From Youngstown to Rome’s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Got Mixed Up with a Bunch of Sword-Waving Saints

Where Youngstown Meets the Huns, and Rome Learns to GrinNow, I ain’t sayin’ it was fate, but the day Tapio Tiihonen — steel-town son at heart, wordsmith, and full-time troublemaker — turned his pen toward the language of his beginnings, the circle didn’t just close. It flared up like a blacksmith’s forge in July. From the grit of Youngstown to the crumbling marble of Rome, this is where the rust meets the empire — and the buckle’s about to snap clean off.Mark Twain once wrote about a fella who got knocked in the head and woke up in King Arthur’s court. Well, in this yarn, our own Youngstown fella Earl Jenkins don’t take no head shot — he takes a steaming cup of monk-brewed tea. And that’s when the real fireworks start.Don’t get it twisted — the bones of this beast are all real history, hammered out of Tiihonen’s ten-volume deep dive into the twilight of Rome. This ain’t fantasy — though it’s got enough wild turns to make a bishop spill his communion wine. Merobaudes’ tattered hymn to General Aëtius, once sung in Emperor Valentinian III’s court, gets patched and polished by a certain mysterious scribe — Anonymus Salarianus — and run through Tiihonen’s own mill of data, wit, and righteous stubbornness. What comes out ain’t no classroom lecture. It’s a Rutilius Namatianus–style road trip from the Eternal City straight into the turf of the Huns — a ride that turns grief into knighthood, despair into a hymn, and tragedy into something the author calls comitragedy. That’s the all-embracing Smile — the kind that makes both the end of the world and the start of a new one reasons to toast.And if you think that sounds lofty, wait ‘til you hear the boots hit the dirt. The Great Migrations roar in the background. Borders — political, strategic, and downright imaginary — crumble like bad pastry. In the valleys of sorrow sprout new humor, new blood, and old wisdom long buried under Christian zeal. And through it all shines the Golden Ratio — the Aurea Concordia — not as some polite geometry problem, but as a living, laughing law of survival.The telling of it? Oh, it’s a full brass band in a cathedral — medieval oaths, Youngstown grit, monkish irony, and more Latin than your average choirboy could stand. Jenkins talks like a man with dirt under his nails and history in his pockets. The humor’s not cheap — it’s hammered into shape, tempered by loss, and sharp enough to make the saints cough. One page you’ll be belly-laughing, the next you’ll be staring at the words like they just pulled a sword outta stone.This ain’t comedy for giggles — it’s comedy for immortality. The Smile here is a weapon, a crown, a challenge. And somewhere between the war-horses and the wisecracks, you realize you ain’t just reading about Aëtius, Phantor, and Condor — you’re marching with ’em. No kneelin’ to the past, no bowin’ to the future. Just men who keep going, brothers who never silence each other, and a storyteller who knows a good truth wears armor.So, pour your tea, sharpen your sword, and mind the crow on your shoulder — he’s seen some things. This is Jenkins/Aëtius — where the last drum of Mars meets the first grin of the new world. And if you’re not ready for both… well, friend, you might be in the wrong book. Read more