Sir Effingham - the porcine gentleman who'd allow the Apocalypse to happen rather than bestow a quest upon a hysterical maiden, even if she was a goddess - is literally a male chauvinist pig, and his name is a homophone for "F-ing Ham".
It actually was the case that in original folklore dwarfs were not short, but craftsman skilled in both metal work and the healing arts.
Effingham shocks Julia by asking for a large drink of cocaine, but before the 20th century hard drugs were regarded as being purely medicinal.
Whilst talking to Julia, Sir Effingham mentions that he thinks she's suffering from 'Hysteria' (or 'female hysteria' as it's more commonly known).
Hysteria used to be classified as a disease, exhibiting a wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, sexually forward behaviour, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others". In Western medicine hysteria was considered both common and chronic among women. Even though it was categorized as a disease, hysteria's symptoms were synonymous with normal functioning female sexuality. In extreme cases, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or to have undergone surgical hysterectomy. The usual treatment was for physicians to manually stimulate the women's genitals, so she would orgasm but the process was time consuming. This led one man, English physician and inventor Joseph Mortimer Granville, to invent a way for women to do so at home, creating the very first vibrator.
The movie, Hysteria (2011) is about this.
Hysteria used to be classified as a disease, exhibiting a wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, sexually forward behaviour, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others". In Western medicine hysteria was considered both common and chronic among women. Even though it was categorized as a disease, hysteria's symptoms were synonymous with normal functioning female sexuality. In extreme cases, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or to have undergone surgical hysterectomy. The usual treatment was for physicians to manually stimulate the women's genitals, so she would orgasm but the process was time consuming. This led one man, English physician and inventor Joseph Mortimer Granville, to invent a way for women to do so at home, creating the very first vibrator.
The movie, Hysteria (2011) is about this.
Penny transports his class to a world which appears to have Saturn in the sky, even though its moons are far too cold for terrestrial life - but this could be a different ringed planet in another solar system, or some other dimension.