Tag Archives: Aurochs

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Your hand hurts. Your non-ergonomically correct work station is giving you all kinds of scoliosis. You are low on ink and making more is a whole thing. That stuff doesn’t grow on trees. And you are the copy machine with a pile on your desk that won’t duplicate itself. Your work requires precision. You absolutely must stick faithfully to the originals, however wordy they may be. How do you get through it? There’s hacks and workarounds for speeding up the process and you know every alt. You erase parts of words, exile the vowels. When you take it down to just one letter you’ll spend less ink and stay as accurate as you like.

What’s that you’ve got there? Well that’s a word that shows up all the time. That’s in the Human stanza, and in Aurochs. Well it’s in the copy you’ve left us, the original to our copy burned up … More

Translating Dæg

The word drihtnes appears twice in the rune poem, here and in stanza one, feoh, wealth. It means God, but in the sense of God as a lord, God the leader, the one in charge. God has other jobs: judge, executioner, advisor, muse, physician, daycare, security, human resources, accounting, project manager. All the jobs really, God is busy. Further down the CV God is also the metodes which sometimes gets translated as measurer. Metlic is something that is measurable, a metrap is a measuring rope for a field, or a sounding line to measure depth at sea. Metod is used in poetry mostly, where it means fate, destiny, and death, especially in earliest Old English, and the Rune Poem is early. God measures out our fate. God sizes us up and calculates our destiny.

Drihtnes isn’t the only repetition going on here, we’ve seen tohiht (hope) and eadgum before. They were together in … More

Stanza 2: Aurochs

ᚢ byþ anmod.         and ofer hyrned.
fela frecne. deor         feohteþ. mid hornum.
mære morstapa.         ꝥ is modig wuht ᛬᛫

It is singleminded and overhorned
Fiercely dangerous wild beast, fights with horns
Famous moor-stepper; that is a spirited being.

 

Translating Ur

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

The Aurochs and the Beaver

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.

 

Bad Idea

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

Moody Joy

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

How to go Extinct

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

Rune Casting: Ur

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.

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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