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
Need‘s Rune poem partner is the Human stanza, but you can’t translate the Need stanza without keeping an eye on the Hail stanza next door. Need and Hail are so much alike. Hail comes suddenly and can destroy a crop, smash berries from bushes, fruit from trees, destroy a roof. Hail makes need. Need can come suddenly too. You know quickly when you are in need. The sky opens up and pummels you with it.
Both the Need and Hail stanzas are anomalies in the Rune Poem. They stand out for being only two lines each, when the others are three or four (five for the final one) and they stand out for having many more stressed words per line than is customary for Old English poetry. The effect when sung is a fast staccato beat. A rapid pounding of the heart. Sounds like hail feels like need.
Hail and need … More
You ok? You look a mess. Well, you knew this meltdown was coming. We all did. There were signals and patterns and that was a massive red flag back there, but no. Some people don’t listen. Well, don’t just stand there looking at everybody else’s better deal, you need to pay attention now before the next thing grabs you, and it will grab you. Like a fist around your heart, squeezing. So listen up. Hwat! Pay attention.
Pay attention in advance of what? What is it that’s coming? That’s the question. The answer depends on what the meaning of the word is, is. If is means is and never has been, that is one thing. If it means there is none, that is a completely true statement. If is means now, there is nothing in any one given teeny moment of now, none, there’s no time for it, so if you ask a question … 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
Voiced alveolar nasal. Vibrate some air through your vocal cords, stop it at the roof of your mouth with your tongue. Nope. No passage here. Never. Send that air out through your nose.
When N stands next to C or G both letters are pronounced together and sound a bit like Ing, the other nasal letter besides M, which is N’s Rune Poem partner. M and N are still close in modern English, next door neighbors, and together they are the only nasal letters left to us since Ing went east.
Carve a line straight down to rock bottom. Now constrict it with another line, right through the heart. Point that line down a bit too, but also point it up.
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.
ᛚ byþ leodum langsum geþuht
gif hi sculun neþan on nacan tealtum.
and hi sæ yþa swyþe bregaþ.
and se brim hengest bridles ne gym ᛬᛫
For the people it seems interminable
If they must venture on a tilting boat
And the violent waves of the sea terrify them
And the sea horse has no regard for the bridle.
The Rune Poem’s stanzas vary in length. Each of the first eight stanzas consist of three lines containing four beats of stressed syllables: twelve beats total. Then we get an abrupt shift toward brevity with a pair side by side, Hail and Need, which have two lines each. They are shorter, but their words beat out the same number of stresses as the previous three line stanzas: still twelve beats total. Sing it. To get all twelve beats into two thirds the space, your song has to speed up. The stressed words come fast, as does hail and need when they storm down suddenly on your head and destroy your abundance.
There’s more math going on here too. The Rune Poem is traditionally divided into three groups of eight stanzas with five extra vowels tacked onto the end as necessary accommodations for sound changes over time. Hail starts the second group … More
Waterways were busy places during the time of the Rune Poem, making for convenient connections between coastal settlements and with ports of trade farther afield. However, things become a lot less easy when the sea won’t cooperate. The whole endeavor becomes as the stanza says, langsum, longsome, long lasting, lengthy. This also means tedious, as in when is this boat going to stop pitching endlessly in these waves? Langsum, that’s when. You’ll be riding this out for a good long while, and langsum geþuht (longsome thought) means it seems even longer. Time slows down when you are scared and in your head, and this is scary. The boat is tealtum, unsteady, and it’s not a big ship. You are right there in the soup and you will feel every one of those sæyþa (waves) coming at you. They are swyþe, strong and violent, and frightening too. Bregaþ says it’s frightening, as I’m … More
The people of the Rune Poem were farmers and seafarers living in a wet country, and they had a much closer relationship with weather than we have. We can spend whole productive lives indoors, deep indoors, climate controlled, insulated, where rain cannot penetrate, and we might wonder sometimes is it windy outside? The Rune Poem singers did not need to go outside to find out: they felt the wind in their homes and their bones. Their houses were much more porous, and if the wind wants to send hail smashing down upon their roofs, crops, heads, they would feel it bitterly. If the storm lashes the sea all around their boats, they’ll be stuck in it terrified, buffeted by waves, riding it out. And they would ride it out. Sometimes the wind brings tempests, but all storms become calm water.
There each of the nights might
see a horrible wonder,
Fire on flowing water.
None so wise live
Of the children of the people,
that know the depth.
Though the heath stalker
pressed by hounds,
The hart with strong horns
might seek the forest,
Pursued from far off,
he’d first give up life,
His body on the shore,
before he will into it
Hide his head.
That is not a gentle place:
From there surging water
rises up
To dark clouds.
From there wind stirs up
A hateful storm,
until the air becomes mournful,
And the skies weep.
Voiceless spirant. Make a narrow aperture of your mouth and throat, leave your vocal cords aside, and force air through. Create friction, steam up the mirror. Huh. Hah.
Placed at the beginning of a word this letter sounds like a modern English H: a very light exhalation of the breath. In the middle or at the end it toughens up, sounds stronger, the spirancy has some voice to it, it’s a clearing of the throat not to be found written with an H in modern English, but just ask Bach who would have given this sort of H some voice, especially when sitting by the loch at nicht. In Old English give them all a sound, every H, heed me well there is no silent H here, I am happy to say. But in modern English? H is being dropped all over the place. H is an heir to naught, almost a ghost.
Stand up … More
Alveolar dental sonorant: using your gum ridge and teeth, leave your tongue free laterally, partially impeding your vocal resonance: now sing. Lalalalalalalahhhhh! Largo! Lalalaaaaaaaaah! Now lento. La. La. La. Lovely. A sound so popular it has remained unchanged all this time.
Carve a line up, now drape a single flag from the top, lacking in wind. Let it be limp.
ᚹ ne bruceþ ðe can ƿeana lyt
sares and sorge and him sylfa hæfþ
blæd ⁊ blysse and eac byrga geniht ᛬᛫
They partake of this who know little of woes,
Pain and anxiety, and have for themselves
Prosperity and bliss, and also the abundance of a fortified town.
ᛝ wæs ærest mid east denum.
gesewen secgun. oþ he siððan est.
ofer wæg gewat wæn æfter ran.
ðus heardingas ðone hæle nemdun ᛬᛫
First he was among the East Danes
Seen and spoken of, until hereafter he and his bounty eastward
Departed over the waves, his wagon ran after;
Thus the hardy ones named the hero.
Ing is a mystery. Who is Ing? Where did he go? Why did he leave? We don’t know. You know who knows? The Rune Poem knows: the Rune Poem has the only specific intel we’ve got on Ing.
Case File: Ing
Clue: Ing was first among the East Danes. Where are these East Danes? The Rune Poem predates the Viking expansion (973-1066), so there’s only one place to look for Danes: modern Denmark and southern Sweden plus the coasts and islands thereabout. The East Danes lived in the Southern Sweden and Zealand half of things, where you can find plenty of people named after Ing: Inge Inga Ingmar Ingrid, living in places like Ingegerd, and Ingeborg. What’s Ing doing in the Old English Rune Poem? His people traveled. Just west of Denmark across the north sea to Northumbria there are also plenty Ings (Inglby Ingoe Ingram Ingham). He’s left a forest of family trees … More
The Wyn stanza breaks with the usual byþ beginning: it starts with ne. Ne means not, or no. It can be used as a conjunction too, but here ne is neither this nor that. Old English is an inflected language meaning it uses different prefixes and suffixes to change a word’s grammatical usage in a sentence. The Wyn rune often shows up in manuscripts as a grammalogue (a single symbol used to represent an entire word) with a suffix attached, like this: ᚹne instead of wynne, meaning “of joy.” Th ne at the start of this stanza is a suffix, not a complete word and not a negation. Wyn starts out with a note of joy!
Usually the mood of Old English poetry is not joyfulness — it tends toward the gloomy, but there’s still plenty of wyn in it, particularly in the Rune Poem where the word wyn occurs six times. … More
When you line up the Rune Poem stanzas and bend the line back on itself into a long U shape so the runes face each other, you get fourteen pairs. This pair, Ing and Wyn, the eighth, begins the middle half of the poem, moving toward the center which is to say the circumference. I say poem. It is a poem. It is also how people communicated with their gods, how they’d get answers to problems, find out which way the wind is blowing, complain, ask for stuff. Whatever question they might have, the Rune Poem has an answer. It’s an instruction manual for living, presented in matched pairs.
This pair, Wyn and Ing are all about abundance. Linked up together, here we have the god of prosperity who once hung around the market towns, nice fortified byrga, and we have the feeling of joy you get when all your abundance is secure … More
What is W? It looks like two Vs but its name says it is U doubled. It is a consonant, but in other times in select places, it is a vowel. What happened? Why do we have W?
Before English was ever written down, there was a W sound in it. They had a letter for it too: the Wyn rune, ᚹ or Ƿ in manuscript form. This is how we would be writing our Ws, if the world had been otherwise: this is hoƿ ƿe ƿould be ƿriting our Ƿs if the ƿorld had been otherƿise. But it was not otherƿise. England had been occupied by Rome for 400 years, and when they left they didn’t take everything, they left their Latin behind all over the place. It wasn’t a switching off of the lights either when they went, people still considered themselves Roman for quite a long time after, and Latin kept a … More
Ing was a deity of prosperity and we remember his abundance in our coins the scilling (shilling) and the feorþing (farthing). In oldest Old English Ing is a word meaning a muggy riverside meadow, the only valuable land for farming in a wild swamp.
Ing left for the east with his cart running after him like a suffix to his word, but in Old English Ing is the suffix running after feminine nouns denoting action: feding = feeding, bletsing = blessing. Ing is also a patronymic suffix used to show family groups, kinds of people or things, or anything belonging to something or someone: deorling = darling (dear-ling), georgling = a child, cyning = king, Centingas = people from Kent. Scyldings = a family name. Ing as a suffix took on more and more uses and we can find Ing actively running behind many words now.
He did not disappear from sight, but stayed;
indeed he so impeded my ascent
that I had often to turn back again.
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
The Rune Poem is sung in a tempo that changes from time to time. You can find the beats and the rests between them in the stresses of the words in each stanza. Some move quickly like the adjacent Hail and Need stanzas. Stand in the hail and you’ll see why it needs a quick stanza. Stand in need and you’ll feel the staccato tempo of a life crashing down. The Home stanza is the last in a string of four stanzas bound together by a change of tempo: Human, The Sea, Ing, and Home. Together they tell a story about Ing who was a goddamned legend. He appears in the adjacent pair to Gift and Home, so we’ll visit Ing soon. For now know that home is where you start from and the end of the story as well. You have nothing else.
In the world of the Rune … More
You possess me always but may touch me not,
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
I sing this wretched song, my full sorrow
Of my departure by myself, that I might speak
That I dwelt in destitution, since I grew up,
Newly until of old, no more than now,
Forever I suffered my compensation, a journey of exile.
First my husband departed away from our people,
Over the tumult of the waves; I have sorrow at dawn
Of where on this land the leader of our people might have been.
Then I departed on a journey, seeking to follow
A friendless exile, because of my woeful need.
I began so that after, my kinsmen consider the servant
Through secret council, that they separate the two of us,
That we two, in the widest wealth of the world
Lived we most horribly, and grieved for me.
I commanded myself, my man, to take a dwelling in the sacred grove,
I had few loved ones in this place
Of loyal friends, because … More
O ᛟ, you shapeshifter. Once you signified all O sounds, until you slipped sideways and joined up with E. Twins you were, they spelled you two ways Œþel and Eþel, depending on what you sounded like where they wrote your name, and when. (O Œþel, you were first in your birth order, if conjoined twins have a birth order.) O ᛟ, ᚩ took your O sound away. What can you do with a wordy god? Without O you get confused with ᛖ a lot. Eh, what do you care? You grew up to be a pictograph in your own right. A whole word world you are, doing the job of several letters in just one shape.
Carve the ᚷ rune. Now put a roof on it. What a gift to have a home.
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.
