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~ By Courtesy of Others ~
The Heathen Chicken: an Old Punchline Revisited Most of you have probably seen a joke circulating on Usenet and e-mail lists,
about how various pagan faiths would answer the classic riddle "Why did the
chicken cross the road?" The original Asatru answer began: I've also composed my own fundamentalist Asatru response to that riddle: Anyone who's bothered to read the Eddas knows that the lore contains only TWO references to chickens...[Insert lengthy discussion of Svípdagsmál stanzas describing Vidofnir the rooster's perching in a tree and guarding the only weapon that can kill it; quote and analyze the original Old Norse if possible. Insert similar lengthy discussion of Prose Edda excerpts describing three roosters crowing to wake armies at Ragnarok.] Neither of those passages imply that the chickens did anything but stay where they were and make noise. In addition, all the chickens mentioned there were roosters -- which proves that our gods want hens to stay in the coop quietly and lay eggs. Obviously, anyone who lets his chickens cross a road is a dangerous, politically correct neo-Heathen eclectic: if the gods had meant for chickens to cross roads, the lore would have described it happening in the first place. © 2003 Ingeborg S. Nordén |