If you live in Norway, it is anything but odd to be odd.

Because in the land of those northern lights, Odd is the eleventh most popular name for men.

It probably has a lot to do with the fact that the word in old Norse has very different connotations to our English word.

It means the razor-sharp edge of an arrow,the slicing side of a sword.

Odd means deadly. Incisive. Warrior-like.

Sail south, and our odd does inspire distance in others, but not because, necessarily they are fearsome.

Odd inspires distrust.

As it did in a fabulous retelling of those very Norse myths, written especially for children.

I have cited Cressida Cowell many times before. Her hero is a Viking tribesperson, the son of a great chief: but there is absolutely no doubt that he is the odd one out. His name – and this gets the seven-year old boys every time – is Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III.

Cowell’s genius is to make everyone else in the Viking tribes impossibly heroic: beefy, brawny and brave, impossibly daring; fearless and feisty. It is only Hiccup who appears average; and he sticks out a mile.

Cowell says he is “an ordinary looking boy, with red hair, and long skinny limbs, and the kind of anxious freckled face that was easy to overlook in a crowd.”

In among the Viking tribes his very ordinariness is striking. He is everything a chief’s son should not be. His inspires ridicule and his fellow tribesmen are suspicious and mistrustful of him. And yet, tucked in among the folds of his personality he hides a secret: he is a dragon whisperer.

Where most would rather subdue a dragon by bashing one over the head, Hiccup begins painstakingly to learn dragonese. There are good dragons, and there are bad dragons, and the language does not open every door. Indeed Hiccup does find himself chased, eaten, and deceived by dragons at one time or another. But he learns a wisdom beyond his years, and befriends more than one dragon along the way.

All this, Cressida Cowell achieves with the most infectious sense of humour. I wish fervently that I could read her books, all ten of them, out loud to my son all over again. She is one of the truly great storytellers. And her odd one out is a parable for us all.

From the raucous and earthy to the erudite and sublime, and a character who always stepped to the music he heard, no matter how measured or far away. His creator Arthur Conan Doyle – made individuality his very raison d’être.

Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant, polar, addictive personality. His highs were arrogant and his lows were cavernous and all-consuming. His eccentricities were many, not  the least of them being a hoarders’ horror of tidiness.

Watson tells us, in The Musgrave Ritual: “Although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind … he keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece.”

He adds: “He had a horror of destroying documents…. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner.”

Perhaps his habits – a refusal to eat under stress, a cocaine habit and a tendency towards obsession  – might have inspired mistrust in others. But Holmes was fortunate indeed: he had a cipher.

Dr Watson did anything but stand out in a crowd. He was brave – a war hero- moderately intelligent, and eminently personable.

But like Hiccup he had a talent no-one could see. He understood Holmes, he liked Holmes and just like Hiccup, he could translate the idiosyncracies of the great man to the rest of the world.

This very evening, I watched an extraordinary example of a cipher: a character who acts as a translator between a beloved friend and the outside world.

Here in Britain we have an annual television appeal which raises millions for children’s charities. I happened to look up to see a personable fourteen-year-old young woman named Victoria talking to the camera.

Her vivacious face and dark hair rendered her instantly likeable. Her frank, well-spoken confidence had me instantly in her thrall. And she told an extraordinary story.

She was just a little older than my daughter, Maddie, when the trouble started. She had looked forward with such excited anticipation to the move to senior school. She looked forward to meeting a wide circle of friends, and growing and maturing in their company.

But she had cerebral palsy, and this necessitated  her using a walking frame. Her clothes were well cut and fashionable, her hair beautifully groomed, but it seemed her peers just couldn’t see past that frame. She knew, for the first time in her life, what it was to be the odd one out.

They say children can be cruel, but words are so inadequate in these situations. These human beings chose to isolate and ostracise this vivid,  beautiful young personality. And she responded by believing them. Who could not? She shrank away, became withdrawn, quenched words and ideas before they emerged into the light of day.

Until the day her mother found a cipher. And this cipher had four legs and a tail.

She named her cipher ‘Yaffle’. A blonde beauty, this golden retriever understands our young woman in the way Dogs for Disabled are trained to do. Yaffle carries out errands: picks up a dropped book, fetches something that is needed. But that is not his main purpose.

Like Hiccup, like Watson, this shaggy golden shadow provides an interface between his owner and the baffled world. Yaffle loves her to distraction, and it’s infectious. She knows herself loved, and the glowing confidence her cipher has given her is breathtaking.

Not only that, but people approach her to learn more about Yaffle. Many of us know the frank, happy exchanges that pass between dog owners. Yaffle is a new kind of social freedom for one who used to be viewed with derision and suspicion.

People who are different, who stand out from the crowd: they have huge contributions to make. But they won’t be able to be the best they can be unless we make sure they have someone who speaks their language, and can relay it to the world.

Long live the cipher.