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.
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
Imagine yourself. Now imagine yourself 1500 years ago. Can you think like that? Think in Old English. There you go. Now you belong to a people who knew the Rune Poem backward and forward and folded in half. Fold it in half and look at the Gift and Home stanzas, they pair up for a reason. You know the reason and you would fear it, if it weren’t unthinkable. It won’t happen, but it does happen. Exile. You get your ass out of here right now. Just like that. Go. You are no longer welcome. This is no longer your home. We are not your people. We don’t know you. We won’t know you. We never knew you.
It’s shocking when it happens, wilderness. You had a place in this world. Gone. This is my family. These are my people. Nope. It’s expected for people to have people. With them comes respect, dignity, worth, support. … More
Good luck summoning an Angel because you will need it. You’ll need good timing as well because the two of you, or however many, speak entirely different languages from each other. You speak duration and they speak phenomenal flux, making them directionless, which is your next problem.
Angels have all the foresight of a toddler who has just learned to walk. The newly mobile have no planning skills. They don’t care what’s in their futures, this is not their concern. They just want to put something new into their mouths. Angels are like that too. I don’t know if they put things into their mouths or even have mouths, but what they do have is no future and no past, and though they lack these essentials and ought be pitied for it, they do have everything else which must be some consolation.
To overcome an angel’s lack of temporal trajectory, you must shift your concept … More
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.
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.
