Symmachus wrote:I hope you can forgive my ignorance here, my dear Doctor Scratch, but what is the 2nd Watson Letter? I've seen this referenced a few times, and while I usually prefer to do my own research, on this one neither Google nor the search function on this site are particularly helpful, and I'm afraid I haven't much time to divert from my work on Nephite linguistics: a three volume project, perhaps more, although, to be honest, I haven't completed any of it, since, much to my critic's delight (I have only one) it consists largely, though not completely, of some notes in manuscript form—really more of a computer file—and the only thing I've been able to give my attention to, since I'm so busy meeting important people in the field and traveling—I'm posting this from the surprisingly crisp shores of an Alpine lake in Switzerland, where I may or may not have served a mission—is comma usage, n-dash deployment, and excessive, if occasionally obsessive, but always pointless hypotactic sentences, with an unhealthy dash of multisyllabic adverbs and, even, exuberantly indulgent self-promotion.
Hamblin disappeared from the blogging scene, as far as I know, after the Jenkins Affair. What a pity. As for John Gee, Forn Spǫll Fira is not very active, certainly not in Mormon apologetics, and its quality is reflected in the blog title itself: it's misspelled (as is a recent blog post on the "Odessey") and mistranslated. A minor philological quibble not worthy of comment, really, except that I do find the misspelling (or perhaps I should write "mispelling") ironic for two reasons: 1) the old FARMSians pride themselves on their mastery of languages, which is one of the main ways that they establish their authority, and 2) Gee in particular portrays himself as a rigorous scholar and writes in that condescending style of people who would never make such sloppy, stupid mistakes. But of course it turns out, as usual, that sloppy, stupid mistakes are an apologetic specialty.
The Old Norse should be "Forn
Spjǫll Fira," and it means not "The Ancient Tale of Man" but "Ancient tales of men." It is from the first stanza of the Vǫluspá from the poetic Edda, wherein a female seer addressing Odin recounts the creation of the world and (in one manuscript) its end in the violent cataclysms of Ragnarǫk. When I first saw Gee's blog, I wondered about the title: was this going to be a blog devoted to a new apologetic theory involving the pre-Christian religion of Iceland (perhaps a lost tribe of Israel)? Would
"ancient document Mormon scholar" and ethnic Scandinavian Erik Einarson finally get some long-deserved recognition from the
employed ancient Mormon document scholars? The only answer to these expansive possibilities was a shrinking disappointment. Its brief posts are mostly links to news stories or other blogposts covering news from antiquity. I guess "Forn Spjǫll Fira" is just supposed to be a way of saying "news about ancient humans." Since the cleverness was bungled, I have to assume we're not supposed to read anything more into it. Of course, why should John Gee know Old Norse at all? It's not his area. But then I have to wonder how any "critic" bold enough to misspell his/her blog with, say, incorrect hieroglyphs would fare at the hands of apologists. Volenti non fit iniuria.
As for Smoot, perhaps I should pay more attention to it. He's more substantive than Peterson—not that he's any more correct in his views—but that means responding to his posts requires a lot more work.
By the way, are you supposed to be the fabled "Malevolent Stalker" or is that the emailer? Stalking is a crime in many states, and if he felt himself the victim of a stalker, he should contact the police. If it doesn't quite rise to that, it's probably not really stalking, and of course if he were ever to attach and publicize a name to this "Malevolent Stalker," whom he claims has been stalking him for years, surely that would be libelous if it weren't true.