Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book.

By this he meant that all events, therefore, all men, are interconnected in an unbreakable web. What man does, no matter how seemingly insignificant, vibrates through the strands and affects every man.

This story is about love, which means that it is also about hate.

It's a peculiarity of the Norwegian culture and of the English and American, too, that men are not supposed to cry. Stiff upper lip and all that. But the Vikings cried like women in public or privately. They soaked their beards with tears and were not one bit ashamed about it. Yet, they were as quick to draw their swords as they were to shed tears. So, what's all this crap about men having to hold in their sorrow and grief and disappointment?

It was a shameful thing that she had nothing of which to be ashamed.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction.