Frequently Asked Question: I want to translate or tranliterate a phrase into runes. How do I do that and how do I make sure it's right?
My answer: There are some decisions to be made:
...PaganSquare
PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
Subscribe to this list via RSS
Blog posts tagged in runes
Series: The Lazy Girl's Guide to Magic
...
It's a truism of modern mythography that Odin, Lord of the Runes, hanged himself from the branches of Yggdrasil, the old Norse Tree of Life.
But did he?
According to the famous passage from Hávamál:
I know that I hung
on the windy meiðr
all nine nights:
Geriht us þat geruni.
“Teach us those runes.”
(Old Saxon Heliand, circa 850)
Writing is a magical act.
The old North Sea ancestors had two words meaning “write.”
One was to scribe. That meant “to write with pen and ink,” as the Romans did. This was the newfangled way to write, with a newfangled Latin name.
But the old word, the ancestral word, was to write. This originally meant “to carve.” The first writing that the ancestors knew was the carving ("risting") of runes into wood.
Note which method they favored.
In our hyper-literate society, in which most of us write with light rather than with ink or with lead, we tend to take writing for granted.
We shouldn't.
“The word ‘rune’ originates in words meaning ‘secret,’ but ‘rune’ has also come to mean ‘a poem, charm, or spell.’ Runar (from the Norse) means ‘a magical sign,’ and runa (from Old German) is ‘to whisper a secret.’ ‘Hidden,’ ‘magic,’ ‘whispers,’ all words long associated with Faery, the secret country. So when we talk of runes, we are speaking of objects that have multiple meanings, letters both worldly and otherworldly in origin and aspect. Their ‘secrets’ may not reside so much in hidden meanings, but in ways of seeing the world. In this sense, each single rune creates layers of phonetics, poetry, and power built up over time. Runes are intended to endure. They record things that must be remembered or heeded. Runes are letters and words that must not be lost or wasted. They embody and express essential knowledge…”
–Brian Froud, Runes of Elfland
Several years ago I had laryngitis and was completely mute. I woke up in the morning with a crystal clear vision of the earth, suspended in space, feeling awe-struck at the majesty and complexity of this planet whirling through space, part of the vast, unfathomable universe. It seemed so clear to me that I was seeing the “invisible net of incarnation” of which we are all a part, the earth held in this enormous web of the universe. Upon rising for the day, I was thinking about my ideas about divinity and reflecting on my cosmological view of the universe as the “body” of the Goddess and the idea that the very web of life itself is the Goddess. Accompanying the sense of majesty was then a profound sense of impersonality. How can I possibly connect personally with something so vast and so powerful? So, as I sat that morning at my little corner altar in the living room, I asked (silently—I had laryngitis, remember!): “what do I need to know about the personalization of the divine?” I drew a Crone Stone from my little bag by the altar…
Remember the laryngitis and then also imagine the huge smile on my face when the stone I drew was, “The Speaker,” with the questions included in the interpretation, “is your voice being heard?” and “how will you share your voice with the world?” And then the final message, “let your voice pour forth like a flowing river…” At this moment I felt I had received an answer to my wonderings—that the Goddess is both as enormous and impersonal as my vision of the web holding the earth and yet also personal enough to offer me this cosmic “wink” through my Crone Stone.
Iceland, 1655. The reverend Jón Magnússon is convinced that he's bewitched.
The devil haunts him whenever he tries to carry out his priestly functions. His livestock have fallen ill. One of his servants is struck dumb.
Obviously, someone has hexed him.
His suspicions fix on two of his parishioners, a man and his son, both named Jón Jónsson. (The vast majority of Icelanders accused of, and executed for, witchcraft were men.) He denounces the two to the sheriff and they are brought before the local court on charges of witchcraft.
A search of their home turns up galder-books and galder-staves. Galder—sung magic—has long been a primary form of magic in the North. (The word derives from galan, “sing, chant,” as in nightingale, “singer by night,” and gale, the “singing" storm.) One gales (chants) the spell and rists (engraves) it on a stave to “set” it.
On this evidence, both father and son are condemned. Both are burned alive.
But the burnings do not end the haunting.
What's "punk religion" and does Paganism fit the label? Can gods be "slackers?" And do the dead ever really leave us, even after millions of years? It's Watery Wednesday, our weekly segment on news about the Pagan community from around the globe! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
