Dead as a solitaire

 

The dodo, the passanger pigeon and the great auk are three almost iconic extinct birds. Inevitably, some people claim to have seen them after they officially traversed to the proverbial hunting grounds. 

Also as usual, some of the reports are more difficult to believe than others. For instance, a report of a living dodo in Zambia?! Hint: the dodo was a flightless bird living on the island of Mauritius. Zambia is a landlocked country in South-Central Africa. But even that pales when compared to an alleged video of a dodo in...Costa Rica. Yeaaah. 

My "favorite" is the Canadian whiskey distiller who tricked the media to a marketing event on the Orkney Islands, claiming to finance an expedition looking for surviving great auks. The runner up is the bizarre story of penguins on the run in Norway being mistaken for said auks. Is that even true, or an April Fool´s joke?

Interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt believed that he spotted passanger pigeons seven years after the species supposedly disappeared. So TR *did* have some kind of cryptid connection. The usually trigger happy rough rider decided not to shoot them. Later sightings are probably misidentified mourning doves or bizarre specimens of domestic pigeons on the run.

A very entertaining video, all in all.    

How Earl Sinclair didn´t reach America

Due to technical errors (or a vast Illuminati conspiracy?), this review was never posted by Amazon on either of their websites. 

This issue of “New Orkney Antiquarian Journal” (Vol 2, 2002) contains an article by Brian Smith titled “Earl Henry Sinclair´s fictitious trip to America”. Henry Sinclair was a 14^th century Scottish nobleman who doubled as Norwegian earl of the Orkney Island. According to alt-history claims, Sinclair discovered (or reached) America almost 100 years before Columbus together with two Venetian navigators, the Zeno brothers. I think Smith´s article does a good job debunking this claim. The Sinclair pseudo-saga has been combined with other, even wilder, alt-history claims about secret bloodlines, the Holy Grail, Gnostic Templar heretics, and what not. (I´m still waiting for the Twelve Tribes of Israel to show up, so can somebody please tell the local neighborhood Gnostics about British Israelism and Herbert W Armstrong?) These wilder claims are only briefly addressed in the article. A piquant detail is that Brian Smith is a friend of Niven Sinclair, who (I think) believes that his illustrious ancestor really did reach America!

Viking pop

This year's Danish song in the Eurovision Song Contest. Yes, it's about Orkney Vikings! Five stars for the effort, but too boring, although the Eurovision format could be at blame here (songs can't be longer than 3 minutes). The right feeling of based shamanic Odinistic pagan sacrifice never really appears...

Magnum opus

This must be the most expensive book on sale here. If you have $ 2,800, you can get *your* very own copy of Jakob Jakobsen's classical “An etymological dictionary of the Norn language in Shetland” in a 1985 reprint edition. Or rather the second of two volumes! The original English version was published in 1928-32, while the Danish version is even older.

Norn is an extinct Scandinavian language, once spoken on the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides and Caithness. Until the mid-15th century, the Shetlands and Orkneys were Norwegian territories. The population was descended from “Vikings” who settled there about six centuries earlier. Norn died out at some point during the 18th or 19th centuries. The language strikes me as similar to Icelandic and Faroese. Unsurprisingly, Jakob Jakobsen was from the Faroe Islands. I never heard of him before discovering this product page, but apparently Jakobsen was a kind of “national awakener” on his native islands. When not promoting the Faroese language and culture, he studied the Shetland dialect of Norn and eventually published this magnum opus on the subject.

Today, a small group of enthusiasts have launched a project called Nynorn or New Norn, but it's entirely web-based and even the creators admit that it's of theoretical interest only. Perhaps a crossover with Reconstructionist Asatru might be more interesting?

Be careful what you wish for

A review of a sign saying "Parking for Norn Speakers only, all others will be towed" 

This is actually a quite funny sign. Norn is an extinct language previously spoken on the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides and Caithness. The language was similar to Icelandic and Faroese, being introduced to these distant shores by Scandinavian Vikings. Since the language disappeared about 200 years ago, a parking lot for Norn-speakers only will be vacated for a very long time. And when the rightful occupants return, it will probably be in a majestic dragon-ship, rather than in a Volvo!