ᛇ byþ utan unsmeþe treow.
heard hrusan fæst hyrde fyres.
wyrtrumun underwreþyd wynan on eþle ᛬᛫
It is on the outside an unsmooth tree.
Hard, earth bound, guardian of fire.
Reliably supported by roots, a joy in the home.
Tag Archives: Yew
How to Make Poison
You’ve murdered before. Good. Now you’ll want to refine your technique and go for a killing more subtle, more elegant. Undoubtedly your next move should be poison. It is clean, classic, and with just a few basic ingredients and a bit of alchemy performed in even the most modest of kitchens, you can achieve a fine toxin useful for dropping into a drink or rubbing onto the shaft of an arrow. Wear gloves for that, this one can be absorbed through skin. You will need patience for your efforts as well, unlike a loud splashy war or a more intimate stabbing, a successful poisoning is not enhanced by anger. Let your rage go, for now. Holding onto anger is like poisoning yourself and expecting your enemy to die.
First, source a yew tree. Yew trees are so delightfully toxic that even inhaling the sawdust or pollen can kill you, though it would … More
X≠Y≠Z: A Joy in the Home
Y is in the garage, sharpening. Trying to figure out how to sharpen. Y is in the garage googling how to sharpen a blade, what angle and what to sharpen it on and is confused as to the metal content of the blade in question. Does it make a difference if Y doesn’t know? Y assumes yes. Y has no whetstone and had tried to use the concrete floor of the garage but has become too cold sitting on it. Why are garage floors so cold? Google says to sharpen a blade on the unfinished ceramic bottom of a coffee mug in a pinch. This is a pinch, Y has had it and heads to the kitchen.
X is in the bathroom. The bathroom has good ventilation and the best light; X can not make a mistake. Next to the sink X has placed a camp stove with a small pot on top … More
Trust
The yew is absolutely massive compared to us, so much weight shooting up, lengthening, drooping back down to plunge into the earth, travel, shoot back up and do it again: swoop up into sky, fall back into earth, swim forward, break through waves into sky and flip back under again. This tree is a fish, moving so slowly through thousands of years in a single life span, we never see it happen. We think the yew stands still. We can trust it will always be there. God knows how the yew sees us. An irritant? An itchy parasite flaring up from time to time? We move so fast we must be itchy.
Maybe in our separate time scales we are nothing to the Yew? The Yew has been quite a lot to us though. We’ve met under it for important reasons for centuries, in the rooms it makes looping its branches into roots underground. The … More
Rune Casting: Eoh
Things have been hard and rough going and could be the death of you if you don’t get your feet under you and stand firm. You’d best gather your people home and be joyful: you can depend on each other for support.
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.
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
