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The Heathen Chicken: an Old Punchline Revisited
Most of you have probably seen a joke circulating on Usenet and e-mail lists,
about how various pagan faiths would answer the classic riddle "Why did the
chicken cross the road?"
The original Asatru answer began:
First, we don't believe in a "One Chicken" or a "Hen and Rooster." We believe in
many chickens.
Second, "crossing the road" is probably a later Christian contamination of
the original Norse riddle--
in which the chicken "trod the road to Hel", a
standard expression for death. Hail the Chickens!
I've also composed my own fundamentalist Asatru response to that riddle:
Anyone who's bothered to read the Eddas knows that the lore contains only TWO
references to chickens...
[Insert lengthy discussion of Svípdagsmál stanzas
describing Vidofnir the rooster's perching in a tree
and guarding the only
weapon that can kill it; quote and analyze the original Old Norse if possible.
Insert similar lengthy discussion of Prose Edda excerpts describing three
roosters crowing to wake armies at Ragnarok.]
Neither of those passages imply that the chickens did anything but stay where
they were and make noise.
In addition, all the chickens mentioned there were
roosters -- which proves that our gods want hens to stay in the coop quietly and
lay eggs.
Obviously, anyone who lets his chickens cross a road is a dangerous,
politically correct neo-Heathen eclectic:
if the gods had meant for chickens to cross roads, the lore would have described
it happening in the first place!
© 2003 Ingeborg S. Nordén