How to hunt an elephant. Find a tree and saw most of the way through it without felling it. Sooner or later an unwary elephant is bound to lean up against it. Down comes the tree and down comes the elephant, which, since it has no joints in its legs, will be unable to get up again. Dispatch your elephant with, um, dispatch, lest the herd arrives in answer to its plangent call. In that case, the youngest of them, being lower to the ground, will be able to lift their fallen comrade back on its feet.
When smaller birds flock around an owl in an Old English sermon, they are not paying homage to wisdom
In her second foray into the Old English lexicon and mindset (The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English came out two years ago), Hana Videen sets out to explore a world where animals hold sway. (A ‘deor’ is the Old English word for any animal and, opening this volume, you are as likely to be confronted by a spider, a dragon, a dog-headed man or a tusked woman as by anything so commonplace as a ‘deer’.)
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