The Nepalese Unicorn
Nepal’s Chitwan National Park is a royal hunting ground turned wildlife sanctuary. In this pristine forest landscape, filmmakers go out in search of the almost mythical greater one-horned rhino. This semi-aquatic beast, also known as the ‘unicorn’ rhino, is one of the rarest rhino species in the world.
No word on whether they’ve ever tried luring it out with young maidens.
(H/T: io9)
Sixteen Cryptids from Around the World
A mythological creature is one that people told stories about long ago. A cryptid is a creature that some people have claimed to have seen (or seen evidence of) in more recent times. A cryptozoologist is someone who studies (or tries to prove the existence of) cryptids.
Mental Floss has compiled a list of sixteen cryptids for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!
The Whirlwind Creation Museum
Somebody needs to build this. I would pay to see it.
Welcome to the Whirlwind Creation Museum. Other so-called creation museums place their emphasis on a narrow, literalistic, modernist reading of the early chapters of Genesis. They imagine that these chapters simply “tell it like it is” — this is how God did it. Period. We, however, focus on a more panoramic and comprehensive text about how God created and rules over the universe, our world and its inhabitants: Job, chapters 38-42. This passage reminds us that we weren’t there, and none of us actually has any idea what God has wrought or how it all fits together. Job teaches us that herein lies wisdom.
It is my pleasure to give you an overview of the museum today, so that I might then set you free to explore the vast wonders of creation on your own — wonders that go beyond our human ability to describe and explain.
You see, we think the most basic truth about creation is its ultimate incomprehensibility.
Though we humans have the privilege to use our minds and imaginations to explore and discover and theorize and understand God’s creation, we will never come to the end of it. Its sheer scope and its innumerable mysteries resist our attempts to grasp it all. Its contradictions and conundrums stretch the limits of our logic. Before this great universe, we are very small. We do not think this should discourage us, however. Instead, we devote ourselves to learning, appreciating, contemplating, and proclaiming the splendor of God’s handiwork. In the end we yield our quest for all knowledge to the spirit of trust and worship.
Sunday Inspiration: Letting Go
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
—Nelson Mandela
New Book Claims Merlin was from Glasgow, Scotland
Another Famous Glaswegian
Via Celtic Myth Podshow:
Tradition has it that King Arthur’s magician was either English or Welsh.
But in the book Finding Merlin: The Truth Behind the Legend, author Adam Ardrey claimed he actually hailed from Scotland. [Amazon]
Mr Ardrey, who spent six years researching the subject, told a newspaper he believed the wizard had lived in Partick “where the River Kelvin meets the Clyde”.
He told the paper:
I am thrilled that Glasgow has recognised Merlin as a Glaswegian and that almost 1,400 years after his death he can take an official place in Glasgow’s glorious history.
The Lowdown on the Minotaur
Alice Leiper has written a nice introduction to the Greek myth of the Minotaur over at Mythic Scribes:
The story of the Minotaur was never forgotten, but it wasn’t just in modern stories that it has been reused. Dante’s Inferno contains mention of the Minotaur, where Dante and Virgil encounter it guarding the entrance to the Seventh Circle of hell, the circle of violence. The Minotaur is here seen as representing all three rings of the circle: violence against others, for he ate people; violence against oneself, whereby in Dante’s version the Minotaur is seen as biting itself; and violence against nature, for what could be more unnatural than the product of a human mating with an animal?
More recently, CS Lewis used the Minotaur not as a single individual but a whole species, aligned with the White Witch and thereby retaining the evilness of their origins, albeit without the myth behind it. And from there, minotaurs became a fantasy race, used as monsters to battle in Dungeons & Dragons and various games stemming from it. In World of Warcraft the Minotaur’s appearance has inspired the Tauren race, but their temperament is quite a contrast to the angry, flesh-eating Minotaur of the Greek myth.
The Minotaur has been reimagined in other ways too. In the slightly bizarre fantasy webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, there is a minotaur called Basil, who lives peacefully in a labyrinth hidden behind a secret door in the library of the Court. Basil gives his version of events in which Theseus is a drunk, party-crashing jerk.
Sunday Inspiration: Truth and Love
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
—William Sloane Coffin Jr.
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: Fast Facts
Mental Floss has posted 16 facts about C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’m pretty sure I knew most of them, but do check out the recipe for Turkish delight (warning: may contain evil).
Blunt Metaphors Trauma
This is your brain on metaphors.
[I]n their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By,the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.
From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors. Our eyes point to where we’re going, so we tend to speak of future time as being “ahead” of us. When things increase, they tend to go up relative to us, so we tend to speak of stocks “rising” instead of getting more expensive. “Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” they wrote.
Female Viking Warriors?
It’s beginning to look like Viking shield-maidens may have existed in numbers greater than previously thought, if the excavations at sites in eastern England are any indication:
[Archeologist Shane] McLeod notes that recently, burials of female Norse immigrants have started to turn up in Eastern England. “An increase in the number of finds of Norse-style jewellery in the last two decades has led some scholars to suggest a larger number of female settlers. Indeed, it has been noted that there are more Norse female dress items than those worn by men,” says the study.
So, the study looked at 14 Viking burials from the era, definable by the Norse grave goods found with them and isotopes found in their bones that reveal their birthplace. The bones were sorted for telltale osteological signs of which gender they belonged to, rather than assuming that burial with a sword or knife denoted a male burial.
Overall, McLeod reports that six of the 14 burials were of women, seven were men, and one was indeterminable. Warlike grave goods may have misled earlier researchers about the gender of Viking invaders, the study suggests. At a mass burial site called Repton Woods, “(d)espite the remains of three swords being recovered from the site, all three burials that could be sexed osteologically were thought to be female, including one with a sword and shield,” says the study.
Personally, I’d like to see a better sampling than fourteen interments before asserting that Viking warriors had something approaching gender parity. Still, this is an interesting discovery. I look forward to seeing where it leads.
Darrell J. Pursiful 