The Is stanza says there is nothing more cold than ice. it is oferceald. There is nothing more slippery than ice: slidor ungemetum. Met means measurement, it is slippery beyond measure. Winter’s ice can be a dreadful hazard and for multiple reasons: survival is much easier to accomplish in warm weather, so people spent their warm months working to ensure their winter survival. The coming of the frost meant the dying of plants, and the food you had put by, the fodder available for your animals, had better be enough. The people would cull their livestock when the frost came, down to what they could afford to keep, to alleviate the problem of not enough feed for the animals for the entire winter and not enough food for themselves: one of the many annual challenges brought by cold weather. Yet the Rune Poem is rather upbeat about ice. The ice may be cold … More
During the time of the Rune Poem, a properly kitted warrior owned a decent war horse to take to battle. These were bigger horses than the usual so they could handle a person wearing heavy armor, and they could even bite and fight with their hooves. With the right war horse, you can be unstoppable. Almost. What can stop a war horse? Ice. Ice is brutal for horse hooves. It can ball up under their feet until they are teetering on their own personal ice cubes. Have you ever fallen on ice? That’s not a soft landing. A horse can easily slip and break a leg on the frozen dips and grooves in a road, and if they fall right through a frozen lake or river good luck getting them back out. Have fun with that. A war horse, large and powerful, formidable in battle, is handily defeated by ice.
You want to stab somebody with an icicle. Good. It’s best when the murder weapon disappears. Here’s the plan:
Acquisition of Murder Weapon
If you are harvesting from the wild, look for something sharp, sized for the hand. Cultivating your own icicle is preferable for the amount of control you have over the finished product. In this case find a steep roof and dribble water down a corner daily. Once ready, your icicle can and should be carved and shaped for a good penetrative point, but not one so slender it will break. There’s a middle ground here so you may wish to preform a few practice murders before the real one. Trial and error.
Placement of Murder Weapon
Is the crime scene cold? If it is, sky’s the limit. The best place to hide something is plain sight, right in everybody’s face. Try blending your weapon into a fancy ice sculpture. Or … More
Cool it. Put it on ice baby love. Call an end to the hostilities and chill. You want to keep fighting this same fight? What are you battling exactly? Might as well punch a tree for all the good it does. Leaves everybody cold. Look. Things are about to get lean for you, so you had better prepare for that. Then maybe your life could take on a little beauty if you’d just pause a minute and chill out.
Vowel, high (mouth slightly open) front (tongue forward) unrounded lax (lips) = bit, unrounded tense = bite. Don’t bite your lips. I and Y were very similar in Old English, the Y sounding like an I but with rounded lips. Words spelled in Old English sometimes appear with a Y or an I interchangeably, depending on dialect. Poor Y. Once a real vowel with the rest of them, now it is only sometimes.
Carve a line like an icicle, let it drip down.
