Ger is a little small. Look at it so teeny: ᛄ. You might not be able to see. It’s bigger now, it grew over time, but the poor thing was only half sized once. Sometimes Ger is carved to look like the rune for Beaver, Ior, ᛡ, making for redundancy and a real identity crisis for sweet little ᛄ, though ᛄ did stand up a little taller to claim a space in manuscripts at least. ᛄ’s got other problems too. It once made a J sound before shifting into a softer palatal G and then ultimately a Y sound represented by Ge, where it seems to have landed, unfortunately sharing the same initial sound of the ᛡ rune as well as its look sometimes. This does lend to a bit of an identity crisis. ᛄ was here first, I’ll have you know, and it’s hard for a small rune like ᛄ to … More
Tag Archives: G
Stanza 7: Gift
ᚷ gumena byþ gleng and herenys.
wraþu ⁊ wyrþscype ⁊ wræcna gehwam
ar and ætwist ðe byþ oþra leas ᛬᛫
For the people it is ornament and praise
Support and honor, and for those wretched in exile
Mercy and sustenance. You have nothing else.
Translating Gifu
Gift giving was a big deal to the people of the Rune Poem. It was everything. They gave everything. It could be food or goods, but they loved ornament and anything old especially: gilded, edged with silver, blinding shiny, these were the best gifts, but it wasn’t about the bling so much as the message. What you give is what you’re worth and what you will be remembered for. Everybody wants to be worth something and everybody wants to be remembered, it’s the only permanent thing in a world where every single thing is temporary. We are each other’s immortality on earth through the memories we lay down in other people, it’s the only way to live, so by God you will remember me.
With the gift comes gleng, which means both ornament and honor, and as is typical in such cases, it’s the intangible half of this pair that’s worth more. It … More
G is for Go
It’s blinding when it happens. You didn’t see it coming. You did and you didn’t. The writing was on the wall, it was right there in your face and you were reading it all this time. And now you need to spell the words out? You want to study what happened? Go ahead, you’ll do it anyway, sound it out. Reduce to elementals who said what when to whom and at what volume. Unwind the choreography too: hands flying, hands shielding, arms folded up, faces folded up. Pick apart the blocking: sudden entrances and exists from rooms or phones, backs turned, unturned, turned. Reduce everything to parts seen and unseen, divide it into infinite smallness and you’ll see nothing’s there. Nothing. A tearing asunder holds no specifics you can explain to the curious.
What really caused your banishment? What do you want me to say. Maybe you didn’t belong together in the first place.… More
Rune Casting: Gifu
Shoved out of the nest. Exiled in wretchedness. You have nothing else. You are not alone though, you’ll survive. Just. You have help coming to sustain you, a mercy, a gift. Help is the gift, and what a gift. Nothing more precious than generosity. Accept it now, you’ll use it later.
ᚷ
O ᚷ, you shapeshifter. You have a completely different character depending on whom you are with. Well we all know somebody like that. Chum up to the back vowels (back of tongue and soft palate, O, U) and guess what, you become great and good like a god. Put you with the front vowels (closer to your teeth, I, E) and you soften up, gentle like a Y or a J. O ᚷ, your name gifu means gift, but doesn’t sound like it. It sounds more like what Y is doing in year. Yifu.
Carve a diagonal line and cross it. Lines in two directions.
