The greatest treachery, or where do assholes come from.

There is an old ballad about a mountain troll who wants to marry a man, Mr. Mannelig, and if she does that, she'll presumably become human. One has to wonder, though, if a troll becomes a human, won't he or she still be a troll inside? The kind of person that leaves garbage around wherever he goes?

Now, if you remember what your grandparents told you -- that "people were better in old times", you'll have to agree that somewhere down the line there was someone who actually got seduced by the promises of 12 mills and a mighty sword (a real, head-cutting sharp sword, not a MMORPG sequence of bytes) and gave to the requests, marrying the troll.

I don't know if she had offered something else in addition to what is listed in the ballad, but it doesn't really matter. The fact is, there was someone who hadn't quite think through what he was getting into and, as a result, has betrayed as all. Because apparently this happened a rather long time ago, when the science of contraception wasn't as developed as it is now. Besides, at that time it wasn't socially acceptable for a married couple to use even whatever sorry means were available.

So they had children and, sure enough, their children were half-trolls. Since the mitochondrial DNA is passed along the mother's line only, their descendants still have those distinct trollish genes. And that is why we see the number of assholes increasing, it isn't just the generation gap, it really is happening, objectively.


P.S. YouTube carries a nice version of the ballad by InExtremo.