PMS Pager: William

Norse-mythology question for you: do primary sources (by which I guess I mean the Eddas) have Mjolnir return to Thor's hand like a boomerang after he throws it? A reviewer in The New Yorker was making fun of the Thor movie for that detail, but I thought it was legit because I read it in d'Aulaire.

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"…the USA is like Microsoft—whatever they decide to use, no matter how brain-dead it is, everyone else copies it from them, willingly or otherwise."

Who's William?
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http://lostfacts.net/boards
3/>- Gavi

I believe it does (in the prose Edda for what that's worth which is a long story etc.). I'd have to look through again, but I'll say that D'Aulaire probably didn't make up that particular detail.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

Searching through http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18947/18947-h/18947-h.htm, I don't see any explicit mention of the hammer flying back, but Snorri does say "it would never fly so far that it did not return to his hand", and I can't see how else Thor could've retrieved it after this:

It is said that the giant Hymer changed hue and grew pale from fear when he saw the serpent and beheld the water flowing into the boat; but just at the moment when Thor grasped the hammer and lifted it in the air, the giant fumbled for his fishing-knife and cut off Thor’s line at the gunwale, whereby the serpent sank back into the sea. Thor threw the hammer after it, and it is even said that he struck off his head at the bottom, but I think the truth is that the Midgard-serpent still lives and lies in the ocean.

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"…the USA is like Microsoft—whatever they decide to use, no matter how brain-dead it is, everyone else copies it from them, willingly or otherwise."

The "it would never fly so far..." line is the one I was thinking of. I wish I had some highly nuanced or insightful way to read that to reconcile it with the Thor we all know and love, but I don't really know beyond saying "that sounds like a good way to read that."

It's also important to note that these things aren't consistent; in one sense I mean that the prose edda alleges to be a concretion of divergent myth traditions, so the hammer doesn't necessarily have that attribute in every story. But in a more important sense, it's internally inconsistent because what the hammer does just isn't as important as the fact that Thor's hammer better than your hammer. We don't ever see the hammer return in a fight because it's more important that the story convey that the hammer does cool stuff than that it actually depict the hammer doing this cool stuff in an actual fight. Mjollnir doesn't return (or not really leave his grasp or whatever) when Thorr throws the hammer into the sea because it was Thorr's intent to hurl it into the sea and the continuity (which was never really given much thought) loses out to the needs of the myth-plot.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

I guess you can read "it would never fly so far that it did not return to his hand" as meaning "it would never fly so far that it got lost", but that sounds like a pretty lame power for a weapon which we're assured is the greatest of the Æsir's treasures.

And you're right, of course, mythology isn't big on continuity in any case. Sources aren't even totally clear on whether Thor was blond or red-headed. I always got a stronger sense of continuity from Norse than Greek mythology, but that may be just because we have fewer sources of the former.

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"…the USA is like Microsoft—whatever they decide to use, no matter how brain-dead it is, everyone else copies it from them, willingly or otherwise."

To answer your second paragraph first (in the Greek heroic formula!): yeah, pretty much. Like we have a bunch of sources, but (1) for some reason, even though we don't draw a distinction between Attic mythology and Doric mythology, we do draw one between continental German (of which we know next to nothing) and "Norse" (i.e. Icelandic, i.e. Snorri), so that writers like Saxo Grammaticus for the purposes of, say, Daulaire, don't "count" and (2) and the privileged source is all material interpreted by or in many cases straight up made up by a much later author (Snorri). He jumped several logical leaps to bring everything into accord with everything else where he deemed it appropriate. There's a really frustrating article you can read about the... originality of the younger Edda. It's "Snorri and the Mead of Poetry" by Roberta Frank (I think it was originally in Speculum and has been reprinted in like a hundred anthologies since then).

And I think that's a totally valid reading. It *sounds* lame, but think of how much lamer a hammer would be without that power. Also, there's every possibility that the line was obscure wherever Snorri saw it, and so he left it intentionally vague/put it in verbatim figuring that someone else would figure it out/no one would care. He may have had this exact conversation!
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

Actually I guess I should check/for the first time read Saxo, see what he says on the subject.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir