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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9455427" data-attributes="member: 6915329">This sounds unnecessarily nit-picky, especially when "they dropped a red-hot sword on themselves" is both "not authoritative" and it's kind of ridiculous to expect that this would happen so often that myths would be built around it--and that only the resultant limp would be build around it and not the clumsiness.OK, you do know that these origin stories are made up by human storytellers, right? There wasn't some documentary crew up on Mount Olympus actually recording everything. The stories are supposed to be fantastical and contain larger-than-life individuals and events.Bronzesmiths had injuries and malformations often enough that this became memetic, in the original meaning of the word meme: information that is passed on from person to person. The early storytellers knew the meme. They may or may not have known its origins. Maybe they knew enough about smithing to know that something about it injured smiths and/or smiths were extraordinarily clumsy. Maybe, being storytellers or priests, they didn't have much to do with the people who did physical labor and therefore had no idea why.So here comes a story about Hephaestus, and he clearly has to be disabled. How? Well, they could use something boring and human like weird chronic diseases or accidental injuries, or they could use the idea that had thrown from the heavens or injured by a god.I didn't say they were stupid. I said they wouldn't care because that bit of knowledge isn't needed when it comes to telling a story. It's not like these myths were written with scientific or medical realism in mind.(Although they did use arsenic in their bronzemaking--admittedly, this was a millennia or so before it was commonly known to be poisoning--so yes, I think that maybe no, they didn't know that some of the materials they used had toxic effects. Especially since it can cause neuropathies which can make other injuries easier to obtain and therefore the exact cause of those injuries would be harder to pinpoint--if someone broke a leg, how exactly would they know if it was because they fell or because they were suffering from bone degradation that caused the bone to be weak enough to break.)One would think that if they knew the difference enough to put it in their myths, the stories wouldn't have to say "Hephaestus got thrown from Mount Olympus" and instead would say "Hephaestus dropped a red-hot robot on his foot and it burned clean off."</blockquote>

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