Another round ofĀ āWhy the Coming to America scenes of season 3 are a pure mess - in all the wrong waysā. After the Orisha scene that was clearly just the writers sayingĀ āForget Nancy, letās all hold hands and sing Kumbayaā ; and the Demeter scene which was a very sad hit and miss that completely ignored the Greek community and diaspora of America, letās delve a bit about this scene from episode 2.Ā
... So. If you have watched episode 9 you might have noticed that Hinzelmann kept in her house the knife that was used by settlers to kill the Native little girl on what would later become Lakeside. Right?Ā
It is because visibly this was a sacrifice given to what would become Hinzelmann. I thought originally that it was a kill to Odin, but I actually visibly misheard it because turns out it was a kill to Hodekin, which they callĀ āthe dark oneā. (I havenāt rewatched the scene but I got that from several reviews - if anyone is kind enough to check). Another thing I didnāt caught was that the guy who prayed to Hodekin was actually German. A German trader. Why didnāt I get that? Because the other guy was French. You hear him distinctely speak French, and he speaks it first. Why, just why would you mix up two different nationalities? Just to blur the lines? Thatās confusing and idiot. Why not make an all-German team, huh?Ā
For the prayer in question I was about to rant about how it is an Old Norse/Scandinavian prayer and not an Old German one, but then my rant fell a bit flat. They use the rune alphabet, true, but it was used by a lot of Germanic languages. They associate the hammer with the thunder, just like with Thor, and earlier Whiskey Jack said to Odin that his followers had slaughtered his people. It might lead one to believe this is an honor to the Old Norse gods, but then you have to rememberer that the Norse gods were also the Germanic gods, the same pantheon being worshipped on the two territories with a few differences (Odin became Wotan, Thor became Donar, but they stayed roughly the same). After that I do not have enough knowledge to identify the language spoken as Old Norse or Old Germanic, so Iāll leave it to experts. But Iāll still mention it stays overall confusing.
Especially since they threw a French in there. Why a French? Why confuse people like that?
But the treatment of Hodekin is the most confusing thing. Here Hodekin is called theĀ āDark Oneā and seemingly referred to as a god, due to the prayer and all that. Something quite serious. Except that Hodekin never was truly a god, and certainly never had a name such as theĀ āDark Oneā. Hodekin is an individual kobold (the same way Hinzelmann is the name of another individual kobold). And while Hƶdekin was reported as a folkloric kobold in the 19th century, Hinzelmannās legend can be dated to the 16th century, well before this Coming to America scene (which is in 1690).Ā
All that being said, it is theorized that the scene actually referred to Hodr, a blind god of Norse mythology, usually associated with cold and darkness. But... to my knowledge Hodr did not actually had Germanic counterparts and stayed mostly a Norse entity? Iām not sure, but I think it is the case. And why would Hodr devolve into a Germanic kobold that specalizes himself in protecting houses, families and bring good fortune? For Mad Sweeney it made sense, because it was based on real facts (the Tuatha dĆ© Danann, the Germanic pantheon, was later associated and fused with the Daoine Sidhe, the people of the Sidh, aka the otherworld where lived mixed together gods, fairies and the dead, and thus it was believed theĀ āpeople of the moundsā andĀ āfair folksā were descendants or a lesser form of the old Celtic gods). But here?Ā
Plus on top of that they entirely skipped the actual backstory of Hinzelmann in the novel. Aka the fact that while in Germanic folklore he indeed became a kobold/sprite/house spirit, hisĀ ācareerā as a god dated from pre-Roman times, as aĀ āgodā of a nomadic tribe that had settled in the Black Forest.Ā
Anyway, this isnāt as bad as the other Coming to America scenes, but it stays confusing and weird. If you have more cultural informations, donāt hesitate to share