What is this thing Ior? Runes are riddles and this one is unsolved, but let’s try anyway.
The Rune Poem calls ior a river fish that forages on land. Amphibian. Eel fits well. Some say it is a newt or possibly a water mammal like an otter. Most translators choose eel because it was important in medieval Britain, it was food. I assumed eel for this reason for quite a long time. But this is no way to solve a riddle.
The name of this rune is Ior. There exists an Old English word for eel and it’s not ior, it’s ælfisc. Eel fish. They didn’t call this rune eel fish. They didn’t call it anything we can understand: ior is not a word in Old English, unless it means the letter IO or the rune ᛡ. We have to look under the surface if we want to find this river … More
Ur, the aurochs, is a wild bovine, like a cow but not a normal cow. Dangerous. Think of the fiercest cows you know: the toro bravo they use for bull fighting, or the Jersey dairy bull which is particularly unpleasant. Gather them together, herd them up, the dangerous cows, and look at them. Imagine what they could do to you if they wanted to, and they want to. These angry cows are nothing; the aurochs was worse. The aurochs was all their daddies.
And wild. The cow is domesticated, the bison is not, so as a wild bovine the bison makes for a better comparison to the aurochs, personality-wise. Take a minute and search up some video of what happens when tourists tease bison. Go ahead, separate window, take a look. Did you see that? Don’t mess with a bison. Leave it alone. Take no selfie. The bison hates you.
The bison is a sweetheart … More
Look at yourself in a mirror or other reflective surface such as shiny metal or a pond. Be careful with ponds, you could fall in or get stuck there staring at yourself forever, wasting away until you become a flower or some such. This is to be avoided.
Note the current state of your appearance. Do you look moody? Do you look terrible? Ascertain if you must ask yourself if you look terrible or if you already know the answer.
Begin with your posture. You must hold yourself in a relaxed manner without thinking about it. If you are thinking about your posture, you won’t be able to shape yourself naturally into a joyful position and may appear wooden and flat.
Try to relax your shoulders. Hold them too close to your ears and you look stressed, too far forward and you look defeated. Try to pull your shoulders down and back. Not … More
For the mpteenth time yo mst nderstand that yor nkindness leaves me nable to tter yor name or anything abot yo from now ntil yo die. Not even then. Yor nabashed and nnatral behavior has made yo npoplar and yo mst nderstand that I will have nothing to do with yo, yo nfaithfl cnt. Yo are sprflos, seless, and nwelcome in this contry.
Y: That one on the left looks dangerous.
X: The one on the right looks more joyful, but it’s a moody joy.
Y: Moody. Who are they? They’re staring and it’s creeping me out.
X: No, look, it’s fish.
Y: Is that fish?
Z: It’s something.
X: They can’t see us, those aren’t eyes.
Y: Aren’t they?
X: Oh wait, they’re reacting to us. Look, that one is scowling.
Y: Stop pointing at it.
X: Now this one is scowling, look at its eyebrows. Fins.
Y: Don’t point! Those are eyes and they can definitely see us.
Z: They aren’t paying attention to us at all. Think about a fish in a pond. A bunch of them. Carp.
Y: That’s not a carp. That’s a face.
Z: Face fish. Whatever. There they are in the pond, just beyond the surface of the water, we are inches from them, looking in, and they don’t … More
The beaver was so full of charm.
The aurochs felt such great alarm.
Stop being so happy.
I like feeling crappy!
Stand down or I’ll do you great harm.
The beaver laughed well never mind
There’s no need to be so unkind.
It was only a joke,
I thought you were woke.
To history you’ll soon be consigned.
But beaver we’re both being hunted,
And with truth you’ll soon be confronted.
The hunter agrees,
Your balls cure disease.
You’ll die first, there I said it unblunted.
They do like my castoreum,
And my testes, you can’t even see ’em.
So they hunt my poor hide
Of this you’ve not lied.
Still, your bones will fill a museum.
Human culture boasts a storied history of bad ideas, of which there are true gems and many favorites. Filling the Hindenburg with hydrogen, there’s one. Napoleon invading Russia in winter. It’s probably a bad idea to do anything in Russia in winter, but in particular don’t walk an army across it when winter is coming. A little foresight might have helped there. Communication. NASA didn’t communicate with Lockheed Martin enough and lost a Mars orbiter because half the team used metric and the other half imperial. That expensive cutting edge engineering and science is out there in space even now, floating around god knows where. That’s more of a blunder than a bad idea, but it’s a bad idea not to check with each other, hey what measurement system are you using? Takes no time. The French didn’t check first either. You need to check first before building a nice roomy expensive super train. Don’t … More
The rune carvers prized beaver fur and skin, their teeth made a great necklace found sometimes in the graves of women and children and once around the neck of a dog, and by church decree beaver tails counted as fish you could eat during lent. Their castor glands were highly valued and their testicles (possibly still the castor glands but mistaken for testicles) cured disease. Because they were valuable for so many reasons, beavers were an overhunted and dwindling population during the time of the rune carvers.
The aurochs were already extinct in Britain by the time the runes were introduced, gone by the end of the bronze age. They still lived on the European continent, though rare, and they were important in Britain for the extremely high value of their horns. The people would carve them and inlay them with silver, and pass them down to their children as ealdgestreon, ancient treasure, which of … More
First of all, in many ways you are doing a fine job on your own and you must be commended for that. For example your most recent pandemic is proving quite exemplary, but is alas, overcomable. You might choose to speed your extinction process along. Extinction can take years, and let’s face it, you simply don’t have that kind of time.
To the extinction methods you are already trying (kudos for that whole poisoning the environment thing, a laudable idea) you must introduce the element of surprise. Your choices have been effective, but predictable. You cannot go properly extinct if you see it coming. In certain elements of society the desire to fix it is just too great. Find a way to be attacked from all sides. Literally. Introduce predators. There are fine moves being made in this direction with wolves. Put the wolves in other places besides the wilderness. Bring them in! Towns … More
Well this is weird. Here’s what’s happened. At the start of The Exeter Maxims I part C, we get a window into how runes were once used, so I wanted to include it somewhere in Letters for Titles. I thought there’s plenty of places to put it, and I did work it into the first draft of Rune Casting: Ur, where it lived for a year. But it doesn’t quite fit there so I removed it from the final version. I say final but everything is temporary. Then I removed a whole piece called The Beasts of the Field which once held this spot, unfortunately losing as well a gif of Brazil‘s fly falling into the typewriter and turning Tuttle into Buttle. Something had to replace it, so I went to the maxims in The Exeter Book, folio 91r, and translated this:
Ræd sceal mon secgan rune writan
leoþ gesingan leofes … More
01001001 01100110 00100000 01011010 01100101 01110101 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01110101 01110010 01101110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01001001 01101111 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100001 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110111 01110101 01101101 00100000 01101000 01101111 01101101 01100101 00101110 00100000
Congratulations! You have found a lucrative way to maintain your luxury lifestyle well into the future! If you wish to augment your capital, the perfume industry will pay excessively for that unique beavery smell of vanilla strawberry with just a hint of fine cordovan leather. So will the tobacco industry: beaver excretion is the taste of Marlboro country! And remember the beaver the next time you enjoy your skinny vanilla latte. Your vanilla anything. Also strawberry and raspberry. As a natural additive, that little critter gets around! You’ll find endless marketing opportunities ahead.
Have your assistant procure a beaver, male. Be sure not to wake the little guy up, the beaver not your helper, though do wake your helper up because beavers are best caught at dawn. Have your assistant be very careful, beaver teeth are sharp and do take note of its claws. It can strip bark off of a tree just like that. … More
Well look at that you got the Ior rune. Nice. Beaver, probably. Some say eel. Beaver is happier. When have you ever seen a cheerful eel?
You’re doing alright, I can see that. You’ve got a nice place here. Comfortable, I like it. I like your stuff. You’ll be happy at home, and close to it. Content. Peaceful. Here you can go with the flow, throw yourself right in with it and splash around.
I hope you’re ready for a fight because you are about to be flattened so badly you’ll be famous for it. Something is howling in from the wilderness, sent to blow your life down and not in a subtle way. This will be a wolf in wolf’s clothing with a one track mind, eyes locked on you, and your sad little piggy house is made of nothing.
How to prevent? Don’t make eye contact and stay out of the wilderness.
IO: extinct Old English diphthong. Of the bajillions of possible sounds we can make with our voices, only a few are needed for language. We made this one redundant. Exiled. Fired its ass. It barely did anything around here. What’s it for? It’s absent from other Old English alphabet collections, the malingerer. It’s unwanted as far as we’re concerned. EO does everything IO can do, and does it better. We don’t need IO. What’s IO even doing here? Pack up your stuff IO and get out, you’re history.
But of course IO has to be difficult on its way out. Typical. Try carving this one into anything. You’ll need a precise hand and a sharp knife. A little finesse. This isn’t hammer and chisel like ᚢ. Make an X, now draw a line through it without slipping to one side or the other. Pass straight through that X’s meeting point, right down … More
Send air through your larynx without stopping it. Let it pass freely. Let it through, some things you just have to let go. That’s a vowel. Stop the air with your throat or mouth, it’s a consonant.
Don’t stop, this is about U. U and U alone. Place your tongue in the middle of your mouth, center it. Now pull in your lips on all sides. Pursed. Hold up now, Just a teeny purse, don’t let your lips stick out too far: you want to say the letter U, not detach yourself from reality. There you go, now let the air out. Excessively pursed lips tell facial recognition experts (trust me, there is such an expert) that you are saying something opposite to reality, the one in your head: you are speaking in opposition to your thinking. Maybe you don’t understand what you are saying, but you are saying it anyway. Maybe you are lying. … More
