Merlin Reads

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In this poem, the ferryman Harbard and the god Thor compete in a flyting or verbal contest with one other. The ferryman Hárbarðr (Greybeard) is rude and obnoxious towards Thor who is returning to Asgard after a journey in Jötunheimr, the land of the jötnar. Hárbarðr obstructs his way and refuses him passage across a swollen river. He begins by saying that Thor dresses poorly (in a beggars clothes, without pants) and that his mother is dead. In the course of the poem, Harbard boasts of his sexual prowess, his magical and tactical abilities, asking Thor about his. Thor responds, telling how he defeated Giants. Ultimately, after mocking him at length, Harbard curses Thor and tells him to walk around.

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The author of Hero Tales is James Baldwin, a self-educated pioneer of American education, born in 1841 in Indiana. Although he never attended school himself, Baldwin founded a public high school, the first school library, and a school district in his native Indiana. During the latter part of his career, he was an editor and author of school textbooks, first for Harper & Brothers, and then for the American Book Company. So prolific was Baldwin as an author and editor, it was said that at one point in time, half of all the books in American schools were either written or edited by him. Baldwin's literary legacy may have been forgotten today in the rush to substitute multiculturalism for more traditional tales taught and enjoyed in previous years. Baldwin re-told classic heroic tales for their interest to young students -- the Song of Roland, the Iliad, and the Nibelungenlied.

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Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.

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