ᛖ byþ for eorlum æþelinga wyn.
hors hofum wlanc. ðær him hæleþ ymb.
welege on wicgum wrixlaþ spræce.
⁊ biþ unstyllum æfre frofur ᛬᛫
It is for warriors the joy of princes
A horse with bold hooves, the fighters there around him
The wealthy on steeds trading speech.
And it is for the uneasy ever a consolation.
The Is stanza says there is nothing more cold than ice. it is oferceald. There is nothing more slippery than ice: slidor ungemetum. Met means measurement, it is slippery beyond measure. Winter’s ice can be a dreadful hazard and for multiple reasons: survival is much easier to accomplish in warm weather, so people spent their warm months working to ensure their winter survival. The coming of the frost meant the dying of plants, and the food you had put by, the fodder available for your animals, had better be enough. The people would cull their livestock when the frost came, down to what they could afford to keep, to alleviate the problem of not enough feed for the animals for the entire winter and not enough food for themselves: one of the many annual challenges brought by cold weather. Yet the Rune Poem is rather upbeat about ice. The ice may be cold … More
There’s lots of words for horse in Old English, hors, for one. But there’s wicg, hengest, friþhengest, onrid, radhors, mearh, sceam, steda, stott, blanca, gelew, all words that mean specific types of horses by the style, sex, physical appearance, color. This was a horse culture. Horses were a very big deal. Why? They made life easier. Having a horse changes everything. They were useful for pulling stuff, not for ploughing though, they would use oxen for that, but they would use horses to bring goods to market and to haul just about anything anywhere, including themselves: in carts and on horseback. During their prime, horses were particularly indispensable for sending messages long distances. Speedy communication has always been desirable. Finally, literally, chop marks in their bones mean that sometimes horses were eaten, particularly after they’d reach five years of age. Even … More
How to change the world? Invent something, something important. Look at the stirrup: a metal rounded triangle you can attach to a saddle as a place to put your feet. Very simple, basic, but it is one of those culturally transformative technologies like the wheel and the printing press that changed everything about how people live and think and believe.
Why? You can ride a horse without a stirrup, yes, but you must work to maintain your balance or one good jostle and you will fall. You’ll want a bit of leverage to hold yourself on, especially when your intentions are warlike. Have you ever tried to shoot an arrow or drive a spear into somebody from horseback? You’ll need something stabilizing to push against or you will go flying. The right saddle can be everything, and innovations were made in this direction to solve the same problem. But with a stirrup, you and … More
⁊ is shorthand for the word et which means “and” in Latin. It shows up in place of “and” seven times in the only copy we have of the Rune Poem. The placements seem random, for example the Gift stanza contains “and” written out twice and ⁊ twice:
Gumena byþ gleng and herenys,
wraþu ⁊ wyrþscype, ⁊ wræcna gehwam
ar and ætwist ðe byþ oþra leas.
The copy of the Rune Poem we have was copied from an older version which burned in a fire and which may have itself been a copy. It’s copies all the way down, so we have no idea what sorts of abbreviations were used in early versions or how frequently. We do know the universal truth that scribal hands get tired. Fingers cramp. Ink runs out and it’s a whole thing to make more. Writing takes time, so corner cutting is essential.
The ⁊ is called … More
Life is about to change for Y. The herd has been dwindling, with Z already exiled in wretchedness. X is on edge, chin elevated, ears pinned back, and has decided that Y’s days in the family are numbered. Y is about to be banished. Y makes an attempt at self protection by avoiding the subject and by holding up a mirror to others which proves rather a good surface to hide behind, but it is not going to help. X lunges forward, mouth open and ears flattened. X spins around and lands a series of rapid kicks. Y is not wanted. X has iced Y out.
As a matter of simple instinct, Y would rather run than fight. Y runs a short distance then stops to look back and see if X is a threat worth fleeing from. Watching forlornly from a safe distance, leaderless, Y has no other source of direction and … More
H: At the start of an Old English word, H is almost silent, an H on its way out. Hha. A burst of breath in cold air, watch it freeze.
I: Short vowel. Hint and hinge and hinder.
L: Hill.
D: Duh.
E: Short. Death, dead, desecrate.
G: In front of a short I, palatalized (fronted, front of the mouth). Sounds like Y. Yield.
I: Short.
C: Between a short I and a short E, a K sound. Ick. A long I here would make it itch, but what’s going on here is way past itchy. It’s gross.
E: Short. The E in Kenning.
L: Hildegicel. Hild means war, gicel means icicle. A warcicle. A word found only in Beowulf.
King Hroðgar, descendent of Scyld Scylding, deceased, has a massive problem. A moody wight called Grendel is killing people in Hroðgar’s hall. Beowulf, great hero, total legend, hears about this and … More
During the time of the Rune Poem, a properly kitted warrior owned a decent war horse to take to battle. These were bigger horses than the usual so they could handle a person wearing heavy armor, and they could even bite and fight with their hooves. With the right war horse, you can be unstoppable. Almost. What can stop a war horse? Ice. Ice is brutal for horse hooves. It can ball up under their feet until they are teetering on their own personal ice cubes. Have you ever fallen on ice? That’s not a soft landing. A horse can easily slip and break a leg on the frozen dips and grooves in a road, and if they fall right through a frozen lake or river good luck getting them back out. Have fun with that. A war horse, large and powerful, formidable in battle, is handily defeated by ice.
You want to stab somebody with an icicle. Good. It’s best when the murder weapon disappears. Here’s the plan:
Acquisition of Murder Weapon
If you are harvesting from the wild, look for something sharp, sized for the hand. Cultivating your own icicle is preferable for the amount of control you have over the finished product. In this case find a steep roof and dribble water down a corner daily. Once ready, your icicle can and should be carved and shaped for a good penetrative point, but not one so slender it will break. There’s a middle ground here so you may wish to preform a few practice murders before the real one. Trial and error.
Placement of Murder Weapon
Is the crime scene cold? If it is, sky’s the limit. The best place to hide something is plain sight, right in everybody’s face. Try blending your weapon into a fancy ice sculpture. Or … More
It’s one thing to get from place to place by boat if you can keep an eye on the coastline the entire time. But if you want to cross the open sea without GPS, you will need some sort of instrument for navigation. Magnetic compasses are nice, but mariners at the time of the Rune Poem did not have them. With a watch they could have pointed the little hand at the sun and halfway between it and the 12 will be south. They had no watches. They had sticks and the sun, with that they could find direction easily enough, the shortest shadow of the day points south, and the shadow will move in an easterly direction as the sun tracks west. This works beautifully for navigating on land, land does not pitch and roll under your feet, sending shadows in every direction. It’s a different thing on an unsteady ship, a sea … More
Publius Cornelius Tacitus
Ingaevones Territory
Year 98 of the New Calendar
Gnaeus Julius Agricola
Governor, Britannia, ret.
Dearest Father in Law,
How are you, I am fine. Julia sends her love. I am still in Germania, moving in the direction of Gaul, separated from this place by rivers, mountains, and mutual dread. This is a land rude in its surface, rigorous in its climate, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator.
Today I observed the practice of conjuring, which one cannot avoid as no people are more addicted to divination by omens and lots. Of their methods, some are familiar and civilized for instance auguring from the sounds and flights of birds, others prove most unnatural, such as deriving admonitions and presages from horses. These are the omens they deem most important:
When a horse neighs, the people foresee a meeting or gathering, of which they sit to many, most often fully armed. If the … More
Cool it. Put it on ice baby love. Call an end to the hostilities and chill. You want to keep fighting this same fight? What are you battling exactly? Might as well punch a tree for all the good it does. Leaves everybody cold. Look. Things are about to get lean for you, so you had better prepare for that. Then maybe your life could take on a little beauty if you’d just pause a minute and chill out.
Saddle up, you’ve got a battle on your hands, and no wonder, you are feeling protective and as well you should. You’ve got plenty to protect. You are well equipped for this one, so be proud of that, and you can talk a good game too. Well, talk it up. Gather your people and exchange words about it. Don’t just chat at everybody though, listen and pay attention.
Vowel, high (mouth slightly open) front (tongue forward) unrounded lax (lips) = bit, unrounded tense = bite. Don’t bite your lips. I and Y were very similar in Old English, the Y sounding like an I but with rounded lips. Words spelled in Old English sometimes appear with a Y or an I interchangeably, depending on dialect. Poor Y. Once a real vowel with the rest of them, now it is only sometimes.
Carve a line like an icicle, let it drip down.
This is the rune for Eh, war horse, letter E. In the Cotton library manuscript called Galba A.ii (burned in a different fire from the one that got the Old English Rune Poem) the name of this rune is spelled eoh. In other manuscripts the name is spelled Eh as it is here, not with an EO at the start. There’s another rune for EO: ᛇ, spelled eoh like it’s a horse but it means a yew tree. This is the Rune Poem catching a vowel shift, from E to EO. This rune gets tangled up in ᛟ as well, Eþel, the rune for Œ. Notice that is not an Œ at the front of ᛟ’s name, it’s an E. ᛟ used to be œþel, but that sound shifted into E from what used to be mostly O sounds. Vowels are shapeshifters. The sound of this one makes us smile.
Carve … More
