I am afraid it was not particularly exciting: he was mostly the pretentious kind of inaccurate as opposed to the batshit spectacular. I started to bring up Tacitus and the fact that while there is a lot of overlap between the cosmologies, the Norse gods were, in fact, Norse rather than really German, he cut me off—did I know, no, seriously, their names are different in German? Like, Odin is Wotan. Sigurd's real name was Siegfried. I contemplated whether I wanted to start reeling off names of the Æsir and the cast of the Nibelungenlied, but decided that might imply that I was interested in his conversation.
(I did ask at one point if he was German. I couldn't otherwise tell why he would be earnestly attempting to convince me, by way of chat-up, that the rest of the world hadn't yet forgiven Germany for World War II. No, he said, but he was very European.
. . . It did not seem to stop him from shouting, at frequent intervals, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!")
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I am afraid it was not particularly exciting: he was mostly the pretentious kind of inaccurate as opposed to the batshit spectacular. I started to bring up Tacitus and the fact that while there is a lot of overlap between the cosmologies, the Norse gods were, in fact, Norse rather than really German, he cut me off—did I know, no, seriously, their names are different in German? Like, Odin is Wotan. Sigurd's real name was Siegfried. I contemplated whether I wanted to start reeling off names of the Æsir and the cast of the Nibelungenlied, but decided that might imply that I was interested in his conversation.
(I did ask at one point if he was German. I couldn't otherwise tell why he would be earnestly attempting to convince me, by way of chat-up, that the rest of the world hadn't yet forgiven Germany for World War II. No, he said, but he was very European.
. . . It did not seem to stop him from shouting, at frequent intervals, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!")