The Rune poem names two gods: Tiw and Ing. Three if you count Os which means god and describes Odin. If we set aside all the sacred trees, and we shouldn’t, we still have one more … More
Tag Archives: Tree
Translating Beorc
This stanza’s riddle is about a tree. There lives a whole forest of important trees in the Rune Poem; this one is hrysted fægere, beautifully adorned, fair and decorative with… More
I Sing This Wretched Song
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… More
How to make a Torch
Find a pine tree, a nice sticky one full of resin, that stuff will burn in rain. Look for dead branches, go for one near the base of the tree and cut it off as close to the trunk as possible.… More
Translating Ac
The Ac stanza is a bad riddle because the answer to the riddle is right there in the wording. Since when does an Old English riddle include its answer? I’ll tell you when. Never.… More
How to Make Ink
Ingredients (alphabetical order):
Cloth (warp + weft): strains.
Ferrus Sulfate (iron + sulfuric acid): darkens.
Gum Arabic (acacia tree + patience): thickens, adheres.
Hammer… More
Crann Bethadh
Crann Bethadh means tree of life in Old Irish. It’s an oak tree. The Celts used to plant them in the centers of their villages where they could be the axis mundi, the pillar holding… More
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… More
Translating Æsc
The ash tree is oferheah. Over-high. Tall. And it grows from nothing: the smallest sapling can become something oferheah, massive, with root systems that are fairly shallow, but… More
Translating Os
Os means God, non specified, though this stanza might be talking about a specific one. There are other specific gods in the Rune Poem. Tiw is here. So is Ing. We don’t know much … More
Speech Bearer
Reordberend the tree called me,
It says I am a speechbearer.
It thinks I am an odd little tree,
A small beech or confused shrub in error.
It looks to me, I said to this tree
That you’re… More
Truth
Did you know that tree means truth? Well it does, honestly, let me be the first to tell you so you know it’s true. The Old English word treow means both tree and truth. Lots of Old… More
Axis Mundi
Archaeologists in their digging and dating trace the oldest runic alphabet back to the late second century. The oldest rune carvings are often of the alphabet itself, carved in order.… More
The Ogam Ash Tree
Ogam, spelled Ogham in modern Irish, is an Old Irish alphabet, it was possibly a cryptographic alphabet like the runic ones, and it may have had its own sign language and musical notation.… More
X≠Y≠Z: How to Punch a Tree
X: The sun’s going down.
Y: Wait, how do I run?
X: Control W, no hold it down.
Z: Don’t lose my stuff.
Y: How would I lose your stuff? Wait, I’m stuck. Where am I? Is this… 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… 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… More
