[tied] Re: Odin as a Trojan Prince

People believe what they want to believe, even when it's demonstrably
fiction. Look at the number of true-believers in ET, who's out there
hiding behind comet Hale-Bopp in his spaceship, with Dead Diana, Dead
Elvis, Dead Marilyn, etc, getting his magic wand ready to rapture the
true-believers up to him. This is popular religion.

People did this in antiquity as much as today. If there's a market for
it, someone will come along and cater to it.

--- In cybalist@..., "Christopher Gwinn" <sonno3@...> wrote:
>
> > But, is there a possibility, even remote, of these legends be a
> true basis?
>
> Not likely.
>
> > Why did Scots relate themselves to Scythia or Egypt? The folk-
> etymological
> > association between Scotia and Scythia? The Biblical references to
> Egypt,
> > including them in the Moses cycle?
>
> Continental Christian authors of late antiquity, into the Dark Ages
> (such as Orosius and Isidore of Spain) engaged in fantastic
> speculation on the tymologies of ethnic names - because the ethnic
> name Scotti (which only started being applied to the Irish in late
> antiquity) looked superficially like the Greek word Skythai
> (Latinized as Scythae, with variants, though this is not the name
> that the ethnic Scythians called themselves), they imagined that the
> two peoples were connected somehow (facilitated byt he fact that
both
> the Irish and Scythians were wild barbarians that lived beyond the
> fringes of civilization).
>
>
> In actuality, Scotti is from a Celtic root and has no relation
> linguistically to Scythae whatsoever - but that didn't stop newly
> converted Christians in Ireland (who were quite fond of authors such
> as Orosius and Isidore, and were anxious to drop their own native
> pagan histories in favor of ones that connected the Irish with both
> the classical world and the people of the Bible) from accepting
these
> wild speculations as the truth. They went on to combine both native
> traditions with Classical and Biblical pseudo-histories,
synthesizing
> them into a "new chronology", which became the basis of works such
as
> the Lebor Gabala Erenn.
>
> > I've already references in books about dog breeds, that Celtic
> terriers
> > could have been a Egyptian origin, relating them to the
> Egyptian "teckel", a
> > small, short-legged dog, usually considered to be ancestor of
German
> > dachshund, Welsh Pembroke Corgi, and even Maltese bichon.
>
> The origins of a domestic animal (which could have easily been
spread
> far and wide via trade) has no real bearing on the ethnicity of the
> people.
>
> - Chris Gwinn