Three illustrations for Språktidningen, Sweden's largest magazine about language, for an essay by Hebrew Bible scholar Ola Wikander on an unlikely overlap between myth and grammar;
The argument: the ancient story of a storm god slaying a chaos serpent, told across both Indo-European and Semitic cultures, survives not only in the words but in the grammar. Specific narrative verb forms, each carrying a small echoing prefix, became the genre marker for epic. The act of killing chaos was, in effect, built into the sentence.
You can't really draw a verb form (at least I can't). So the images go where the grammar points: to the monster and the god; A sea serpent rearing at a spear-throwing storm god for the spread, a many-headed beast for the myth as it recurs across languages, and a dragon caught in the lightning for the kill itself.
