Friday Ephemera

…the hamster urine spray bottle or to distract his deranged readers with a new post.
Or? >>>AND<<< Always have a backup plan!

[ Reaches for tablet. Prepares battleships. ]
Glad he didn’t go for the galleons.

Hamster urine comes in galleons?
No, because England is metric.

Hamster urine comes in galleons?
Of course not. Sex-starved British sailors come in galleons.

If anyone’s getting aroused by this thread, I’m flashing the lights on and off.
That will just bring back memories of discos packed with sexy women.

Disco sucks. Just sayin’.
Yeah, so did the women there.
… OK, I’ll see myself out…

A single small woke complaint has creates problems for a larger group.
Disney should give him exactly what he wants and make Schneewitchen und die Sieben Svartalfar and call it a day.

Svartalfar
I’ll thank you to leave the room before breaking wind from now on, sir.

We’re now way beyond my slight knowledge of Norse mythology
That “dwarfs” are short grumpy Jews with long beards is a relatively new thing. In the original Norse myths the dvergr are synonymous with the svartalfar or dokkalfar, the black elves who live underground, are prodigiously strong, forge weapons for the gods and look like human corpses. That’s a deconstruction I would watch the hell out of, and no kvetching about hiring the Right Kind of Actors.

“♫ dvergr elves, dvergr elves, Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?♬”
Tonight: a dvergr elf takes a norse axe to the chest after running at a Norse policeman with a sword and the policeman is forced to defend himself. Also, an overloaded Viking ship gets pulled over by the fiord police and cited for having an inadequate number of shields mounted on the sides of the boat.
“♫ dvergr elves, dvergr elves, Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you? ♫”

Yes, unfortunately the written sources we have on Norse mythology are rather sparse, and what there is assumes the reader is conversant with a broad popular knowledge base that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s still worthwhile reading, in my opinion.

On the morning of Good Friday, it happened in Caithness that a man called Dorrud went outside and saw twelve riders approach a woman’s bower and disappear inside. He walked over to the bower and peered through a window; inside, he could see women with a loom set up before them. Men’s heads were used in place of weights, and men’s intestines for the weft and warp; a sword served as the beater, and the shuttle was an arrow. And these were the verses they were chanting:
‘Blood rains
From the cloudy web
On the broad loom
Of slaughter.
The web of man,
Grey as armor,
Is now being woven;
The Valkyries
Will cross it
With a crimson weft.
‘The warp is made
Of human entrails;
Human heads
Are used as weights;
The heddle-rods
Are blood-wet spears;
The shafts are iron-bound,
And arrows are the shuttles.
With swords we will weave
This web of battle.
‘The Valkyries go weaving
With drawn swords,
Hild and Hjorthrimul,
Sanngrid and Svipul.
Spears will shatter,
Shields will splinter,
Swords will gnaw
Like wolves through armor…’
-Excerpt from Njal’s Saga

so there are at least six different D&D monsters, all completely different, that are all based on one translation or another of the phrase “black elves” from the two sparse references to same in the original Norse sagas.
Thanks for the explication.
Sagas being an oral tradition, would I be right in surmising that a lot never got written down?
a dvergr elf takes a norse axe to the chest after running at a Norse policeman […]
That almost sounds like something one might read about today, except that it would be “orc takes bullet to the chest…”

would I be right in surmising that a lot never got written down?
The earliest written source we have for the Icelandic sagas is from the 13th century, long after the Scandinavian countries were thoroughly Christianized. So yes. One of the most frustrating things about pre-Industrial history is how absolutely miniscule the corpus is, and unreliable.
That almost sounds like something one might read about today
Well yes, that was the joke.

Yikes. I think I prefer the North Malden Chamber of Commerce.
I intentionally picked one of the most over-the-top parts of the saga in question. Most of it is a combination of family drama climaxing in periodic skull-splitting action as the family drama comes to a head. Oh, and lots of bizarrely modern-feeling medieval Icelandic legal maneuvering! It’s probably my favorite of the sagas I’ve read.
With regards to more directly mythological stuff, the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda both have some fantastic passages and are overall very interesting.
Nowhere near as copious as our knowledge about Roman and Greek mythology, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
You’re right, of course. I realize now that I was implicitly comparing what we know of Norse and Germanic myth with the more literate cultures around the Mediterranean.

Love the Sagas, and yes, Njal’s Saga is full of hilarious legal quibbling. I believe the passage you were quoting from is the ‘Battle Song of the Valkyries’/’Song of the Fates’/the ‘Darraðarljoð’ – a very well known song quoted in several Icelandic texts and actually surviving until the 18th century in the Orkneys! George Mackay Brown, a wonderful Orkney writer, talks about it a lot in his books.
Some of the shorter sagas – the Viking ‘Romances’, as they have been dubbed – are hilarious and fantastical and give the lie to the quasi-historical tone of the longer, more serious pieces like ‘Njal’s Saga’. Well worth chasing up.

My favourite classical author is Aristophanes, only eleven of his many works survive. The dude is hilarious.
Brekekekex Koax Koax 😉

My favourite classical author is Aristophanes
The source of “cloud cuckoo land”, the true name of many a university.

I noticed today the problem was a bit hit-and-miss. I thought it was over until later in the day it popped up again. I spent most of today on my laptop, Chrome/Windoze. But when I sat down to use my iPad just before dinner it was almost immediate.

We will never reach Peak Woke because there are always new heights of idiocy and evil to climb.