Hello, DeepStream:)

>Perhaps the Germans on the list can say more, but
>I believe most *modern* texts of, say, a fairy
>tale, would introduce a girl in a story bei
>saying something like "das Maedchen hiess
>Rotkaepchen" ("the girl [neut] was called red
>riding hood"). Nevertheless, later in the story
>they use feminine pronouns ie "sie ging zu ihrer
>Oma" ("she went to her Grandma").
>In *older* text, however, the author (Grimm, in
>this case), sticks grammatically to the neutral
>gender throughout: "es ging zu seiner Oma" ("it
>went to its Grandma")

Yes. We have the same possibilities in modern Icelandic.
When we had a female president the newsman would perhaps say:
'Forsetinn heimsótti Bolungarvík og þar hitti 'hann' leikskólabörn'
Because 'forseti' is a masculine word. However, in everyday speech
we would usually have said "hitti 'hún' leikskólabörn" with 'hún'
referring to 'Vigdís'.

I think it is mostly a matter of how formal and precise the speech is.

>Haukr has noted that there is no relationship
>between an object's "biological gender" and the
>"grammatical gender" of a word which names the
>object. He gave some examples, but a prime
>example is German "das Weib", das means very
>basically "the woman" and is nevertheless
>neutral.

We have that in Icelandic too "víf-it"; and in Old English "þæt wíf".

Regards,
Haukur