ᛗ byþ on myrgþe his magan leof.
sceal þeah anra gehwylc oðrum swican.
for ðam dryhten wyle dome sine
ꝥ earme flæsc eorþan betæcan ᛬᛫
In mirth they are loved by their kin
Though each and every one must depart from the other
For the gods will by their judgement,
That wretched body, entrust to the earth.
In Old English, a mann is a human being of any gender, translated into modern English as anyone, they, people, a citizen, a human. Mann is not a male person here, so when you see Mann as the name of this rune, it does not mean man as in male. Most correctly it can be either Person or Human but I need to pick one: Human. Person says more about ourselves as bodies. We carry things on our person, we are a person in a room. We are also a human in a room, but we do have a collective human nature, a human understanding, and human sensibilities. Human is a word that suggests the connection we have from our shared experience of being people in the world. It’s a choice that feels right to me as an answer to the riddle of the stanza. Maybe I’m wrong. As a person I’m only human.… More
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
Both the Need and Human stanzas say that life is guided and determined by the gods, and they both highlight two seemingly contradictory aspects of fate, its changeability and its certainty. Need sends a warning. Listening to omens can bring help when fate turns against us, so you’d better listen up. The Human stanza warns something else: we enjoy life with each other, but only until the gods decide our ultimate fate, the permanence of death, so let’s enjoy each other now while we can.
This is powerful stuff. The gods do not, however, have absolute power. In a world governed by fate (wyrd in Old English), it is not the case that the gods have sole and complete charge over every aspect of our lives. Even with deities such as the omnipresent ones (nosy, deeply involved in human business) belonging to the people of the Rune Poem, people have discernment. People are … More
The Rune Poem stanzas Wealth and Human have so much in common they ought to be a matched set, except they already have their own partners, The Grave, and Need. Here are Wealth and Human repeating themselves:
Wealth: Sceal ðeah manna gehwylc (though each of us must).
Human: Sceal þeah anra gehwylc (though each and every one must).
And look at how many words they share: byþ, gehwylcum/gehwylc, sceal, wile/wyle, ðeah/þeah, drihtne/dryhten, dome/domes, 7 not counting pronouns. The name of the Human rune, manna, appears in the Wealth stanza so let’s count that one too: 8 words in common is a large number, especially when you consider that the Wealth stanza has only 18 words and the Human stanza has 23 if you include ꝥ, which isn’t a whole word but a grammalogue for the … More
You look happy on the outside but I can still see you coming apart. It’s your whole vibe: you’ve got no zip, zero, nada, and look at you. Loved by your family, yes some of them love you very deep down in kind of a fuzzy way, but they are there holding strong nevertheless. They especially love you when you’re happy. Well, they like you more. Picture yourself out of the picture. Can you do that? Find a remove from which to stand and fulcrum yourself out, look at what that looks like. Not in a wonderful christmas carol life kind of way, I see what you want so stop it. You’ve been in the world, a messy person like you, yes? Messes leave stains. There’s going to be smears of you all over the place. Getting all up in everything. You’ve always been the red sock in the laundry, bleeding. So look now. … More
Be happy, your people love you, especially when you are happy. Enjoy each other now because everybody will die. When will you depart, one from the other? O I couldn’t tell you that. That’s not for us to know.
Send out some air and impede it a bit with your vocal cords, press your lips together and send that air through your nose. Smell that? Mmmmm. Delicious.
Carve the rune for joy and give it company: its spitting image, like looking in a mirror. Like the rest of us, they love to be happy together.
