It’s been really nice out here in New Hamp­shire lately, per­fect weather for com­mut­ing around town with a bicy­cle. If you’ve been look­ing for a lit­tle two wheeled inspi­ra­tion of your own, a great book to check out is David Byrne’s Bicy­cle Diaries. It’s a quick read that’s very enter­tain­ing and some­times even thought pro­vok­ing. The con­cept was sim­ple, Mr. Byrne trav­els around the world with his bicy­cle and jots down what­ever comes to mind while bik­ing around. Although he some­times strays from his con­cept via rent­ing a car or hir­ing a taxi, he does suc­ceed in pro­vid­ing the reader some sort of abstract idea of what it would be like com­mut­ing via bicy­cle in lands far and away. That being said, the most enjoy­able parts of the book are when he is explor­ing the United States. I found the trips to Nia­gra Falls and through Detroit to be par­tic­u­lar­ily fascinating.

Bicy­cles and travel tips aside, most of this book is filled with delight­ful arm-chair style phi­los­o­phy. Mr. Byrne suc­ceeded in pro­vok­ing thoughts about all sorts of top­ics that I found myself con­tem­plat­ing long after fin­ish­ing dif­fer­ent chap­ters in the book. He touches on top­ics that range from the hos­tile nature of Aus­tralia, polit­i­cal dynas­ties in the Philip­pines, cor­po­rate archi­tec­ture and land­scap­ing, to the ques­tion about whether dogs expe­ri­ence denial. It’s all good fun and what this book made me real­ize more than any­thing else is that Mr. Byrne is actu­ally a pretty rea­son­able guy who can be sur­pris­ingly nor­mal and down to earth. Much of his writ­ing reminds me of the type of con­ver­sa­tions I would have in some of my own circles.

I, like Mr. Byrne, am more of a com­muter type that enjoys using a bicy­cle to get from point A — B, rather than the type that likes to suit up in Span­dex and burn rub­ber, so this book spoke to me more than it may to other types of bike fanat­ics. I enjoyed that there was very lit­tle right­eous­ness that is some­times asso­ci­ated with bicy­cle activists, although the appen­dix had an inter­est­ing dis­ser­ta­tion on the future of bicy­cles in New York City. I typ­i­cally enjoy the activist stuff also, but I’m glad this book was dif­fer­ent and that he kept the writ­ing focused on the expe­ri­ence. Some­times it’s good to be reminded that bicy­cling can just be about fun and adventure.

Over­all, the book is great enter­tain­ment and there’s a lit­tle some­thing in there for every­one. To get a glimpse of his writ­ing you can check out David Byrne’s blog.

Find more info on Bicy­cle Diaries here.

Over the last month, I spent some time exper­i­ment­ing with my Ver­mona Retro­verb Lancet. This clever machine has more than a few tricks up its sleeve so I thought I’d share some thoughts and ideas about this superb effects unit. A bird’s eye glance at the box could see that its made up of a spring reverb com­po­nent with a built in fil­ter and some mod­u­la­tion options via an LFO.  At its most basic use, it’s a handy lit­tle box for adding some warmth to any sound with the spring reverb. This vin­tage reverb con­cept is well imple­mented in the box and the spring of the Retro­verb sounds full and rich. No surf-a-billy band should be with­out one just for this qual­ity sound­ing spring. But start plug­ging line sources other than a gui­tar sig­nal and you’ll imme­di­ately dis­cover a new kind of reverb drenched sound that you can mod­u­late in a wealth of dif­fer­ent ways.

Like all of Vermona’s tools, the inter­face is beau­ti­fully laid out. The vin­tage space age con­trol panel makes the reverb unit a real lady killer in the stu­dio. Every knob, but­ton, input and rocker switch is thought­fully laid out with a handy empha­sis on the most impor­tant func­tions being the knobs you want to impul­sively grab and spin. Although once you start spin­ning knobs and flip­ping switches, it can get dif­fi­cult to get your head around what’s actu­ally hap­pen­ing to the sound, but after some time with the unit you can start to see that the phys­i­cal lay­out of the fea­tures can really help you under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing. It’s worth study­ing the panel for a bit and think­ing your way through the sig­nal flow. You can tell a great deal of thought went into the design of this unit and the result is a playable effects unit as if it were an instru­ment of its own.

The reverb can be pre or post. Depend­ing on if it’s pre or post, you can set the in & out stages of the unit to mix in the amount of spring reverb by spin­ning the mix knob left or right. This is a handy live fea­ture to set the mix stage this way, because with the flip of a switch and a slight turn of a sin­gle knob you can dras­ti­cally morph dif­fer­ent sounds this way which can be a great for a track vari­a­tion in an arrange­ment. The In/Out sec­tion also offers 2 forms of dis­tor­tion. Increas­ing the gain, you’ll reach a point that cre­ates a warm type of dis­tor­tion I nor­mally asso­ciate with soft clip­ping found on some ana­log mix­ers. Push­ing up the drive knob will pro­duce a dis­tor­tion that’s more com­pressed and with the right input sig­nal can pro­duce some­thing that sounds more like bit reduc­tion. Both sound great on every­thing I fed it, but I think these fea­tures would espe­cially be a hit with gui­tarists. To the right of the In/Out is the VCA mod­u­la­tion sec­tion which, curi­ously at first, is sep­a­rate from the Out sec­tion. How­ever, with spring reverb or reverb in gen­eral I believe it’s often less is more, so it does seem appro­pri­ate that the VCA mod­u­la­tion para­me­ters would be kept sep­a­rate. This makes it quick and easy to work with the spring should you sim­ply want to use the device like a gui­tar pedal only for the reverb and the dis­tor­tion effects.

The fil­ter is a multi-mode fil­ter with band, high­pass & low­pass fil­ters. There is quite a range in the cut­off and the res­o­nance will drive it effort­lessly into self oscil­la­tion at just about 1/2 way there. This fil­ter is based on the M.A.R.S syn­the­siz­ers they pro­duced about 10 years ago. It’s a fil­ter with a unique design of its own and not mod­eled from the Moog lad­der or other com­mon fil­ter mod­els. While exper­i­ment­ing with the Retro­verb I acheived reward­ing results for this machine just using the fil­ter by itself. The fil­ter has two mod­u­la­tion sources, the LFO (we’ll get to this cool LFO shortly) and a switch­able alter­nate source that could be a con­trol volt­age, an enve­lope fol­lower, or the built in enve­lope gen­er­a­tor.  And if the source sig­nal you are feed­ing it is all skin and bones, they car­ried over the ‘balls’ fea­ture from the Kick Lancet which com­presses the fil­ter input to fat­ten it up. This fil­ter has bite, it’s a great addi­tion to any synth tool­box. In fact, if you don’t need the spring reverb, Ver­mona offers the Fil­ter Lancet which is same exact design of the Retro­verb, but with­out the spring reverb. It’s worth look­ing into.

If mod­u­la­tions the game, this box has your name. The final sec­tions of the Retro­verb pro­vide some mod­u­la­tion sources. You get a LFO and an enve­lope gen­er­a­tor with some very unique fea­tures. The LFO has the usual sus­pects in terms of avail­able wave­forms (btw thank you Ver­mona for includ­ing the sine LFO option in this Lancet), except there’s one at the end called EG. This means that this shape is gen­er­ated by the shape of the enve­lope gen­er­a­tor. What’s cool about this is that you can cre­ate your own LFO wave­forms from var­i­ous attack/decay set­tings from the enve­lope. If you switch the VCA mod source to EG and set the LFO shape to EG you can get some fun sounds by sim­ply vary­ing the decay/release on the enve­lope. By switch­ing the LFO range to LO/TR, the LFO will reset on the gate sig­nal fir­ing off the enve­lope when set to gate. This means you can eas­ily get your sounds to sync to a track’s tempo if using a mod­u­lar sys­tem that feeds the trig­ger input on the back. Pretty slick.

The Retro­verb unit has a bunch of handy inputs that allows you to feed CV/Gate sig­nals and con­nect numer­ous ped­als. It takes an audio input, a pedal or con­trol volt­age, a input switch that can take a con­trol volt­age to trig­ger a ‘crash’ of the spring, a trig­ger in that takes a gate sig­nal, and an input switch for bypass­ing the unit with a pedal. This makes the unit a handy per­for­mance tool which could be used side by side with any instru­ment being solo’d. With a col­lec­tion of ped­als, many fea­tures could be used hands free, mak­ing an attrac­tive addi­tion even for a drum set. With so many inputs, this brings up my only crit­i­cism of the unit. It could be that I’m just spoiled at this point, but while using this machine with my mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer sys­tem, I just wished they would have added two more fea­tures — two out­puts for the mod­u­la­tion sec­tion. LFO/EG out­puts would have been extremely use­ful and could have lead to some inter­est­ing exper­i­ments mod­u­lat­ing more than one track Retro­verb style.

This leads me to some final thoughts on using the Retro­verb as part of a big­ger sys­tem. First off, the entire Lancet series work amaz­ing together. Like Voltron, the MonoLancet cou­pled with its euro­rack dock, and the Retro­verb all come together to make one über mono mon­ster synth. Alto­gether, the specs for look like this:

• 2 oscil­la­tors. Tri­an­gle, Saw, Noise, Pulse with PWM. Either or both oscil­la­tor can be free run­ning to use else­where by detach­ing the oscil­la­tors from the sig­nal path. They can also be shut off to use the sys­tem exclu­sively with exter­nal sound sources. PWM via midi for both oscil­la­tors, or cv for each inde­pen­dently. FM mod­u­la­tion of either or both oscil­la­tors via CV. Pitch Mod­u­la­tion via enve­lope, LFO or Glide. Global tune.
• 2 fil­ters — a Moog Lad­der style LP fil­ter & a unique mul­ti­mode fil­ter with HP/LP/BP. Both reach self oscil­la­tion and can be run in a series or par­al­lel. 2 fil­ter inputs. Moog Lad­der style LP fil­ter has FM mod­u­la­tion via CV, optional veloc­ity mod­u­la­tion, and optional cut­off after-touch mod­u­la­tion. Enve­lope mod­u­la­tion on both filters.
• Fil­ter key track
• Enve­lope follower
• 2 enve­lope gen­er­a­tors. One can be trig­gered by CV or an Enve­lope follower
• 2 VCAs both can be free run­ning, mod­u­lated by the envelopes, exter­nal cv. One can be mod­u­lated by an enve­lope fol­lower and an LFO. One has a full sus­tain mode, veloc­ity mod­u­la­tion, and man­ual trigger.
• 2 LFOs. One with square, tri­an­gle, & sample/hold. One with ascending/descending saw­tooth, square, sine, sample/hold, and EG shape. One can be reset with gate sig­nals, and has an adjustable range of Low (.05 -> 25 HZ) & High (1 -> 300 Hz). Clever sync­ing of trig­ger sig­nals allows one LFO to do dou­ble duty as a 3rd envelope.
• Spring Reverb switch­able pre/post with crash fea­ture that vibrates the spring. Clever sync­ing of the crash trig­ger input can allow this to be used as a alter­nate noise source. Adjustable global reverb level.
• Midi/CV con­verter
• 2 audio inputs, 2 audio out­puts, 4 pedal inputs (1 cv, 2 gate, 1 enve­lope fol­lower, bypass switch).
• Midi imple­men­ta­tion with veloc­ity on/off, pitch wheel on/off, mod­wheel on/off, after­touch on/off, legato on/off, and glide on/off.
• Inte­gra­tion between 1/4″ jack sys­tems and 1/8″ euro­rack systems.
• Solid metal con­struc­tion with small footprint.

If you crammed all of these fea­tures in a sin­gle box, you’d have an ana­logue setup in league with a Moog Voy­ager Rack and its mod­u­lar exten­sions. How­ever, the Ver­mona sound and design is very dif­fer­ent from Moog so it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter to think of them not as com­peti­tors, but as two sys­tems that com­ple­ment each other very well. In fact, if you col­lect Mooger Fooger boxes, the Lancet machines are nat­ural exten­sions to this kind of cv/gate ana­logue play­ground. The Moog MF-107 Fre­qBox is a great source for feed­ing a sub oscil­la­tor into the Lancet sys­tem. As far as mod­ern analag pro­cess­ing goes, reverb is pretty much the only stan­dard ana­log effect not pack­aged into a Mooger Fooger. You can achieve a sort of reverb with the MF-104 Delay and MF-108M Clus­ter Flux, but the Ver­mona Retro­verb has this cov­ered in spades.

After spend­ing some time exper­i­ment­ing with the Ver­mona Retro­verb lancet, I made a track that incor­po­rates most every fea­ture men­tioned in this arti­cle. I found the results to be very musi­cal, and had a great time through­out the process. The sounds are sourced from the Ver­mona MonoLancet, the DRM mkIII, and the Retro­verb along with some Mooger Foogers, a DSI Poly Evolver, and some euro­rack stuff from Pitts­burgh Mod­u­lar. All tracks were then ran through the Retro­verb on a return track. The Retro­verb is pure fun and one of those tools that reminds you of why you got into syn­the­sis in the first place. Hats off to the team at Ver­mona. Here’s the track, enjoy!

Fol­low Be Bet­ter Stu­dios on SoundCloud

I recently picked up an Amaz­ing Machines Mid­itribe mod kit for my Korg Monotribe. Now that this clever lit­tle machine can play with the oth­ers, I’m hav­ing a blast mak­ing all kinds of quirky lit­tle bass-lines with this thing. Mid­i­fiy­ing the monotribe is an essen­tial upgrade that really makes this machine the usable ana­log tool from Korg that you hoped it to be when you pur­chased it.

Installing the mid­itribe mod kit is a snap. The most basic imple­men­ta­tion requir­ing just a clean sur­face and a phillips head screw­driver. How­ever, base instruc­tions leave you with a cou­ple wires hang­ing out of the bat­tery com­part­ment, which is less than ideal if, like me, you already have a stu­dio with enough wires and cables hang­ing about already. I decided to go the extra mile and drill holes into the case and mount the midi sock­ets directly into the hous­ing. Here’s what you’ll need to do this:

First thing first, be sure to fol­low the instruc­tions that came with the Mid­itribe kit. These steps are not a replace­ment for the well writ­ten instruc­tions from Amaz­ing Machines. These steps are intended to help some­one that may be con­sid­er­ing tak­ing these instruc­tions a step fur­ther by mount­ing the midi sock­ets directly to the monotribe cas­ing. Just like the man­ual says, you will void your warranty.

1. Mid­itribe mod kit from Amaz­ing Machines, nee­dle nose pli­ers, phillips head screw­driver, house­hold drill, stepped drill bit for drilling through metal, small drill bit for drilling through metal for screw holes, and a chalk pen­cil or some­thing to mark the cas­ing that you can wipe clean.

2. Remove the rub­ber feet, knobs (they just pop off), and screws on the bot­tom of the case. Care­fully open the case and detach the speaker cable. After that remove all the screws attach­ing the two pcbs to the case. Since we’ll be drilling into the case, you want to be sure that all the elec­tronic com­po­nents are removed to ensure that they don’t get con­t­a­m­i­nated with dust or shav­ings. Also remov­ing the pcbs will ensure you don’t acci­den­tally hit them while drilling. Just be care­ful when han­dling the main pcb, the LEDs can eas­ily pop out.

3. Deter­mine where on the case you want the midi sock­ets to live. Mark the cen­ter and a few points on the outer cir­cum­fer­ence of where you plan on drilling. Be sure to mark both midi in & out so that you leave enough room on either side for each socket’s screw holes. Drill 2 5/8″ holes with your step drill bit into the casing.

4. Fit in your midis­ock­ets into their loca­tions and mark the screw holes with the chalk pen­cil. Dou­ble check that the bit you are using to drill the holes is as wide as the holes on the jack and then drill the four holes for the screws. Be sure you clean the cas­ing really well of any dust or shav­ings that might con­t­a­m­i­nate the elec­tron­ics after you are done drilling.

5. Now we just have to put it all back together. If you put the midi sock­ets in the top left like many synths do these days, you’ll want to put the main pcb back first and then bolt down the midi jacks. You’ll need nee­dle nose pli­ers to hold the bolt in place while you tighten them down because with the main pcb board installed, there’s very lit­tle room for fingers.

6. Bolt down the Amaz­ing Machines midi board to the main pcb fol­low­ing the instruc­tions in the kit and reat­tach the midi cables. Match the col­ors of the wires to the labels on the Amaz­ing Machines midi board.

7. Attach the Amaz­ing Machines midi board to the monotribe’s ser­ial port. Take care to fol­low the wire color guide­lines high­lighted in the instruc­tions — blue down, yel­low up. Tuck the wires into the bot­tom of the case, attach the speaker cable and screw back down the sec­ondary pcb.

8. Screw the case back together, reat­tach rub­ber feet, and put the knobs back on, you’ve now got a fully func­tion­ing midi syn­the­sizer! Piece of cake!

Over­all I’m pretty impressed with how use­ful this lit­tle box is now that it can speak midi. I was pain­lessly able to map all the con­trols to my midi con­troller and had nearly dou­ble the expres­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties with this synth using full size keys, the pitch and mod wheels and var­i­ous con­trollers. Using Able­ton live, sequenc­ing this thing becomes a real joy. Acid type bass-lines scream out of this thing like ban­shees and retro com­puter type melodies are a snap. Using this machine in a more musi­cal con­text also makes it more flex­i­ble with effects devices. Run­ning a sequence that’s in key through a mooger fooger pedal for instance can pro­vide some­thing that’s really quite usable in a mix. Basi­cally before the midi upgrade, most often I would only build a track around the monotron parts from scratch, where now I can find uses for it in an exist­ing mix.

Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a cou­ple down­sides. The gate on the device can pro­duce clicks and pops while in use. This is appar­ently a result of the monotribe’s design and not a fault of the midi upgrade. It’s not all that notice­able in mix unless you solo the instru­ment. You can also try using a multi­band eq to cut out most of the pops as well. The other down­side of the instru­ment is really just more of a gen­eral truth. I’m refer­ring to how far the monotribe goes into make an afford­able ana­log groove box, yet it could have gone just a lit­tle far­ther to become leg­end. Play­ing with this machine for a few months I’ve had a lot of fun with it, but it always just makes you real­ize that with just a lit­tle more engi­neer­ing it could have been the TB303 of the mod­ern era. If they fixed the gate issue, imple­mented cv/gate pitch con­trol con­trol, and added a vari­able Attack/Decay enve­lope it would be that instru­ment. Good news is, that Korg Japan has released an update that allows for cv/gate con­trol which is an amaz­ing fea­ture add-on, but for now it’s only avail­able on the Japan­ese web­site. I’ve been work­ing with CV for quite some­time and can rec­om­mend it as a use­ful pro­to­col for get­ting inter­est­ing results that are not as easy to achieve with midi. I’m look­ing for­ward to the idea of inte­grat­ing CV on the monotribe with my other ana­logue gear, I’ll have to post an update when I’ve had a chance to try it out.

Amaz­ing Machines really did us all a ser­vice for mak­ing this midi kit so easy to imple­ment. Order­ing is pain­less via their web­site and it arrived in about 7 busi­ness days. Located in Brazil, they also offer another inter­est­ing device to add onto the Korg mono series. It’s a spe­cially designed feed­back cir­cuit for use with the fil­ter input of your monotron/monotribe although the web­site men­tions it can be used with any such device with a fil­ter input. For more infor­ma­tion, check out their web­site: www.amazingmachines.com.br.

All in all, this was a fun lit­tle project. It gives you a glimpse into the world of DIY, home-brewed mods, and there’s some­thing entirely grat­i­fy­ing about solv­ing man­u­fac­turer short­com­ings with your stu­dio gear. And of course, praise to Korg for mak­ing a unique sound­ing prod­uct that allows us all to con­nect with on this level. To me it makes syn­the­siz­ers some­what more human and I think that’s a good thing.

Finally, here’s the first track I made with the Monotribe with midi and as always it’s free to down­load. It’s a techno acid house track of sorts inspired by the Monotribe’s sound. There’s four tracks of Monotribe hap­pen­ing on this one. It’s really great to hear it play­ing well with all the other synths. Enjoy!

Fol­low Be Bet­ter Stu­dios on SoundCloud

For more infor­ma­tion about the Korg Monotribe and var­i­ous modifications:

Korg’s web­site: www.korg.com/monotribe
Korg Monotribe Schemat­ics: www.korg.com/monotribeschematics
Sonicstate’s review of the Monotribe:
www.sonicstate.com/news/2011/05/26/sonic-lab-korg-monotribe
Sonicstate’s review of the Mid­itribe:
www.sonicstate.com/news/2012/02/21/review-amazing-machines-miditribe-io
Monobot’s blog is full of other mod tips and ideas: www.monomodder.blogspot.com
This guy seems to sell drum mod kits among other things: www.monotribemods.blogspot.com

I finally got around to fin­ish­ing a new track. This one was started last sum­mer when my brother brought his syn­the­sizer with him dur­ing a visit. We both spent the evening scratch­ing down some basic ideas, but that was it. I took it off the shelf last month and spent a good time rework­ing into some­thing I think is pretty inter­est­ing. Have a lis­ten and if you like it feel free to down­load. Cheers!

This year I am res­olute in my goal to read at least one book per month that has noth­ing to do with web tech­nol­ogy or pro­gram­ming. Over the last few years, I have spent too much time on the tech­ni­cal arts and not enough on the lib­eral arts. I remem­ber the days of gain­ing a wealth of insight and cre­ativ­ity from all the ran­dom books I used to have time to read. In those days I used to be able to make time stand still and could dis­ap­pear into a book on just about any topic that would inter­est me. I could roam free in the world of lit­er­a­ture and his­tory. Well, I’m bring­ing it back this year. My brain needs food for thought and ammo for cock­tail party conversations.

I enjoy a good casual dis­course on a book so I’ve been think­ing that I’ll use this blog to write a lit­tle about these books that I’m read­ing for fun. Through the act of writ­ing about them, I will not only be retain­ing what I’ve read, but who knows, maybe it’ll be inter­est­ing to read about any inspi­ra­tion that might come out of it.

Inspired by my trip to Ice­land last month, my first non tech­ni­cal book of the year was: Njal’s Saga by an unknown author writ­ten in the late 13th century.

My ver­sion is the Pen­guin Clas­sic trans­lated and edited by Robert Cook, a native of Penn­syl­va­nia now a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Ice­land in Reyk­javik. The intro­duc­tion was clean and insight­ful, true to Penguin’s legacy of hav­ing intro­duc­tions that aren’t ter­ri­bly bor­ing. Hav­ing read many Ice­landic Sagas pre­vi­ously, I pretty much knew already what I was get­ting into, but what’s par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing about this one is the atten­tion to detail Pro­fes­sor Cook has included in his work to place events that unfold in the saga in his­tor­i­cal or fac­tual con­text. It’s sim­ply crazy to think that most of these peo­ple really existed, some ver­sion of these fan­tas­tic events actu­ally hap­pened, and some­one took the time to write so ele­gantly about them in late 1200’s (and in prose!).

The story itself it com­pletely epic in its pro­por­tions. It’s a clas­sic tale of honor amongst friends and unsym­pa­thetic vengeance. This tale is not a child’s bed­time story. It fol­lows a very com­plex plot with numer­ous sub­plots. The book’s author has a frank, straight to the point writ­ing style that exe­cutes a cer­tain sim­plic­ity that com­pletely sucks you in. The atten­tion to detail with names and events is really quite admirable. If you start Njal’s saga, be ready for a roller coaster ride of fam­ily feuds, magic, medieval court bat­tles, large and small scale war­fare, spite­ful women, con­niv­ing vil­lans, and pagans grap­pling with Chris­ten­dom. The basic for­mula here is some­one awe­some becomes a vic­tim of cir­cum­stance and is killed -> friends and/or fam­ily takes revenge -> more revenge -> more revenge -> more revenge -> every­one dies -> some­one else gets rich and peace is finally resolved via mar­riage between families.

To illus­trate how intense this book is, here is how it starts off at the very begin­ning before you know who any of these peo­ple are:

It hap­pend once that Hoskuld held a feast for his friends, and his brother Hrut was there and sat next to him. Hoskuld had a daugh­ter named Hall­gerd; she was play­ing on the floor with some other girls. She was tall and beau­ti­ful, with hair as fine as silk and so abun­dant that it came down to her waist.

Hoskuld called to her, ‘Come here to me.’

She went to him at once, and he took her by the chin and kissed her. Then she went back.

Hoskuld said to Hrut, ‘How do you like this girl? Don’t you find her beautiful?’.

Hrut was silent. Hoskuld asked again.

Hrut then answered, ‘The girl is quite beau­ti­ful, and many will pay for that, but what I don’t know is how the eyes of a thief have come into your family.’

Hoskuld was angry at this, and for a time the broth­ers had lit­tle to do with each other.

This inci­dent between broth­ers, really sets the tone for the whole novel. Many of the worst deeds are fore­told either in philo­soph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion, visions, or in dreams. What’s remark­able is that the char­ac­ters all have a strange type of opti­mism that even though they are told they are going to die, or some­thing bad is going to hap­pen, each time, they would still always head fear­lessly to their fate.

The tale is really two com­bined into one. The first half of the book fol­lows Gun­nar Hamundar­son, an ambidex­trous war­rior who is pretty much awe­some in every way except for his taste in woman. He mar­ries Hall­gerd who grows up to be a beau­ti­ful woman with dark side who insti­gates mur­der and large scale fam­ily feuds. Njal is Gunnar’s best friend and he is not a vio­lent man; nor is he any type of war­rior. Njal’s honor comes from his wis­dom and the abil­ity to fore­tell gloomy events just in time to save the day. Gunnar’s evil wife puts the friend­ship to the ulti­mate test by start­ing a deadly feud with Njal’s wife. Even­tu­ally the feud between wives grows out of hand and starts spread­ing across the whole south of Ice­land. Gun­nar retains his honor through­out it all, but even­tu­ally makes a sin­gle mis­take that results in him being out­lawed by Ice­landic law. Venge­ful Ice­landers go after Gun­nar as soon he’s legally able to be mur­dered and it all cul­mi­nates to an edge-of-your-seat con­fronta­tion. Gunnar’s last stand is mag­nif­i­cant, the guy puts up such a furi­ous defense that the bad guys have to rip the guy’s roof of his house to finally get to him. By this stage of the book you finally real­ize that the book has got­ten to you; to the point where you actu­ally start think­ing like these crazy medieval Ice­landers. Instead of being sad at the mur­der of Gun­nar, I found myself think­ing, “Good for him, he put up and hon­or­able fight. Nice way to go.” I’m telling you while you are read­ing this you’ll start think­ing like a viking too.

These events with Gun­nar lead to the 2nd half of the tale which is about Njal and his sons the Njalssons. Njal and all of his sons are very lik­able char­ac­ters. Revenge for the death of Gun­nar pretty much leads the reader down a dark and bloody path to the end of Njal and his sons. The main tragedy of the story is how Njal and his fam­ily are burned alive in their home by a venge­ful gang of rogues. It is truly a very sad cli­max to the book and all through­out the land the act is con­sid­ered a dis­grace, even by some of the most dis­grace­ful char­ac­ters in the book.

The burn­ing of Njal is named in sev­eral other sources apart from this saga, and it appears to be a very big event in early recorded Ice­landic his­tory. The scene will cer­tainly be burned onto my recorded mem­ory as one of the most vivid scenes I’ve ever come across in a book. Apart from the vio­lence, there is a lot of other inter­est­ing aspects of the book. You’ll find detailed descrip­tions of early court pro­ce­dure, an account of how Ice­land became a chris­t­ian nation, and numer­ous won­der­ful descrip­tions of what daily life was like in the Viking age.

All in all, I would highly rec­om­mend it for win­ter read­ing. You can’t go wrong with a copy of Njal’s Saga, a warm fire and a horn full of mead.