Tag Archives: mythology

The Lost Norse Myths

These are notes from a presentation by Ada Palmer at Capricon 46. Any mistakes here are mine, not Professor Palmer’s. The room was crowded and I had to stand, limiting my note-taking ability. Here is the blurb from the convention program:

Why It’s So Easy To Be Wrong About Vikings. We recently realized Heimdall is a tree! A new lost Loki story was discovered on the Faroe islands! It turns out Hel isn’t black on one side after all, she’s blue! Mixing storytelling with the latest discoveries, Ada Palmer discusses recent advances in Norse myth research, both what we’ve found and why it took so long to find it, a history which involves not only the Medieval sources but the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly debates, feuds, mistakes, and corrections in this live and rapidly-changing field whose constant new discoveries mean every decade brings new material to draw on for our own Norse Myth fiction projects.

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A techie note from church

This morning in Church it was my turn to read the lesson from the Hebrew scriptures, about Joseph being sold to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of Silver (Genesis 37). I also read the assigned part of Psalm 105, where this story also comes up.

17 He sent a man before them, *
Joseph, who was sold as a slave.
18 They bruised his feet in fetters; *
his neck they put in an iron collar.

I saw the phrase “iron collar” and my mind immediately went “Anachronism!”. Continue reading

Large Scale Engineering in the Bronze Age

Extensive remains of vast Mycenaean citadel revealed

A team of archaeologists is excavating the remains of a vast ancient Mycenaean citadel, known as Glas or Kastro (castle)….The area is estimated to measure ten times the size of the ancient citadel of Mycenaean Tiryns and seven times that of Mycenae.

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Faith, Myth and Star Wars

Monomaniacal

The newest George Lucas production, Red Tails, forces a Star Wars nerd to come to terms with a troubling philosophy

From faith stems nuance. From myth, generalities. And, sadly for us, the spirit of myth is winning: We revere Star Wars because to our minds—modern machines that equate religion with superstition and are willing to disregard imperfections in science but never in dogma—the movies represent transcendentalist humanism at its best, a perfect manifestation of that noxious label, “spiritual,” that people use to describe themselves when they’re too dull to believe in religion and too dim to understand science. This is why the Force has become the organizing metaphor of our time; there’s no better one for those who believe that if we only open our hearts and understand people are all the same and all good we’d be enlightened enough to lift rocks with a tilt of our heads.

Just how idiotic is this logic will become evident when we examine the controversy known in geekdom as the “Han Shot First” incident….

(My emphasis)

By way of the Episcopal Cafe.

I want to see this

In classical Greek theater, a tragic trilogy was often followed by a “satyr play” on the same subject for comic relief. Such a play accompanied the Oresteia by Aeschylus, but, alas, it has not survived.

However, when the BBC did a television version of the Oresteia in 1979, called The Serpent Son, they had two modern writers fill this gap. The result was Of Mycenae and Men.

Actually, I would also like to see The Serpent Son. Diana Rigg played Klytemnestra!

From RogueClassicism.