Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadhlan, Relating His Experiences With the Northmen in A.D. 922

The story is about a 10th-century Muslim writer who travels northward with a group of vikings to their settlement. Crichton explains in an appendix that the book was based on two sources. The first three chapters are a retelling of Ibn Fadhlan’s personal account of his actual story journey northwards and his experiences with and observations of the Rus’, the early Russian people. The remainder is based upon the story of Beowulf.

Michael Crichton has sold a zillion books, mostly by sticking to one simple formula–take a relatively stable social system and introduce some threatening variable, most often technology based, that proceeds to wreak havoc. The vital subtext, particularly for an author who appeals mainly to the frequent flyer crowd, is that these threats play on the many fears of middle class, middle aged, white men–in Andromeda Strain it’s biological warfare, in Rising Sun it’s the Japanese (remember when they were going to rule the world?), in Jurassic Park it’s DNA tampering, in Sphere it’s aliens, in Disclosure it’s women in the workplace and, in what surely must have been a disquieting touch for his target audience, in Airframe it’s airline safety. How fitting then that in Eaters of the Dead he returns to the legend of Beowulf, one of the primal tales of dread from the murky Anglo Saxon past.

In 1974 one of Crichton’s friends, a college professor, joked about teaching a literature course on “The Great Bores”, among which he counted Beowulf. Crichton laudably came to the defense of this classic and decided to try and retell the tale for a modern audience. Eventually he decided to move the setting of the story forward in time to 922 AD so that he could have a historical figure, the Arab traveler Ahmad Ibn Fadhlan (احمد بن فضلان), narrate it. Ibn Fadhlan was an emissary of the Caliph of Baghdad (المقتدر بالله) who came into contact with Vikings during his journey into modern Russia and left behind a manuscript detailing his experiences.

For the purposes of the novel, Crichton has him meet up with a band of Northmen lead by the warrior Buliwyf just as they have been summoned to Hurot Hall to help King Rothgar repel the mysterious and terrifying Eaters of the Dead, a horde of seemingly demonic beasts who attack under cover of night and fog. A soothsaying crone insists that he accompany them as the 13th member of their party. As he finds out later, his inclusion is necessitated by cosmological and numerological superstition:

I learned that these Northmen have some notion that the year does not fit with exactitude into thirteen passages of the moon, and thus the number thirteen is not stable and fixed in their minds. The thirteenth passage is called magical and foreign, and Herger says, “Thus for the thirteenth man you were chosen as foreign.”

Initially repulsed by their violence and carnality and by their lack of hygiene, the more cultured, even effete, Ibn Fadhlan gradually becomes an integral member of the band, developing a particularly good friendship with the affable Herger, and, unlike most of his comrades, survives the repeated savage encounters with the Eaters of the Dead (or wendol, as they are also known) to become the official chronicler of their adventure.

I thought that it took Crichton a little too long to set the stage here, particularly for such a short book, and the technique of casting the tale in Ibn Fadhlan’s voice and style makes for a somewhat archaic narrative. But once the action gets going it is great fun. I read the book after seeing the movie version, The 13th Warrior, which t

hough it got decidedly mixed reviews I enjoyed greatly. Basically what you’ve got here is a combination of Beowulf and The Magnificent Seven with a smidgen of anthropology thrown in for good measure; what’s not to like?

Differences between film and novel

In the book, during the first fight Ibn Fadhlan is nearly helpless against the monsters and must depend entirely on the Vikings to slay them. Later on Ibn Fadhlan becomes convinced that death is only a moment away and decides to become a fighter. In the movie Ibn Fadhlan kills several Wendol and is shown the equal of the Vikings in combat by his use of a scimitar (a sword with a curved blade design finding its origins in western Asia Middle East, the name can be used to refer to almost any Middle Eastern sword with a curved blade. They include Arabic saif, Indian talwar, Persian shamshir, and Turkish kilij, among others. These blades all were developed from the ubiquitous parent sword, the Turko-Mongol saber), also it is his idea that the Wendol are sleeping in caves. The Tengol (leader of the dwarves) from the book is replaced by an old mad woman in the film (unknown whether a dwarf or normal human). In the movie Ibn Fadhlan travels with a friend when he meets the Vikings; in the book that friend was s

ick during a hard winter and is left behind. In the movie, Buliwyf doesn’t acknowledge Ibn Fadhlan as much of a friend; in the book they were so close that Ibn Fadhlan was one of the few that got the honor to be in the ceremony of Buliwyf’s funeral.

A further difference is that in the book, the Wendol (mist monsters) actually seem to be another human species (Ibn Fadhlan makes a few accurate descriptions on how their faces and bodies differ from those of “normal” humans), while in the movie there are no direct references by the characters of the Wendol being Neanderthals and the Wendol seem to be just a tribe of Stone Age savages wearing bear skins and heads. Later in the book one finds a suggestion that the Wendol are actually the last tribe of the Neanderthal sub-species.

References

Crichton, Michael. “A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead” in Eaters of the Dead. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Company, 1992. ISBN 0-345-35461-3.

Eaters of the Dead
the manuscript of Ibn Fadhlan relating his experiences with the Northmen A.D. 922
Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1976
ISBN: 0060891564

Contact is a 1997 science fiction film adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Ann “Ellie” Arroway, Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, James Woods as National Security Advisor Michael Kitz, and Tom Skerritt as Dr. David Drumlin.

PLOT SUMMARY

The film opens with a montage shot of Earth in space, with a loud background noise made up of radio and television signals from recent years. As the camera pans out, the transmissions become older, until the camera loses sight of Earth, the Solar system, and the Milky Way in an unimaginably vast, silent universe.

The main protagonist, Ellie Arroway, is introduced as a child, living with her father in Madison, Wisconsin and and obsessed with amateur radio. After a scene in which Ellie asks her father if humans can talk to other planets, and if there are other civilizations in the universe, the scene changes to Arroway in her late 20s, a brilliant scientist and researcher working on the SETI programme, using the gargantuan Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for her research. While working at Arecibo, Arroway meets Palmer Joss, a student of theology researching for a book on science’s impact on the Third World.

He gives her a compass from a Cracker Jack Box. He says that someday it might save her life. They start a romantic relationship. At this point it is revealed that Ellie, whose mother died during childbirth, lost her father due to a heart attack when she was still a child, before they were to watch a meteor shower. Despite her commitment to the SETI project and her scientific genius, Arroway is unknown amongst the academic community, and is ridiculed by her former teacher, Dr. David Drumlin, an officious, pompous, arrogant man who has been promoted to Chief of the National Science Foundation and Science Advisor to the President of the United States. Drumlin arrogantly tells Arroway that her research is a waste of time and public money, and shuts down the project. The team, including the blind, brilliant astrophysicist Kent Clark, leaves Puerto Rico, and for an unknown reason, Ellie deliberately does not telephone Palmer Joss, effectively ending the relationship. With the help of friends and partners from the Puerto Rico site, Ellie spends the next thirteen months trying to find a new source of funding for her research. During a presentation to a board of directors at the fictional Hadden Industries Inc, Ellie loses her temper and is ultimately awarded a large grant from the corporation’s reclusive owner, billionaire industrialist S. R. Hadden (John Hurt).

Leasing time from the government-owned Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, Ellie and her colleagues spend the next four years combing the skies. Yet again, Drumlin intervenes, and recommends to the government that they cancel Arroway’s lease contract in favor of more legitimate research. But that very night, Arroway herself detects a signal of unknown origin being picked up by the radio telescopes. In a frenzy, Arroway and the team realize the message is being transmitted as a sequence of prime numbers, and trace its origin to the star Vega. The team passes the co-ordinates to radio telescope stations across the globe and, realizing that they have found an artificial signal that can only have come from an advanced alien civilization, they release their information across the world Overnight, the New Mexico acility becomes the scene of an international media circus. Dr. Drumlin arrives at the site with the American National Security Advisor, Michael Kitz (James Woods). While Drumlin pompously tries to direct operations at the site, Kitz chastises Arroway for having breached National Security policy by sending the message around the world. Arroway and Kitz begin a heated argument, and at this point Kent hears a complex interlaced audio structure woven into the sequence of prime numbers. The team quickly discovers that this sideband of additional data is interlaced with a television image. The team feeds the signal into a television set, which reveals that the television signal is footage of Adolf Hitler, making his opening speech at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Though the Hitler footage causes governmental panic, with Kitz demanding to militarize what he sees as a conflict with a pseudo-fascist civilization, Ellie points out that the Olympic broadcast was simply the first television transmission powerful enough to travel into space. Though Kitz concedes this point, Ellie is increasingly ignored by the government and media as Drumlin begins to take credit for her discovery. Meanwhile, in New Mexico what was thought to be noise amongst the frames of the Hitler footage is found to be tens of thousands of pages of data written in an undecodable alien language. After several failed attempts to decode the language, Hadden, on an overnight meeting with Ellie, reveals to her that he has discovered that the encrypted data sheets fit together in a 3D fashion, revealing complex blueprints for some sort of mechanical device . This information gives Ellie renewed political power, and she returns to Washington D.C. where the Cabinet meets to discuss theories on what the machine does, and whether or not it should be built.

Despite her insistence that the machine’s designers are likely to be peaceful, Arroway is confronted with officials who worry about the “morally ambiguous” and potentially Godless nature of the civilization, fearing that the machine is a weapon of mass destruction or a Trojan Horse. Ellie is supported by Palmer Joss, who has become the personal religious advisor to the President. The President himself (shown as Bill Clinton) eventually decides to authorize the United States to build the machine, which is identified as an interstellar transport device designed to take a single human occupant into space (presumably Vega). The reunited Joss and Arroway start another romantic relationship.

Construction begins in Cape Canaveral, Florida on “The Machine,” which is basically four concentric rings with a crane above it, from which the passenger pod is dropped in. The astronomical cost of construction and technology rights are split between several different nations, with the International Machine Consortium (IMC) managing overall construction and operation, and an international committee of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and politicians is formed to select a suitable candidate to make the journey. Joss is included in the committee and Ellie is among the potential candidates, preventing them from spending much time together. Dr. Drumlin resigns from his government post in order to become a candidate, and he and Arroway become the main contestants for the machine seat. While being questioned before the committee, Ellie is forced by Palmer Joss to reveal her atheism, and Drumlin is eventually chosen to make the journey. It is implied that the committee did not want to select a candidate who doesn’t represent humanity’s belief in a higher deity.

Ellie ends her relationship with Joss and stays with the project as a technical advisor. The day of the Machine’s first full-scale systems test is a widely-attended celebratory event, but Ellie notices that a religious fanatic (Jake Busey) she had previously encountered has infiltrated the site by posing as an employee. She alerts Drumlin to his presence, but before Drumlin can stop the explosive-strapped fanatic, he commits a suicide bombing, killing Drumlin and dozens of technicians, and destroying The Machine. Soon after the Cape Canaveral disaster, Arroway receives a communication from Hadden, who is now living on the Mir space station in an attempt to delay the progression of his cancer. Hadden informs Ellie of the existence of a second Machine, secretly built by his corporation in Hokkaido, and tells her that the International Machine Consortium still wants her to go on the journey Ellie travels to Japan where Palmer Joss meets her and reveals that his acts at the committee hearing were influenced not entirely by his professional beliefs, but also by his personal fear of losing her. He makes peace with her going on the second Machine, which is then announced to a stunned world. On the day of the test, Ellie is learning about the restraint system. She says that if the aliens had meant for there to be a restraint, they would have designed one. The team also gives her a suicide pill in case something should happen. Ellie enters the Machine’s transport pod (IPV) assisted by two technichans. As the Machine begins to build up power, the rings transfer their energy to the pod, which makes the interior metal of the pod begin to turn slightly translucent. Her communications signal becomes fuzzy as the energy field increases, and the rings begin to create a massive energy vortex in the core of the machine. The Machine becomes structually instable and the team prepares to abort, but Kent picks up Ellie’s faint voice telling the team she is ready to go. The team agrees to go ahead, dropping Ellie’s transport module into The Machine.

Inside the pod, Ellie travels at immense speed through a series of wormholes, while the translucence of the pod allows her to see all around her. She then stops briefly in the Vega system, where she sees a complex radio antenna (the one that originally transmitted the message) that could have only been built by a highly advanced civilization. She is then pulled into another wormhole, and is transported at greater speed to a quadruple-star system, where she sees a planet that appears to have cities and indications of advanced alien life. The pod is then pulled into another, much more violent wormhole. She then gets out of her chair to grab the compass given to her by Palmer Joss. The pod violent vibration causes the restraint system to detach and shoot against the wall of the pod. She finds she has been transported to the site of a celestial event so beautiful she cannot describe it. After losing consciousness, Ellie awakes on a surreal beach that resembles a childhood drawing she made of the beach at Pensacola.

She sees a transparent entity moving toward her, which slowly takes the form of her desceased father, and overcome with emotion, embraces him. She then realizes that she is in a simulated environment based on her thoughts and memories. She talks briefly to the alien who has taken her father’s form, who tells her that they were just listening to earth instead of deliberately contacting them, and that there are many other civilizations, who they all try to contact and bring them to themselves via the transportation system, which was already there when they arrived at this place. She is told that she cannot take back any proof to Earth, because “it’s the way it’s been done for billions of years.” He adds that they made the first step (of potentially many) in contacting Earth because, in the immensity of space, “the only thing we’ve found that makes the loneliness bearable is each other.” Before she is sent back, they witness a huge meteor shower, and so they finally get to watch the meteors together.

Ellie wakes up inside the transport pod and is told that the pod simply dropped through the Machine without going anywhere, a fact supported by forty-three separate cameras. With opinion divided as to whether Arroway made the journey or simply hallucinated it, Kitz heads a Congressional inquiry and argues vitriolically that the entire project was a perverse multi-billion-dollar hoax orchestrated by Hadden (who has just succumbed to cancer.) Arroway admits that, in accordance with Occam ’s razor, the hoax theory is the more logical explanation, but that she continues to believe her journey took place. As one Congressman points out, the atheist Ellie is put in the ironic position of asking the public to accept her unsupported personal experience based only on faith.

Ellie leaves the hearing with Joss, who embraces her experience, and both are greeted on the National Mall by a large crowd of supporters to whom Arroway has become a prophetic figure. It is then revealed by Kitz that a secret report states that Arroway’s video headset recorded approximately eighteen hours of static, the exact time Arroway claimed she was gone, despite the cameras showing her drop straight through the machine with no interruptions in descent. Though the information is suppressed, Kitz decides to continue to fund Ellie’s SETI work. Ellie is shown 18 months later, giving a children’s tour of the newly-expanded radio telescope array back in New Mexico, and is last shown sitting in the desert during sunset, looking not at the night sky but at a palmful of desert sand. The film ends with a backdrop of stars, with the words “For Carl” shown against them.

CONTACT
by Carl Sagan
Mass Market Paperback, 1997
ISBN : 0671004107

The 1984 book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by Canadian journalist George Jonas, tells the story of an Israeli assassination squad from the viewpoint of a self-described former Mossad agent and leader of the squad, Avner. Avner has since been revealed as a pseudonym for Yuval Aviv, an Israeli who now runs a private investigation agency in New York.

However, Aviv’s account of the operation has not been independently verified beyond the fact checking Jonas says he has done. Jonas points to a former Director General of the RCMP Security Service, John Starnes, who he says believes Aviv’s essential story. In spite of this, the Mossad director at the time of the operation, Zvi Zamir, has stated that he never knew Aviv. Several former Mossad officers who took part in Operation Wrath of God have also told British journalists that Yuval Aviv’s version of events is not accurate. After its 1984 publication the book was listed on the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists in Britain.

AT THE 1972 OLYMPICS, 11 Israeli athletes were murdered in cold blood by Palestinian terrorists. As the rest of the world continued playing their games, Israel mourned. In the coming years Israel would set out to kill those responsible for the attacks and individuals who would plan, supply, and commit such atrocities in the future.

Steven Spielberg’s Munich and George Jonas’s Vengeance, the book on which it is based, are purportedly accounts of the Israeli hit team that set out to conduct these executions (Operation Wrath of God [Hebrew: מבצע זעם האל, Mivtza Za'am Ha'el], also called Operation Bayonet). The story of those two works is also countered by a new book, Striking Back by Aaron Klein, a correspondent for Time magazine and an officer in the Israeli Defense Force’s intelligence unit. And although the two sides of the story seem to conflict, they are, at a deeper level, of a piece.

FIRST PUBLISHED in May, 1984, Vengeance caused immediate controversy. The book, which reads more like a novel than a historical or journalistic work, relies on “Avner,” a single, pseudonymous source for its narrative. While Jonas may have trusted his source, it is ultimately up to the reader to decide if Avner should be believed. Portions of the book were labeled as either false or unprovable by both the New York Times and Maclean’s magazine.

Whether or not all the specifics of Vengeance are true, one thing can certainly be said about it: Vengeance is not a piece of mindless moral relativism. In fact, the author explicitly denounces moral relativism in his epilogue. “One can,” Jonas writes, “in terms of moral justification, distinguish between counter-terrorism and terrorism in the same way one distinguishes between acts of war and war crimes. There are standards; terrorism is on the wrong side of them; counter-terrorism is not.”

That is not to say that “Avner” feels nothing about killing Palestinian terrorists. Indeed, in Vengeance he and the rest of the Israeli team are, for the most part, happy with their work. The team was “for the first time in millennia [making] slaughtering Jewish men, women and children an expensive proposition. Avner saw nothing wrong with that. If anything, he continued to be proud of being one of the swords that cut off the hands of the enemies of Israel.” However, the deeper question raised by Vengeance is whether or not the Israeli squads were doing any long-term good. “[B]eyond vengeance, their mission was supposed to weaken and diminish anti-Israel terror in the world. Not stop it all together . . . but at least slow it down,” Jonas writes. And at the end of the day, Avner comes to the conclusion that his mission did not cause terrorists to hit the brakes.

This is a country mile from moral relativism.

NONETHELESS, Aaron Klein disagrees with Avner’s conclusion. For Striking Back Klein interviewed more than 50 current and ex-Mossad agents about the post-Munich attacks. And he agrees with Jonas that deterrence was at least a part of the mission: “The Mossad’s aim was to create a permanent threat in the minds of Palestinian operatives and potential inductees, a violent persuasion to cease, or shy away from, all activity on the behalf of terrorists,” Klein notes.

Klein admits that it is tough to measure the efficaciousness of preemptive strikes, but says that the Mossad is certain that terrorist activities were at least hindered by the post-Munich killings. “Deterrence is something you cannot measure. Things happen because of your deterrence. You can’t count the numbers because it is impossible to say who didn’t do something for this specific reason, but it’s there,” he said in an interview.

Consider the assassination of Wadi Haddad, one of the leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “The faction under [Haddad's] command collapsed after his death,” Klein reports in Striking Back. “Dry statistics indicate that the number of attacks against Israeli targets abroad plummeted with his passing. Israeli intelligence and, in particular, the Mossad, viewed them as further proof of the effectiveness of their assassination program.” Or take the killing of Zuhir Mokhsan, the leader of the terrorist group A-Tzika: “Mokhsan’s sudden death led to the dissolution of the A-Tzaika organization–another veritable well of terrorism gone dry.”

Deterrence has its limits, however. “Deterrence helps on a tactical level,” Klein said in the interview, but he added that “it doesn’t solve conflicts. It won’t solve the conflict between the west and extreme Islam. It helps to prevent the next terrorist attack, so you can use it.”

WHICH IS THE POINT of Steven Spielberg’s oft-maligned Munich. Much has been made of Spielberg’s movie, with many worrying that the director sees no difference between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers. That simply isn’t the case.

The film has its problems. As has been pointed out elsewhere, its devotion to reality is sorely lacking. While not a docudrama (the film opens by claiming only to be inspired by real events, not to be an actual portrayal of real events), some scenes are pure inventions of Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner. Yet, issues of factual fidelity aside, it is a misunderstanding of Munich to view the film as a work of moral equivalence.

For instance, much has been made of a scene near the beginning of the film in which photos of the Palestinian terrorists being targeted by the Mossad, and images of the dead Israeli athletes are juxtaposed. Some have suggested that this is a clear case of moral equivocation, that Spielberg is trying to imply that there is no difference between the two groups of “victims.” But if anything, it seems as though Spielberg is trying to help the audience understand the motivations of the Israeli government. In actuality, he seems to be highlighting the fact that the murders at Munich forced Israel to pursue these terrorists.

On the whole, Munich is a finely-wrought character study of the effects of war on those who have to fight it–not an apologia for terrorism. By the movie’s end Avner–gaunt, pale, and aged–is sleeping in a closet because he is afraid of retribution from Palestinian operatives. His fellow agents have been killed one by one and he now lives in fear, both for himself and his family.

Again, this may or may not be factually accurate. For his part, Klein says that of the 50 officers he spoke with “nobody knows some kind of figure who had remorse. And it’s a close circle of people. The people who were actually involved are not a lot.” One place where Klein and Spielberg would agree, however, is that, unlike the Palestinian terrorists, the Israelis took extreme lengths to ensure that innocents were not injured in their strikes. In the film, the team risks missing a target and blowing its cover to save the life of a little girl. Compare this to the Palestinian terrorists who have no problem with turning AK-47s on hogtied hostages. And then there is the deeper question of humanity: Avner understand the justness of his mission, but still struggles with the taking of life. The terrorists show no such qualms.

So even if it’s inaccurate, Spielberg’s characterization of a conflicted Avner is, in its own way, flattering to the Israelis. Indeed, it says more good than bad about the quality of the Israeli men who accepted the job of protecting their country by hunting down the terrorists who would do it harm. We should not want those tasked with defending us to be as remorseless as the sociopath terrorists who are so evil that they take delight in murder.

References

Countering Terrorism: The Israeli Response To The 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre And The Development Of Independence Covert Action Teams, M.A. thesis by Alexander B. Calahan at Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1995.

Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team
with an introduction by Richard Ben Cramer
Simon & Schuster, 2005
ISBN: 0743291646