Tag Archives: Runes

ᛉ

Solve for X. X = a stand in for consonant clusters: sounds like ks for word endings and when it appears after stressed vowels. It is an unvoiced ks when it comes before a t, voiced as gz for before stressed vowels, and kzh for the middle of words. It can also sound like Z at the beginning of a word, K in the middle, and sometimes remains silent for word endings. Why such a multiplicity of work for such an underused letter? X = unknown.

Grow a line up from the ground, let it twine to either side. Here’s a twist: give it antlers.

 

ᛈ

Voiceless bilabial stop. Send air through your mouth, now stop it, now start. If you vibrate your vocal cords you make a B. This is not that, keep your larynx still and put a little extra air into it. Perfect.

Carve a line down. Now carve a bent line at the top. Mirror that line on the bottom, make a cup on its side. You can put dice in it or a drink, it’s a toss up. Don’t spill.

 

ᛋ

Alveolar voiceless spirant. Send air into your mouth, almost closed, then slip it out sibilantly. See? Splendid.

Carve a line down, change your mind and go back up, no, go down again.

 

ᛏ

Alveolar dental: tongue along teeth, gums too. Stop and start the air flow. Let your voice stay out of it.

Carve an arrow. Point it to the stars.

 

ᛇ

Short E, mouth a little open: eh, no big deal. Let the E fall off past an O. Let it keep falling, we don’t use these sounds together anymore.

Carve a line up like a tree then bend the branches back down toward earth on one side. On the other side, send up a new trunk from the ground.

 

ᛒ


Voiced bilabial stop. Send air into your mouth. Now stop it with your lips and release. Put a little sound into it, vibrate those vocal cords.

Carve a line down, straight as a tree. Now carve two bumps on the right, budding out one side.

ᛄ

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

ᛁ

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.

 

ᛖ

This is the rune for Eh, war horse, letter E. In the Cotton library manuscript called Galba A.ii (burned in a different fire from the one that got the Old English Rune Poem) the name of this rune is spelled eoh. In other manuscripts the name is spelled Eh as it is here, not with an EO at the start. There’s another rune for EO: ᛇ, spelled eoh like it’s a horse but it means a yew tree. This is the Rune Poem catching a vowel shift, from E to EO. This rune gets tangled up in ᛟ as well, Eþel, the rune for Œ. Notice that is not an Œ at the front of ᛟ’s name, it’s an E. ᛟ used to be œþel, but that sound shifted into E from what used to be mostly O sounds. Vowels are shapeshifters. The sound of this one makes us smile.

Carve … More

ᚾ

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.

ᛗ

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.

 

ᚻ

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

ᛚ

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

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

ᛝ

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.

Carve an ᚷ, what a gift! Now … More

ᛟ

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.

 

ᚷ

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.

 

ᚳ

Originally the letter C made a hard sound in Old English, like a K, but because everything is temporary, over time C developed a second sound depending upon its immediate neighbors: CH (represented as tʃ by the International Phonetic Alphabet). One’s immediate neighbors can really change a vibe. In Old English C most often sounds like a K, velar region of the mouth. It moves to the front of the mouth (dental and front palate region) to make the CH sound mostly when it lives next door to a long I or long E, or a diphthong starting with these letters.

Cen is usually pronounced as cheen, or /t͡ʃeːn/ in IPA, but may also be pronounced as keen, K sound. We don’t really know what Old English sounds like. The E in Cen is a long E, so this would suggest a CH sound, except if this were a Y, and E was … More

ᛞ

D. Voiced alveolar dental stop. You use your voice and soft palate to make the sound, make your breath stop against your teeth. Leave your larynx out of it and you make a T.  D was sometimes spelled with a T in later Old English, and it would occasionally appear as the letter Eth which looks like this: Ð and this: ð. Eth is kind of a cross between a Þ (thorn, TH) and a D. A th sound with a little D flavor. Eventually the Рand Þ became interchangeable leaving the D to stand alone, exiled in wretchedness.

Make a thorn and point it at a reverse thorn. A thorn in a mirror. Let them keep in touch, they are very close.

 

ᚱ

Probably the R in Old English was trilled or rolled. They’d travel along with the R for an extra beat before moving on to the next letter. Put your tongue near the roof of your mouth and vibrate the air. For a trilled or rolled sound, touch the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth and do it again. Drumroll please. Faster! 

Carve a straight path up. Now send a crooked road traveling back down the side.

 

ᚪ

In the Old English Rune Poem the letter A means oak. This was the most sacred tree in most Celtic societies and to the Baltic cultures living east of the Rune Poem’s people, where Ing went. In the Ogam alphabet, the earliest form of writing in Ireland, Oak is the letter D. D comes right before A in the Rune Poem alphabetic sequence, it’s adjacent, and the next letter after that is the another one of the sacred world trees, the Ash, Æ. The Old English Rune Poem plants the oak next to family and its own sacred tree.

A is an older sound in Old English than Æ or O. A became both of these letters, vowels are slippery like that. They pass through your mouth unrestricted by teeth or tongue or closed lips, so with all that out of the way, it’s only mouth shape and air flow that makes the … More

ᚫ

The ᚩ rune (O, Os) and the ᚪ (A, Ac) both started the same way, as new shapes of the ᚫ rune (Æ, Æsc) which once made the sound of the letter A, stood in the fourth position of the alphabet, and meant God. The A sound changed very early in the lifetime of Old English, vowels are shifty, and this one changed into O and Æ, so new runes were made with new meanings to represent the new sounds, and appropriate places were found for them in the alphabetic line up. Æ, sounds like the A in ash tree, which is its meaning, this is one of a whole grove of trees in the Rune Poem. It kept the original rune shape ᚫ while the others are derived from it, and was moved opposite it’s original 4th position to the 26th place. They put it there so it can … More

ᚩ

Vowels are slippery things. They shift around and we have to learn which sound differences to ignore as another person’s accent and which ones change meaning. In the earliest times of Old English history the sound of the letter A changed so much it became three letters, A (ᚪ), O (ᚩ), and Æ (ᚫ). The ᚫ rune was the original rune shape for the A sound and stands in the 4th position in the Norwegian and Icelandic runic alphabets where it makes the sound for the letter A and means God. In the Old English runic alphabet, ᚩ (Os) holds the 4th position where it still means God, but here it makes the sound O. Smote. Lot. That God that smote you is a lot. The O sound was once made by the ᛟ rune, Eþel, but by the time they wrote down the Rune Poem, Eþel was already slipping … More

ᚣ

Say something. Go ahead, you heard me, say it and listen to yourself. Now say it about a hundred years ago. Hear it? You can hear it. Different. Speech sounds change. Accents change. You’ve changed. You think you sound the same but go back home after some distance and they’ll tell you different. And they’ll tell it to you differently. English has changed, big time, my God it’s different. It’s old. It’s medieval. Let’s think of a famous medieval person, to see how old. Somebody with a real mark of distinction. Dante. Dante Aligheri. He finished writing the Divine Comedy in 1320. He’s really really old, hundreds of years. Think of this, in this current moment we are closer in years to Dante than he was to the start of Old English. And from the Rune Poem to us he’s in the middle of the path of life. Not the runes, they’re even older, the … More

Þ

Thorn survived for ages. That kind of longevity in a dead letter deserves a eulogy. Ye, though Thorn has walked through the valley of the shadow of death it has surely found its way to the great abecedarium in the sky where it may abide in that illustrious dead letter office alongside its companions UI, IO, and EA. Dearest Thorn made it a long time, longer than most, and had a great run, bless its heart. Nettlesome old bastard. Kept showing up to things year after year with its barbed jokes and pointed comments, though it was a giant among letters and always welcome. Thorn, though our days be restlessly marked by the unmet cruelty of your loss, we take great consolation in knowing you sleep amongst the roses.

Though thorn is dead to us as a letter, the Icelandic language still uses it, so it’s really only mostly dead. There’s … More

ᛡ

IO: extinct Old English diphthong. Of the bajillions of possible sounds we can make with our voices, only a few are needed for language. We made this one redundant. Exiled. Fired its ass. It barely did anything around here. What’s it for? It’s absent from other Old English alphabet collections, the malingerer. It’s unwanted as far as we’re concerned. EO does everything IO can do, and does it better. We don’t need IO. What’s IO even doing here? Pack up your stuff IO and get out, you’re history.

But of course IO has to be difficult on its way out. Typical. Try carving this one into anything. You’ll need a precise hand and a sharp knife. A little finesse. This isn’t hammer and chisel like ᚢ. Make an X, now draw a line through it without slipping to one side or the other. Pass straight through that X’s meeting point, right down … More

ᚢ

Send air through your larynx without stopping it. Let it pass freely. Let it through, some things you just have to let go. That’s a vowel. Stop the air with your throat or mouth, it’s a consonant.

Don’t stop, this is about U. U and U alone. Place your tongue in the middle of your mouth, center it. Now pull in your lips on all sides. Pursed. Hold up now, Just a teeny purse, don’t let your lips stick out too far: you want to say the letter U, not detach yourself from reality. There you go, now let the air out. Excessively pursed lips tell facial recognition experts (trust me, there is such an expert) that you are saying something opposite to reality, the one in your head: you are speaking in opposition to your thinking. Maybe you don’t understand what you are saying, but you are saying it anyway. Maybe you are lying. … More

ᚠ

Lips to teeth, expel air, use force. Ef. Efv. Old English has no V: an F between two vowels is a V. Efen. Even. Efern. eVern. Electronic Vern.

The first letter of several ancient languages means cow. The letter A upside down is a horned cow. Cows were a big deal. You want a cow. Cows are money. ᚠ is for money.

Carve a line straight down. Carve two more lines on the right side at a 45 degree angle up from the middle and midway to the top. A horned cow in profile.

 

ᛠ

EA. Diphthong: a compound vowel. This one is deceased, we don’t use it any more. What did EA sound like? Maybe like EO, maybe like AU, emphasis on the E or the A because all Old English diphthongs fall down dead in the end: you pronounce both letters but not equally, let the second one drop away to its death, thirty two feet per second per second.

Maybe EA sounds like the E in second. Maybe EA sounds like ÆA, like a hybrid of what A is doing in gnaw and in mad. More like gnaw, but it’s still pissed off. Or it was, EA is dead and gone now, some sounds die. They get eaten up, don’t be mad about it. What chewed EA away? Everything is temporary.

Carve a W and make it look like a fresh mound of earth in a valley. Dirt piled over a grave. Put it on a stick … More