And quartz, of course
of course
I was going to look for the comic to link it, but this reference out of context will be more than enough.
When I started getting more fluent in Spanish I found I was overestimating how much Spanish vocab my husband had, just because part of me kind of assumes I’m late to the party on everything and everyone else already knows this. Nope!
And as always, there is a relevant xkcd:
okay but banshee is surely a gaelic / celtic myth which is more obscure due t genocide / christianization, because it ends in shee / sí / sidhe (see also cait sith)
It is. You caught the ending correctly, and the ban part is from bean (not pronounced like English bean, of course), meaning wife or woman. Still, I would say that the banshee specifically has a fair bit more cultural recognition than most things from Gaelic myth. Like I’d expect a lot more people to recognise “banshee” than, say “each-uisge”
Probably a joke but this person sounds annoying. I guess it IS Tumblr
I mean they did use the single most well-known norse myth fact on tumblr, so
Isn’t Odin’s eye more famous?
In the world at large? Yeah. But the story you’ll hear cited most often on tumblr is the pregnant Loki one, because of the genderfuckery / queer interpretation.
Thor’s Hammer, c’mon…
Yeah the hammer itself is probably the most famous object, along with some facts about it like it can’t be lifted and it shoots lightning and such. But in terms of knowing the whole story of a myth, Odin going to the world tree and trading an eye for knowledge I thought would be the most well known.
I would agree the way they write makes them seem annoying
I know what a banshee is, the story where Loki fucked a horse, and I know the Olympian gods, Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Hermes, Athena, Ares, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, Dionysus, and Demeter. But there are a lot more Greek Gods and lesser Gods than them, Hades being a big one. But also various primorial gods, titans, demigods, river gods, gods of the winds, goddesses of seasons, muses, nymphs, satyrs… hundreds of them. I know only a handful of them and in much lesser detail. I’m pretty sure anyone that has played Hades, watched Hercules, or completed high school English in the US can name at least a couple dozen though.
For fun I’m going to try listing as many Greek deities as I can from memory, this will pale in comparison to the real total but it will be fun nonetheless (I’ve probably made many spelling mistakes)
- Zeus, king of pantheon of the gods who rules the sky and weather etc.
- Hera, wife of Zeus… one of the goddesses of fertility? And peacocks?
- Poseidon, god of water and horses and earthquakes
- Hades, god of the underworld who has a helm of invisibility
- Persephone, daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades goddess of spring
- Demeter, goddess of agriculture
- Hermes, god of messengers and thieves, has winged shoes
- Dionysus, god of wine and festivities
- Aphrodite, goddess of beauty (born of the corpse of the father of the titans… Ourous?)
- Artemis, goddess of strategy …and the moon?(multiple weird birth stories but all from Zeus’s body if I recall)
- Apollo, god of the sun, son of Zeus
- Ares, god of war
- Phobos, demigod or lesser god of fear, related to Ares
- Demos, same as above but for “terror”
- Hephaestus, god of machines and husband of Aphrodite
- Hestia, goddess of the hearth
- Lethe, river in Hades and god of sleep
- Eris, goddess of chaos
- Prometheus, titan who defied Zeus to give humanity fire and got his liver ripped out by eagles indefinitely
- Helios, titan of the sun (having multiple deities for the same thing happens a lot)
- Kronos, titan of time
- Gaia, Mother Earth and mother of titans
- Nyx, goddess of poison? Treachery?
- Charon, ferryman/guide of the dead (id call him a deity since people give him “offerings”)
- Hercules, half human, became a god via golden apples after completing tests intended to kill him
- Europa, titan, i don’t remember, exploration? She’s the namesake of Europe though, also I think she’s the one who fucked Zeus when he was a cow or something.
- Vulcan, titan of fire? Volcanos?
I don’t remember if Orion the hunter is just a hero/demigod or if he is a god. Same for Perseus.
Damn. That’s less than I thought. Can I name all nine muses still?
- Calliope (voice)
- Erato (you know)
- Uterpe (joy? Also I feel like there’s another name but I only remember this one because it’s weird)
- Thalia (song? )
- Urania (poets?)
- Clio (history?)
- Polyhymna (geometry?)
- Melpomene (tragedy)
- … I want to say turpentine which is definitely wrong, but I think it does begin with turp- and she’s the muse of dance?
Idk like half the muses are muses of song and there’s significant overlap in all of them if I recall correctly.
Anyway it’s late so I’m going to bed, I’ll see how wrong I was when I woke up lol
Oh also I have never played the game you mentioned but I have siblings who were very into the Percy Jackson books lol
Excellent work, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the glaring lack of the great war strategy goddess Athena, borne from Zeus’ head fully clad in armor she made for herself, giving Zeus a terrible migraine (and with Hephaestus as a midwife).
Damnit I think I combined her with Artemis because that’s one of the weird birth stories I was talking about. Also yeah I really can’t believe I missed one of the main gods.
Turpsicorian.
I learned that from Cats. (Hence I may not have spelt it correctly).
Pretty great effort here. Not surprising that you weren’t sure about Hera’s dominion, in pretty much every story she’s basically the god of “my wife is such a bitch lol”
Isn’t Hera the goddess of wisdom and learning?
You wouldn’t know it from the tales. Most people would go looking for Athena or possibly Metis on those counts.
Well I mean I’ve been an electrician for decades and I’m still mystified about how electricity works. So I’ll probably give the Greek God’s thing a miss I reckon.
You shouldn’t. It’s Zeus. He made electricity work.
Probably fucked a cloud and that’s how we got lightning.
You’d think it would produce sleet.
Nah, cloud got pissed off.
Most everyone knows what a banshee is to some degree. This post makes me think there is some deep lore about them I don’t know. They’re just screaming demonic women from Irish legends, no?
There is a bit more to them, specifically that they predict death as roscoe said. There are no explicitly supernatural banshees in the film, but there is a character who is implied to either be one or be like one. She matches a lot of the visual characteristics of one, but… only things that a regular elderly human lady could match. Whether she is or not is left without a direct answer. The discussion of it within the film is more important than the answer
It’s a very good film
I think they’re harbingers of death also. If you hear them, someone is going to die.
Kind of not connected but on the same topic :-
I was totally surprised when I realised my boss didn’t know there was Nazis in The Sound of Music.
I mean – who doesn’t know there are Nazis in The Sound of Music? That’s like something EVERYONE knows? How is there someone who doesn’t know that?
But no – he was genuinely surprised when the Nazis arrived.
This reminds me of a podcast (an episode of This American Life maybe) where one of the reporters talks about being surprised when someone mentions Nazi’s in The Sound of Music because they only ever saw up to the intermission and thought that was the entire movie.
Its like the old adage goes: “Those that forget history are doomed to be surprised there are Nazis in Austria in 1938”
where Loki what
And then Loki got preggers, and gave birth to Sleipnir, an 8-legged horse that Odin rides around.
Should’ve been in MCU. Common Disney L.
Sleipnir says hi!
Not IP enough
Well you see Loki was also a horse at the time
Um … Loki was a trans horse at the time.
Goddamned woke Norse mythology. (/s)
Ah, silly me
Well, technically the horse wasn’t his…
I’ve got a friend who, every time we meet in the pub, would ask “‘ave you seen Banshee?”. Of course we still hadn’t and it turned into a running joke where obviously we can never actually watch Banshee.
Its that flying vehicle on Halo 2 that campers use to get into the “sniping spot” on Blood Gulch
Everyone knows about the Banshee.
But are you familiar with her 🐋?
I do, but I once didn’t. So there is that.
that level of lacking awareness is far more insufferable than this will ever be funny, unless we’re just laughing at their position on a spectrum 🌈
I see an alternate world where I wholeheartedly agree with your views, but I think I prefer this one.
