Tag Archives: Exeter Maxims

Sitting to Battle

Imagine yourself sitting in a beer hall with the rune carvers, playing a game requiring strategy, skill, luck. You are feeling wlanc, proud, boastful. What are you boasting about? Other times you relied on strategy, skill, and luck. These were a seafaring people, you might be boasting about what you got up to at sea, what you plan to do next when the sun comes back and the weather turns favorable again for sea voyages. This is all you want to do, to get back out there on a boat and really do something to be proud of.

Imagine yourself sitting in a boat, battling big waves sending you in all directions, the sea horse has lost its bridle, the sun is obscured by storm clouds or gone altogether and you must navigate by the stars. You’ve been in the wars, and you want the sun to come back to … More

How to Play the Game

You don’t just play this game. It’s fun, yes, everybody battling peacefully united, but this is more than that and deadly serious. Focus. If you want to win you have to immerse. You live in this game. Make the game is an extension of your body and after you are gone they will find the game board intermingled with your ashes.

Decide which of you is going to be the eorl with the þegns and who wants to be the attacking sæmanum coming from the four corners to take el jefe in the middle, but don’t let that happen. That’s not going to happen. Not on your watch. The boss holds it all together and you will fight with everything you have to defend him. Ok. You’ve chosen. You’ve got the center ground.

There’s more attackers than you, You’ve got somebody important and powerful right in your very center, but they’ve got strength in … More

Wyrd

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