First line of the Anglo-Saxon charm against bees.
Anyway, so my sister mentioned the phrase "bee's knees" in a comment, and, it got me to thinking. Like, maybe those 1920s "nonexistent=awesome" expressions, of which there were dozens (only "bee's knees" and "cat's pajamas" survive), might have been in continuity with the tradition where Mjolnir and the chains binding the Fenrir-wolf are made of things like "the sound of a cat's footsteps" and "the beard of a woman".
I know, weird idea. But not impossible. The other day I was noticing how my Dad, who's from Massachusetts, distinguishes the vowels in "marry", "Mary", and "merry"—they're the vowels in "man", "main", and "men", respectively. Notice anything? Yeah, "marry" and "merry" are short, and "Mary" is long—at least if we remember the Great Vowel Shift changing most of the long vowels to diphthongs. Not coincidentally, it's determined by double consonants. That is, my father, born the same year as the Today Show, follows a Germanic vowel-length rule that probably dates to when nouns ended in *-az. Given that, it's not unthinkable that 1920s slang could retain continuity with the Migration Era writers of the eddas.
And I realized, that's what bugs me about Michael Moorcock and his illiterate statement that Tolkien is "the prose of the nursery" (admittedly, all my examples that also use Tolkien's diction were, uh, poetry—I should've said Scott, Stevenson, and Dickens). Is it even legal to write fantasy, as Moorcock does, if you're so unacquainted with folklore as not to know the role nursery literature plays in preserving the ancient traditions of a people?
But no, apparently it never occurred to Moorcock that more than just legends ("fairy tales") had been consigned to the nursery—a whole tradition of poetic diction dating to the days of skalds and bards, also took refuge there. Why? Well, because it wasn't the diction of the Bible.
Meet the new Puritan, same as the old Puritan.
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