ᚹ ne bruceþ ðe can ƿeana lyt
sares and sorge and him sylfa hæfþ
blæd ⁊ blysse and eac byrga geniht ᛬᛫
They partake of this who know little of woes,
Pain and anxiety, and have for themselves
Prosperity and bliss, and also the abundance of a fortified town.
ᛝ wæs ærest mid east denum.
gesewen secgun. oþ he siððan est.
ofer wæg gewat wæn æfter ran.
ðus heardingas ðone hæle nemdun ᛬᛫
First he was among the East Danes
Seen and spoken of, until hereafter he and his bounty eastward
Departed over the waves, his wagon ran after;
Thus the hardy ones named the hero.
Ing is a mystery. Who is Ing? Where did he go? Why did he leave? We don’t know. You know who knows? The Rune Poem knows: the Rune Poem has the only specific intel we’ve got on Ing.
Case File: Ing
Clue: Ing was first among the East Danes. Where are these East Danes? The Rune Poem predates the Viking expansion (973-1066), so there’s only one place to look for Danes: modern Denmark and southern Sweden plus the coasts and islands thereabout. The East Danes lived in the Southern Sweden and Zealand half of things, where you can find plenty of people named after Ing: Inge Inga Ingmar Ingrid, living in places like Ingegerd, and Ingeborg. What’s Ing doing in the Old English Rune Poem? His people traveled. Just west of Denmark across the north sea to Northumbria there are also plenty Ings (Inglby Ingoe Ingram Ingham). He’s left a forest of family trees … More
The Wyn stanza breaks with the usual byþ beginning: it starts with ne. Ne means not, or no. It can be used as a conjunction too, but here ne is neither this nor that. Old English is an inflected language meaning it uses different prefixes and suffixes to change a word’s grammatical usage in a sentence. The Wyn rune often shows up in manuscripts as a grammalogue (a single symbol used to represent an entire word) with a suffix attached, like this: ᚹne instead of wynne, meaning “of joy.” Th ne at the start of this stanza is a suffix, not a complete word and not a negation. Wyn starts out with a note of joy!
Usually the mood of Old English poetry is not joyfulness — it tends toward the gloomy, but there’s still plenty of wyn in it, particularly in the Rune Poem where the word wyn occurs six times. … More
You are miserable, exiled in wretchedness. Why can’t you shake your anxieties? You are lacking in prosperity, that’s why. Your troubles are nothing a little abundance can’t fix. Though you must contend with the old myth: more money more problems, happily the truth is there is absolutely no reason why wealth can’t solve all your problems, every last one of them, if you have enough of it.
How do you get enough wealth to be happy? Make it yourself.
Ingredients:
Yourself
Cream of Tartar
Washing Soda
Dung (Cow or Horse, for christsakes not your own)
Dew
Note: collect your dew during a waxing moon in spring time, preferably when the sun is in Ares. Acquire an amount commensurate with your own body mass. Some may prefer for this reason to start rather early during Ares so that you might have room to slip into Taurus or even Gemini depending on your girth. People … More
In the Old English Rune Poem, Ing is specifically masculine pronoun male. He’s a boy. But where Ing came from amongst the East Danes of what is now eastern Denmark and Southern Sweden, Ing appears to be a deity who was sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both at once. This is not uncommon, there are crowds of intersexed deities in world belief systems. I was going to list them. I don’t have enough space. But anywhere we look, there they are, including if we look toward Ing’s people. We have to look close, we have very little to go on.
We also have to look at Ing’s people at the wrong times which is always tricky. Ing is called Ing in the Rune Poem, which was most likely written down in the 600’s but is probably several hundred years older than that. The runes themselves are certainly older. When Ing is called Ing in the … More
When you line up the Rune Poem stanzas and bend the line back on itself into a long U shape so the runes face each other, you get fourteen pairs. This pair, Ing and Wyn, the eighth, begins the middle half of the poem, moving toward the center which is to say the circumference. I say poem. It is a poem. It is also how people communicated with their gods, how they’d get answers to problems, find out which way the wind is blowing, complain, ask for stuff. Whatever question they might have, the Rune Poem has an answer. It’s an instruction manual for living, presented in matched pairs.
This pair, Wyn and Ing are all about abundance. Linked up together, here we have the god of prosperity who once hung around the market towns, nice fortified byrga, and we have the feeling of joy you get when all your abundance is secure … More
X: Z left.
Y: It was your fault. You did this. I mean, I support you and whatever, but Z left because of you.
X: Because of Z. Z left, Z left us, Z abandoned us and why? We have such a blissful situation here, it’s a fortress of comfort, plenty of anything, Z just had to stay in with us. Was that so hard?
Y: You got rid of Z, thinking Z’d come right back, you said don’t come back and Z won’t now. Z’s gone.
X: Z will need us. We’ll never be rid of Z.
Z: You banished Z, it’s permanent, you did that.
X: We can’t tell people that, we can’t say that to the nosey, the truth is it has to have been Z’s idea to go or how will it reflect on us? How can we say we just got rid Z, said Z get out, never
Ƿhen a Ƿ’s not a P it’s a ƿyn and that’s ƿinning
But those P’s in my brain ƿhipping in is headspinning
Aƿ ƿack, It’s shoƿstopping, my floƿ takes a ƿalloping
Ƿhatup! Powerup! let’s ƿish Ƿ a reƿrapping!
To them then Scyld went, at the fated time, on a journey full of exploits, to God. Then they carried him away to the surf on the shore, his beloved companions, as he himself asked, while he ruled with words, friend of the Scyldings. The beloved first of his land long had possession. There near to harbor stood a ringed prow, icy and ready to set out, a prince’s vessel. Then laid down the beloved chief, the giver of rings, on the ship’s bosom famous by its mast. Of treasure there was much, ornaments brought from distant parts. I had not heard of a ship more beautifully adorned with war weapons and battle dress, with blades and armor. For him, on his body lay a multitude of treasures, that with him must into the flood’s possession, far depart. They provided him with no lesser gifts than the people’s treasures, then those did, who at his … More
It’s time to go. It is past time. If you need to get out of here yesterday you’d better do it with an eye on the future, that knife blade of a now you balance on will cut and run, so plan fast.
You don’t want to plan. You don’t care what comes next, I get it, but if something is going to come next, you’ll need to survive long enough to see it and that takes money. Bring any portable wealth you have, the smaller the better depending on your means of conveyance. Is that your car? Load it up. Fill it with anything you might regret leaving behind. Maybe we can attach a trailer or something you can pull behind you. Take what you can because you will not know your regrets until the actual future arrives. To speed that process, leave nothing, otherwise, you will quickly discover your regrets at which time … More
Cheer up, you are safe. It’s dark and scary out there, but not here. Not anymore. Look around. Walls keeping the baddies out, inside you’ve got way more than you need and access to everything. Feel the bliss of security, it’s joyous! Anxiety means nothing in the face of this abundance. You will prosper, so be happy.
Any help you had packed up their stuff and hit the road. You are on your own. That was a powerful benefactor and hitching your wagon to that particular star was a good idea, but you are on your own now. Take stock of your remaining goods because what was once abundant will now be scarce, and you will have to work hard for what once came easily. All is not lost, greater ones have gone before you and you’ve learned a thing or two from them about prosperity. Follow them and maintain your trajectory or you’ll get stuck traveling in circles.
What is W? It looks like two Vs but its name says it is U doubled. It is a consonant, but in other times in select places, it is a vowel. What happened? Why do we have W?
Before English was ever written down, there was a W sound in it. They had a letter for it too: the Wyn rune, ᚹ or Ƿ in manuscript form. This is how we would be writing our Ws, if the world had been otherwise: this is hoƿ ƿe ƿould be ƿriting our Ƿs if the ƿorld had been otherƿise. But it was not otherƿise. England had been occupied by Rome for 400 years, and when they left they didn’t take everything, they left their Latin behind all over the place. It wasn’t a switching off of the lights either when they went, people still considered themselves Roman for quite a long time after, and Latin kept a … More
Ing was a deity of prosperity and we remember his abundance in our coins the scilling (shilling) and the feorþing (farthing). In oldest Old English Ing is a word meaning a muggy riverside meadow, the only valuable land for farming in a wild swamp.
Ing left for the east with his cart running after him like a suffix to his word, but in Old English Ing is the suffix running after feminine nouns denoting action: feding = feeding, bletsing = blessing. Ing is also a patronymic suffix used to show family groups, kinds of people or things, or anything belonging to something or someone: deorling = darling (dear-ling), georgling = a child, cyning = king, Centingas = people from Kent. Scyldings = a family name. Ing as a suffix took on more and more uses and we can find Ing actively running behind many words now.
