A blog named Owlet

This site will host a blog written under the nom de plume (ha!) of Owlet of Minerva. The same mythical owl has been hooting for a while on Twitter (2017–2023) and Mastodon (2022–) under its Latin name, @NoctuaMinervae.

The little owl (Athenae noctua) was the companion of the Greek goddess Athena, known to the Romans as Minerva. Athena was a goddess of wisdom and war, defender of the city and teacher of useful technologies like weaving.

Her owl, then, fits as the familiar of a blog that aspires to deal with the polemical intersections between science, religion, and politics, but also with the tools and téchnē of my trades: translation, research, writing, web-weaving and the like.

[EDIT – added 2023-10-01:] (Well, aspirations are nice, but based on the owlet’s social-media use, the blog will be rather more about popular culture and bad puns.)

Hegel famously used the twilight flight of the owl of Minerva as a metaphor for philosophical understanding, which always arrives too late to teach the world how it ought to be. Since I tend to take a long time to make up my mind about things, that makes it a perfect metaphor for my blog as well. Or to put it more nicely: I’ll be taking my time to try and understand things and reason things through, rather than dispense instant punditry.

The name also owes something to children’s books and certain animated owls on film: The Norwegian classic Marens lille ugle (1957) by Finn Havrevold, brought to life in Ivo Caprino’s equally classic Ugler i mosen (1959), as well as Jonathan Allen’s Little Owl series (I’m not cute!), and of course Bubo, the automaton owl in Clash of the Titans (1981).

Please take that as an exhaustive list of inspirations: The name is not inspired by Minerva McDonagal, much less by the Norwegian right-wing think-tank Minerva, and absolutely not by two nearly identical book titles by a certain former Slovenian human-rights judge turned far-right loon.