Quotulatiousness

December 25, 2020

“Swedish Pagans” – Vikings & The Russ – Sabaton History 099 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 24 Dec 2020

It was a sword-age, a spear-age — an age when fearsome Northmen, savage Vikings, and mysterious pagans from across the sea haunted the shores of northern Europe. The Swedish pagans, believing in the fate of the old Norse gods, traveled south across the Baltic Sea and deep into modern-day Russia. With their sleek longships, they sailed along the big rivers, ever southwards to reach Miklagard. Miklagard — the Great City — that was Constantinople, where the Swedish Pagans sold slaves and goods from the north for silver and coin. Those who made the long hazardous journey and survived the treacherous country were to be rich men.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “Swedish Pagans” on the album The Art of War: https://music.sabaton.net/TheArtOfWar

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Editor: Marek Kamiński
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.com

Sources:
Swedish National Heritage Board
Kulturhistorisk museum
Museum of Cultural History, part of the University of Oslo, Norway
Pictures of Runestone courtesy of: Berig, RJürgen Howald & Bjoertvedt from Wikimedia
AU Library, Campus Emdrup, http://galleri.au.dk/aul/#14891850309…
Longship sketch with a keel courtesy of Cornelis from Wikimedia
Map from 878 courtesy of Hel-hama – from Wikimedia

All music by: Sabaton

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

Bonus QotD: Modern services in church

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I remember when Christians used to actually believe in Christianity. Those were the days. (Some still do, but their numbers are shrinking.)

Back then, you could still visit an average (Protestant) church and hear a pastor actually teach real doctrine and share authentic insights. You could hear his thoughts on how to live an upright Christian life, or on why bad things might happen to good people, or how Christian marriages might be improved. And you could hear it all supported by actual Bible passages.

After the sermon, you could hear the congregation sing hymns affirming the importance of obedience, humility, faith, courage, or some other Christian virtue. They were something, the old hymns: bold, clear, impactful, sometimes even militant, like “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand”, or particularly thoughtful, like “How Great Thou Art”.

Things are different now. Wander into a typical Christian church these days, and, far from hearing a sermon challenging you to live an upright life, you’re more likely to hear an unsuccessful attempt at a Jeff Foxworthy-style stand-up comedy routine, Hallmark-style stories of dubious veracity, and utterly vacuous “praise songs” which all sound like U2 album rejects from 1986. (They even feature the thumping eighth-note bass parts, echo-drenched guitar, and melodramatic vocal performances.)

Oh, and I forgot: At some point, you’re also going to see the pastor dutifully hand the mic over to his overly-assertive, overly-eager, overly-made-up wife (presumably on pain of divorce, or possibly even death), who will then speak loudly and rapturously — all about herself — for the next half hour.

Not all Christian churches are like this, of course. The problem is, too many are. As the years roll by, contemporary Christian churches increasingly abnegate their scripturally-prescribed role as fortified beacons of divine truth, and instead transform themselves into vehicles for a social justice pseudo-gospel completely incompatible with Christian (or Jewish, for that matter) scriptural teachings.

Tal Bachman, “Christians, Come Back”, Steyn Online, 2020-09-03.

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

Update: Looks like the video I’ve linked to has been taken down, so here’s a more recent version on the “official” Pogues YT channel.

QotD: Christmas movies

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…

At which point, Sylvester the cat looks up from his long fruitless vigil outside the mouse hole in the baseboard and sighs with feeling to the narrator, “You’re not jutht whithlin’ Dickthie, brother.”

“Gift Wrapped” is like every Looney Tune or Merry Melody — a mere six minutes long. But with Christmas movies that’s a good thing. The western and the musical may be dead, but the charmless Xmas movie is now a genre all of its own and doing gangbusters. Do they teach it in film school? In fact, it’s really two genres: there are intentionally charmless Christmas movies like Bad Santa 2, and then the accidentally charmless ones, like that Ben Affleck flick where he’s some heartless yuppie who rents a bluecollar family for the holiday season so he can enjoy the authentic down-home Yule he’s never known. In such pictures, the great American Christmas, once the ne plus ultra of e pluribus unum, appears on celluloid an utterly exhausted seam.

So, besieged by such horrors, I thought I’d retreat to short-form holiday entertainment, or alternatively short-form holiday entertainment within long-form non-holiday fare. Any thirty seconds of “Gift Wrapped”, for example, is more rewarding than all three-and-a-half hours of Bad Santa 5 or whatever it is: six minutes of pure Looney Tunes pleasure in which Sylvester determines to land the only Christmas present he really wants — Tweety. The film opens with Granny slumbering upstairs and the impatient cat sneakily unwrapping his gift. It’s a rubber mouse and he’s not happy about it. “Why couldn’t I get thumthin’ practical?” he complains. “Like a real mouse.”

Mark Steyn, “A Frizzy Christmas”, Steyn Online, 2018-12-15.

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