward we must quickly go,
and it is wrong we are put of so,
by the sacrifices that must be made,
Our onward progress they only aid.

As others rise to take our place
we urge them forward in the race.
"We can now do so much more
than our fathers did before!
If we should do the impossible task
is not a question we thought to ask.
Progress! Progress!" we softer cry,
"Onward, Onward, till we die"
The voice continues slow and broken,
faster, faster, away from Eden.

Notes on a New Arthurian Story

So I'm thinking about trying to create a new Arthurian story, and while trying to decide how to start it off a few interesting things came to mind that are helping me shape the context of the story.

1. Arthur's name, and the names of some of his knights, are puzzles that nobody can solve to everybody's satisfaction, since they seem to have qualities of Latin and Gaelic names. Also, a number of his knights have Gaelic names.


2. The accounts of Arthur all agree on two important things. He was a mighty warrior and both he and his men were known for their ability to fight on horseback.


3. Most accounts of Arthur place in him a period of great unrest and bloodshed in Britain.


4. The earliest accounts of Arthur are all from Welsh sources. The Historica Brittonum and the Annales Cambriae both Welsh histories compiled by Welsh monks and scribes and nearly all of the early legends that mention Arthur are Welsh in origin, most prominantly the the tale of Culhwch and Olwen, and the Welsh Triad.

Combine these suggestive facts together and they point to one particular period of time and to a particular type of Arthur; a Celt raised by Romans who stayed behind with his sword brothers and tried to served protect Briton against the raiders after the Roman Legions left.

During the Roman occupation of Britain the primary inhabitants of the land were Celts from various tribes who later became the Welsh and Irish. It was common practice for Romans to take the sons of prominent members of various kingdoms or tribes and raise them as romans. This served the practical purpose of holding the natives in check, providing soldiers to help garrison the Roman forts, and eventually to spread Roman customs and beliefs among the Celts when the young men were finally released from Roman "hospitality". Such mingling would create names that would be difficult to attribute to either side, since especially toward the end of Roman occupation in Brition, the Celts would have influenced the Romans almost as much as the Romans had influenced them.

If a young Celt was brought up into the Roman occupying army, it is very likly that he would be attached to the cavalry auxilia. They were not meant to do the heavy fighting that legionares were, being used primarily for scouting and tipping the tide a pivital points in the battle. Even so, wearing roman armor and weilding roman weapons, the auxilia would be far ahead of any weaponry deployed by the occupied Celts and later, the invading barbarians from Northern Europe. On horseback, armored and armed with Roman steel against lightly armed raiders with iron weapons, a relativly small mounted company backed by a larger, if poorer armed, local force could dominate a battlefield.

If Arthur were a hero who had defended early Britain against Saxon invaders, we would expect to find numerous mentions of him in Welsh and Irish stories, legends, and chronicles, which is exactly what we find.

On a more personal note: as much as the film King Arthur tried to be true to the scant historical evidence that we have (they even included the battle of Badon Hill), they messed up on at least three basic counts. First, ancient peoples did not use modern cuss words with anything approaching the regularity that Arthur's knights did throughout the film. Second, longbows and crossbows were far, far in the future when Rome fell. Third, and most importantly, Lancelot has nothing to do with Arthur, having been added in by a Frenchman named Chretien, who has singlehandedly done more damage to the Arthurian story than any other single man in history.

Total War and Total Fascism

Total War

Recently, I had an argument with a certain personage on the subject of Total War, not the game, the practice. The modern idea of modern war dates back to William Tecumseh Sherman, a Union General in the Civil war famous for his destruction of Atlanta and his march to the sea. Sherman believed that for the war to be won, everything of any value to the enemy must be destroyed. While this initially meant “everything necessary for the enemy to produce articles of war” it eventually expanded to include anything that might support morale. After the war, Sherman toured Europe teaching European generals his doctrine of total war. They took his teaching to heart, and in World War I, France was almost completely destroyed by massive artillery barrages, and millions of soldiers were killed or permanently injured by the use of poisonous gasses. Total war was taken to new levels in World War II when airplanes enabled governments to send immense levels of destruction over long distances. In fact, it could easily be argued that Britain still exists because of Adolf Hitler’s idiotic resistance to building long range heavy bombers until it was far too late.

The modern Doctrine of Total War has two main problems. First, it has a tendency to spiral out of control, and as soon as one side no longer fears the opposing side’s destructive capability, the only limit on Total War, the ideal of mutual destruction, goes out the window. The second problem is that Total War is essentially Fascism relegated to warfare.

Fascism, boiled down to it’s bones is the belief that the end justifies the means, that we should pursue not that which is right, but that which we think works. If the Twentieth Century taught us anything, it was the danger of this idea. Under this belief, Hitler and the Nazi Party killed thousands of Jews and began one of the bloodiest wars in mankind’s history to safeguard the German people, Stalin wiped out millions of Russians to create a better Russia, Neville Chamberlain signed thousands of Czechoslovakians over to Nazi Germany to save lives, and the U.S. Government supplied weapons and military aid to dictators such as Saddam Hussein in order to prevent the world from being oppressed. Every single one of these attempts failed.

The problem with fascism and its various branches, is that man simply cannot see far or wide enough to see the consequences of our actions. We may solve the problem at hand, but we often cause a thousand more problems that never existed before. When we stop seeking out the right thing to do, and pursue the “efficient” thing to do, we have fallen off the path of reason because we can’t define what is and is not efficient! The world was designed one way, good actions cause good results, bad actions cause bad results no matter how well meaning the doer may be. This is the point that Tolkien makes in “The Lord of the Rings”, that good can never come out of evil.

A smaller and more minor problem that plagues advocates of Total War is their claim that you must do “whatever is necessary” to win the war, or something of that sort. I severely doubt and fervently hope that the personage with whom I discussed this topic does not wish to return to the use of poison gas in war, or wants to start nuking Afghanistan and Iraq.

Once one decides to pursue what they deem to be efficiency over what is known to be right, they have started on the path to fascism and foolishness. They draw lines based purely upon what they feel, and as soon as “necessity” drives them across the line, they happily draw another, and on ad infinitum.

Pray for The Men and Women in our Armed Forces...and their families

The story behind the picture can be found here.