Category Archives: Axis Mundi

Stanza 4: God

byþ ordfruma.         ælcre spræce.
wisdomes wraþu.         and witena frofur.
and eorla gehwam.         eadnys and to hiht
᛬᛫

It is the source of every speech,
The support of More

Stanza 26: Ash

biþ ofer heah.         eldum dyre.
stiþ on staþule .        stede rihte hylt.
ðeah him feohtan on         firas monige 
᛬᛫

It is very tall, dear to the elders
Firm in its foundationsMore

Translating Æsc

The ash tree is oferheah. Over-high. Tall. And it grows from nothing: the smallest sapling can become something oferheah, massive, with root systems that are fairly shallow, butMore

Translating Os

Os means God, non specified, though this stanza might be talking about a specific one. There are other specific gods in the Rune Poem. Tiw is here. So is Ing. We don’t know much More

How to Talk to God

First of all shush! Shh. You talk too much. You need to listen more. Who do you think you are? You’re not God. You are about to talk to somebody who is God and who is not chatty. So shush.… More

Æ is for George William Russell

George William Russell, Irish legend in a crowded field, once published something under the pseudonym Æon but the printer cut off the last two letters and Æ liked the result. He did… More

Speech Bearer

Reordberend the tree called me,
It says I am a speechbearer.
It thinks I am an odd little tree,
A small beech or confused shrub in error.

It looks to me, I said to this tree
That you’re… More

Truth

Did you know that tree means truth? Well it does, honestly, let me be the first to tell you so you know it’s true. The Old English word treow means both tree and truth. Lots of Old… More

Axis Mundi

Archaeologists in their digging and dating trace the oldest runic alphabet back to the late second century. The oldest rune carvings are often of the alphabet itself, carved in order.… More

The Ogam Ash Tree

Ogam, spelled Ogham in modern Irish, is an Old Irish alphabet, it was possibly a cryptographic alphabet like the runic ones, and it may have had its own sign language and musical notation.… More

Shh

 

 

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O is for Apostrophe

There are three kinds of apostrophes, grammatical don’t you know, botanical (when bits of protoplasm and such gather on plant cell walls adjacent to other plant cell walls,… More

X≠Y≠Z: How to Punch a Tree

X: The sun’s going down.

Y: Wait, how do I run?

X: Control W, no hold it down.

Z: Don’t lose my stuff.

Y: How would I lose your stuff? Wait, I’m stuck. Where am I? Is this… More

Rune Casting: Æsc

You getting it from all sides? Lots of people want to take you on? Something’s coming for you, but this is the Æsc rune, and it is used to a good fight. It’s seen plenty of battles,… More

Rune Casting: Os

You want to hear from your God and got the God rune. You pulled a rune that tells you to talk to the Gods with runes. That’s some nested levels of scale messaging from your deity right… More

The ᚩ rune (O, Os) and the ᚪ (A, Ac) both started the same way, as new shapes of the ᚫ rune (Æ, Æsc) which once made the sound of the letter A, stood in the fourth position of the alphabet, and… More

Vowels are slippery things. They shift around and we have to learn which sound differences to ignore as another person’s accent and which ones change meaning. In the earliest… More