(no subject)

[rymenhild]

I am sure I just read the passage of Beowulf that inspired Tolkien to write The Hobbit. A crafty thief steals something from a dragon... but the passage is so corrupt that we don't know quite what he stole. The passage includes the phrase "bigfolc beorna." "Bigfolc" literally means "neighboring people", but "big people" works too; "beorn" means warrior ("beorna" is genitive plural) and supplies the name for the bear-man the assembled dwarves meet in the woods on the way to steal from (and kill) the great dragon Smaug. (Never mind that "bigfolc" is a conjectural reading supplied by nineteenth-century scholars, as the damaged text only reads "b..folc." Tolkien would have seen the conjectural reading.)

Yes, I'm a geek. You noticed?

Comments

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

(pat, pat)Aww. You get a honey-cake of the beornings. :)
Seriously, while I had some idea of Tolkien's sources, the Kalevala, and the like, I had no idea it could be honed down to something passage-specific. At least not so promisingly and nicely.
We're dorks and dweebs and four-eyes and geeks, drink up, me lovelies, yo ho...
(mea culpa -- that film is my Vilna antidote.)

[a-trick-mind.livejournal.com]

Being a geek is one of my great joys in life. :)

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

The fact that this type of question would never appear on an internet "geek test" makes you all the more geekier.

(Geekishness being a good thing, obviously. More fun than just being a Nerd and a great improvement over being a Dork.)

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

You know, after that whole "nerd test" debacle, I have to regularly fight the urge to type "So there, nerd test" at the end of my entries.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

http://www.catandgirl.com/view.cgi?94

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Excellent!!

(And that makes FIVE!)

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

I wait with bated breath for the reports of rymenhild and ayelle biting heads off of chickens. Until then, PhD and Merriam-Webster aside, I will maintain that we are nerds. Nerds, I tell you!

In related news, that was fun to read.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

We get to wear capes and tights while doing it!

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Oooh, capes and tights? That almost convinces me to go bite heads off of chickens myself. (Although I don't like tights. If I wear sandals, does that mean I can keep the cape and get rid of the tights? I hear it's tacky to wear tights/pantyhose with sandally-things.)

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Another thing. I know that Dr. Seuss invented the word "nerd." But what was the context? I've racked my brains and can't come up with it.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I'm such an idiot. It's explained in the same websource I used in my comment immediately prior -- the etymology of Nerd.

Yes, I have now commented four times on this post without in any way referring to its actual content.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

rymenhild and I did spam your messages by talking about Mystery of the Abbey and the Fibonacci Sequence.

And if she talks about being a geek? She asked for it.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Both points are quite true.

[earis.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I noticed the same thing a couple years a go when I was working with a medievalist on Tolkien!!!

Write something about it!!! Because, it's a cool idead whose time has come.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Sadly, my Old English prof finds Tolkien research deeply irritating, so maybe right now is not precisely the time. But someday.