Finding Odin



The God Odin



In several postings I have reffered to the works of Thor Heyerdahl and in particular I mentioned that he shortly before he died (2002) he published two books about his hunt for the “real” Odin.1 I also mentioned a devastating review that was published in 2002 shortly after his death, concerning Thor Heyerdahl’s efforts in this area. The review was originally published in Norwegian, but a English translation of the piece was put on the web. Sadly it appears that it is no longer obtainable on the web. I have therefore decided to post the piece in its entirety.

In a previous posting I quoted an author who said concerning Thor Heyerdahl:

Rather than classifying him [Thor Heyerdahl] as a pseudo historian it would be more fair and accurate to call him a careful scholar who sincerely holds some highly speculative hypotheses that are widely viewed as wrong.2

The idea that Thor Heyerdahl can be described as a "careful scholar" is actually quite risible as the following will show in abundance.

 

(In this piece my stuff is in italics, the rest in regular script)

Stupid Grammar Tricks

No Caption Needed

This short little note about grammar is not about the basic rules of language that regulate how language is structured so that what we say makes sense. It isn’t about Noam Chomsky’s idea about transformative grammar and so forth. It is not about the basic, apparently hardwired rules that make “The cat sat on the mat”, different from “The mat sat on the cat”. Those are actual grammar rules governing exactly how people express themselves in speech and language.

No what I’m going to talk about are what are called prescriptive language rules. These are rules created, supposedly to avoid, vague, and incoherent ways of expressing yourself by avoiding certain uses of speech.