Rap, Rhyme, and Reason This is a summary reconstruction of a paper written when Rap was a new phenomenon and before it degenerated into "Gangsta Rap" with its filthy words and anti-feminist sentiments. Regrettably, the original has been lost or irretrievably misplaced. At the time the paper was written, there appeared to be interesting parallels between this form of spontaneous rhyming of everyday phenomena in the Black Community, leading to highly inventive use of language to maintain the rhyming, and the similar phenomenon of kenning which arose among the Vikings, to pass the long boring interludes between battles as they sailed (or rowed) from their remote homelands to Ireland (where they raided for pretty girls to take home as wives), or the English shore (where they raided for wealth), the Mediterranean (where they raided for money and gold), and Constantinople (where they often took employment as the Varangian Guard for the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. As the vikings sailed on for day after day, they found it helped pass the time to engage in poetry contests, trying to keep a rhyme on the state of the weather, the behavior of the sea, the events of a memorable battle, or the charms of a girl left at home, going on uninterrupted for as long as possible. This required the use of kennings, i.e. the employment of unusual (or even invented) words or phrases which could suggest the object or event being spoken of. For example, instead of merely speaking of an unusually high wave, one might speak of "Neptune's white maned chargers", or the wild courage of a couple of Berserkers (literally, "those who wear bear shirts" [or a bear skin shirt]), as they did battle on an island in the middle of an Icelandic river. A Sword was often given a special name to indicate the bravery of the man who wielded it (this notion was carried over into the Arthur Legend, where the future king's sword, Excalibur, arose -- and eventually returned after working its magic in battle -- to the hand of "The Lady of the Lake". Students of language assert that it was during the long sea voyages of the vikings that much of the vocabulary and grammar of Old Norse took form, being established as the language of the Sagas and Eddas during the long winter nights as the poems and stories invented at sea were told to wives, sweethearts, and children. The argument of the paper Rap, Rhyme, and Reason, as originally drafted at greater length, was that the appearance of this phenomenon among American Blacks, might well be a promising indicator of rising Black Pride, with the further promise of a beginning of interest in literature and the arts within the Black Community which in due time might blossom into the type of great literature which accompanied the development of other languages and dialects. The author did not anticipate the perverse turn Rap would take as it degenerated into the current super-phenomenon of Gangsta Rap. Just goes to show, one imagines, that neither biological nor social evolution need follow a predetermined (nor necessarily positive) direction. With neglect over long periods of time of attention to man's moral dimension, and absent reasonable attention to eugenics (through executing moral misfits who kill, rape, and engage in other highly anti-social acts, in order to avoid passing on such anti-social traits to posterity; plus "licensing" those considered fit to breed to maximize the likelihood that future generations will inherit genes demonstrating aptness for acceptable social life -- one supposes that it would be just as possible for homo sapiens to revert to Neanderthal (or even lower) biological form, as to evolve into the superman envisaged by Nietzche -- or LDS doctrine.