This stanza is about time. Some see it as a specific time, like harvest when the bright bleda (fruits) mentioned are ready for eating. Others translate this as springtime, when bleda, which also means blossoms and green shoots, appear on plants. Which bleda do we want? In Old English poetry, multiple meanings apply. What kind of temporality were the people of the Rune Poem working with? We can look closely anywhere in Old English and see it, but we ought to pay attention here in the Ger stanza to find out how they managed their solar time reckoning at least. The moon is another matter.
The name of this rune is ger, year. What is a year? A cycling of the seasons. There is a time when the sun is with us a lot, and then another time after that when it is not, and then when it is again. Time is … More
Old English is an inflected language, meaning that its words are amended as needed to change meaning and grammatical category such as tense or case. We’ve talked about suffixes before. Ge (sounds like yee) is a prefix, one we no longer use. You can’t escape it in Old English though, it’s everywhere and the reasons for it were already dim by the time the language was first written down. Most of the time it gently sits there doing nothing, getting in the way, a grotesque extravagance gumming up the works when you need to search alphabetically for the meanings of a word. Students of Old English are often told to ignore the ge prefix as superfluous, but it does do a job from time to time. When ge is busy at the start of a noun, It generally flavors the meaning with a sense of something being together with something else, but you … More
You are coming out of it. It’s been a long time coming. What you’ve been missing, if you have been missing out, will return soon enough. This will be a rebirth of new life. The signs are already here that you will benefit from a rich kingdom awakening to plenitude. Fruits will dangle off of vines replete with abundance, but they won’t fall into your mouth just like that chickadee, you will have to take steps and get busy.
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
