A Correction and Rebuttal

BY R ICH AR D CAR R IER / ON AUGUST 3, 2012 / 6 COMMENTS

Two scholars I have criticized lately have responded to my critiques and this fact is important enough for a brief note here.
The first is Dr. Ralph Kenna, whom I took to task in various ways inBad Science Proves Demigods Exist!Though his
rebuttal largely skews reality and does not adequately defend the bad science in his paper–as I demonstrate in my
response–he rightly criticizes me on two points: my opening line was misleadingly facetious, and I misrepresented one of
their arguments.

I apologized and made corrections to the article. Those consisted of one line at the end of the first paragraph, which now
reads:

“
To be fair, they only claim to have evidence “the societies” and “some of the events” in them are true,
not the entire stories as wrote. But really they don’t.

And a rewrite of one paragraph later in the article, which now reads (new material in bold):

“
Certainly Beowulf is based on real historical persons and contexts (Wikipedia has a nice summary), but
Beowulf himself is by all accounts a fictional character inserted among them, to play out a supernatural
drama that obviously has no basis in history (no monster was terrorizing the lands that required finding a
special young warrior named Beowulf to gather a band of men to hunt it down). This is actually
admitted by Kenna and Mac Carron, so I should not take them to task for that (as I did in the original
draft of this critique). But the general fact of it illustrates that any character could be similarly
inserted, possibly thereby undetected. This tale appears to be a Nordic (and possibly Christian-
 influenced) adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Like the Aeneid, if in Beowulf any ancillary (non-central)
character was invented to fill out the story, would Kenna and Mac Carron’s method be able to detect
it? I don’t see how. We can only confirm the historicity of its characters by other, more traditional
methods; and by that method, we have.

That last sentence not being a correction but just a restatement of my original overall point, transitioning to the next
paragraph.

Lester Grabbe likewise responded to my criticism of him in my review of Is This Not the Carpenter?, his chapter being
the only one I found so terrible I had to take it substantially to task. His rebuttal was wholly inept, and my response
reconfirms that everything I said in this case was correct. No corrections warranted.

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6 comments
'T I S H I MSE L F • AUGUS T 3, 2 0 1 2 , 1 :0 4 P M

I noticed that Grabbe accused you of chest beating and penis waving when he was the one indulging in that
behavior.

R E P LY

JA C OBF R OMLOST • AUGUS T 3, 2012, 5:24 P M

Shouldn’t it be “not the entire stories as written”, rather than “not the entire stories as wrote”?

Unless I missed something.

R E P LY

R IC H AR D C AR R IER • AUGUS T 6 , 2012, 4:44 P M

It’s an old colloquialism, “take it as wrote” (analogously, “the law as wrote,” “the story as
wrote,” etc., meaning the same thing: without challenge).

R E P LY

DA VI D H I LLMA N • AUGUS T 4, 2012, 2:49 AM

It is by no means a consensus that the characters in Beowulf, apart forom Beowulf himself are based on real
people. There was a Hygelac but Gregory of Tours makes him a Dane not a Geat. That the Shieldings and
Ynglings really existed is doubtful, since such names for lineages were not used in the north till much later. That
some burial mounds in Sweden were later associated with named Yngling kings in the story is no proof. I believe
the Shieldings were the great army of vikings from Frisia so named by the Northumbrians, whose clan were
backdated in made up stories. There are several plausible origins for the name: see for example Scalding in Alex
Woolfe’s From Pictland to Alba. Also Irish names in story were back projections often from the invented
genealogies of later kindreds. Much more fiction than allowed in the assumptions of the story, and fewer
historical characters than in Shakespeare.

R E P LY

STEVI E JA K E • AUGUS T 5, 201 2, 7:27 P M

Still waiting on that reply to Thom Stark…

R E P LY

R IC H AR D C AR R IER • AUGUS T 6 , 2012, 5:56 P M

Already done. The latest revision is the reply. This was announced in my Ehrman recap.

R E P LY

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Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to
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origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He
is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.

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