#Ýr poem

[yr-idk]

more poetry by me Why

Why do we exist?

What is the point?

I dont know what I want?

Why is everybody under so much pressure?

What are we doing here?

What am I doing?

I cant describe myself?

How can I be?

We need to do something.

No matter what it is

To have been awake or breathed

It doesn't matter what it was.

I originally wrote this in Icelandic for a school project back in January and this is a pretty direct translation which is why it doesn’t rhyme even if I normally write poems with rhymes

the Icelandic version is under the cut

Af hverju

Af hverju erum við til?

Hvernig stendur á þessu?

Ég veit ekki hvað ég vil?

Af hverju eru allir undir pressu?

Hvað gerum við hér?

Hvað er ég að gera?

Ég get ekki lýst mér?

Hvernig má ég vera?

Við verðum að gera eitthvað.

Sama hvað það er

Að hafa vakað eða andað

það skiptir ekki máli hvað það var.

[thorraborinn]

Really interested in the yr rune but I’m having trouble finding information on it that isn’t “death rune” garbage. Could you point me in the right direction?

Sure, that is one of the more difficult ones to find good info on because the Icelanders who did a lot of compiling of poetic material didn't totally understand it. The /ʀ/ sound that it wrote in early Old Norse was long gone, and by the 1700's /y/ was gone too. If I remember correctly, Grunnavíkur-Jón Ólafsson wrote that it came "from Ireland" -- participating in a long tradition of attributing things that are difficult to explain to people the audience won't know anything about. Several hundred years earlier, Ólafr hvítaskáld, author of the Third Grammatical Treatise, said it came from Hebrew (and although he was talking out of his ass there is a possibility that he was slightly less off than you'd imagine).

The best source concerning rune meanings is Inmaculada Senra Silva's "The Significance of the Rune Poems" available here: https://idus.us.es/handle/11441/15113. It's believed that while it's graphic shape and use in writing came from the *algiʀ/elhaʀ rune ᛉ/ᛦ, that it's name and meaning come from the *ī(h)waʀ rune ᛇ. So if you're interested in the history of the rune before Nordic-specific developments, you will want to read about that one in the Old English Rune Poem.

The word ýr literally means 'yew (tree/wood)' but it's actually somewhat rarely used that way in Old Icelandic. Generally ýr means 'bow,' though there is surely some selection bias because so much of Norse poetry is about battle. The Old English and Norwegian rune poems refer to a tree, but in Iceland (where yews didn't grow) the poem and kennings refer to a bow.

Old English Rune Poem (Halsall 1981):

The yew is a tree with rough bark, hard and firm in the earth, a keeper of flame, well-supported by its roots, a pleasure to have on one's land.

Old Norwegian Rune Poem (my translation based on editions in Senra Silva):

ᛦ is the tree (which is) greenest in winter; it is expected that, that which burns, scorches.

Icelandic Rune Poem (my translation):

ᛦ is a bent bow and unbrittle iron and arrow-thrower.

In Sweden its name had changed by the early modern period when evidence for the Swedish Rune Poem was being compiled. Senra Silva (p. 252) has stupämaþr ('fallen/sloped/stooped man') and oRmahr; Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen (edited from Stiernhielm) gives Aur madur (and translates 'rich man', from öre, money/currency); presumably this is all reinterpreted based on the visual similarity to the maðr 'man' rune ᛘ.

Here's a selection of dylgjur collected by Jón Ólafsson, with my quick, rough, sloppy translation:

bendur bogi 'bent bow'

fífu fleytir 'arrow-flinger'

Fenju angur 'Fenja's (giantess's) grief'

bogi spenntur 'tensed bow'

tvíbentur bogi 'twice-bent bow'

uppdreginn álmur 'drawn-up elm'

skotmáls ör 'projectile-range's arrow'

píla á streng 'arrow on a string'

bardaga gagn 'battle-gear'

fífu fax 'arrow's mane (fletching?)'

handa raun 'hands' trial'

firða armbrysti 'men's crossbow'

stutt fjör 'short life'

ævibann 'life-ban'

fár fugla 'birds' misfortune'

See also: "Runes, Yews and Magic" by Ralph Elliott.

If you're more interested in how it was used in writing, that's complicated and I'm not sure of anything written that breaks it down, but that's something I'll hopefully be working on eventually. The overly-simplified version is that it was used to write the r-like /ʀ/ sound that comes at the end of many Old Norse words until that sound was lost; it was also used to write a few vowels and ultimately settled at /y/, in accordance with the principle that runes should have a name that indicates their phonological value in writing.

Here's a selection of appearances (including Elder Futhark algiʀ/elhaʀ):

By sheer numbers, short twig ᛧ is probably most common. The two-sided arrow shape ᛨ is distinctively Icelandic.

[yr-idk]

A poem I wrote today

I've not been doing good

But sometimes all it takes is to be understood

To feel as if you are alive

Through the stories that survive

They can mean a lot

Or be all that you got

Yet at the end of the day

All I can do is say

I don't feel so great...

I've got some more poems pre written/translated im planning to post on here over the next few days

[yr-idk]

prounouns

They called me she

Now I'd rather use he

Or just be me

People don't understand

But it's not their hand

When I even try to ask

They suddenly drop their mask

How do I begin with star, it or xe

If they won't even use he

for reference I mainly use It/He/Star bc they feel pretty correct no matter my gender but I tend to lead with he bc it’s a bit easier to explain. I used xe both bc it rhymes and bc I’ve tried to explain it to someone irl who wouldn’t really listen to what I was saying.

[yr-idk]

I made this blog so I could post stuff like my poetry if I ever get to actually translating it and things like maybe some of my art that is not fanart. My main is @yridk and my pronouns in English are It/he and I’m genderfluid.

Currently I’m working on: daily outfit drawings + gender of the day and my final project for school which is art based so will be posted here :D

The tags I try to use on here are below

[thorraborinn]

First thank you for your amazing and super informative posts. You have brought to light things I hadn’t come across before in my own learnings through sources such as Dr. Neil Price’s books and Dr. Jackson Crawford’s YouTube videos. Anyway my question is specifically re: rune poems. Crawford has stated that runes didn’t have meaning aside from an alphabet & even though named don’t represent the concept of that name. This is confusing to me. Does this mean individual runes r devoid of meaning?

Sorry, as usual I forgot this was in my drafts.

I don’t think it’s right to say they have no meaning at all, it’s that they have no meaning that can withstand removal from context. This is true of all symbols and even things like words. Runes represent the concept of the name exactly as much as the name itself does. Saying “the word money doesn’t represent the concept of money” is a little ridiculous so I think that’s true of the rune names as well.

[maðr] er [mann]s gaman ‘man is the joy of man’ with m-runes in Hávamál, Codex Regius

What they don’t have is a fixed, unchanging, essential meaning that is true in a way that is detached from their historical development and context.

I think the problem a lot of people have with understanding runes is that they lack a depth of history. Runes have been in use for nearly 2,000 years and have been in a process of perpetual change and development for that entire time. In my experience most people are most interested in the “original” meanings of the runes, but there is nothing that we can call “original” in any meaningful way. We don’t even know if the 24-unit rune row on the Kylver stone was fully-formed when the earliest inscriptions were made. To be clear, I don’t mean that there wasn’t a point in time when someone was the first to write using an alphabet that was a clean break away from whatever alphabets informed it, and which forms the beginning of a writing culture that followed, but we have no access to this moment, don’t know what it consisted of, and don’t know even if those first letters had names.

Runes having meaning is incredibly important to how they are used but it’s meaning is liquid, it shifts around depending on the needs of the author. People looking for runes in the context of initiatory mysteries or metaphysics or whatever are looking in the wrong place, they belong in the context of riddles and poetry. In Iceland poets would hide hidden messages in poems by referring to rune kennings (like those that make up the so-called Icelandic rune poem): https://ordstirr.wordpress.com/runes/spelling-with-rune-kennings/

When it comes to the name there are actually two components and the rune might be identified more with one than the other depending on what the writer wants to do. There’s the meaning of the name, and the sound of actually pronouncing the name. The latter is important for puns and stuff like that. In Old English the u-rune ūr means ‘aurochs’ but that didn’t stop them from writing it standing for the possessive pronoun ūr ‘our.’ This is also how the younger futhark o-rune óss ‘god’ became óss ‘river mouth.’ On the other hand, continuity of meaning is what underlies the rune kenning tradition.

So they have “meanings’ but it’s not what modern runic mysticism makes it out to be. That the word rún is related to secrecy probably means something about how they are a means of communication, but only to people who are in on it.

In some specific contexts they did develop meaning apart from the literal meaning of the word, specifically the Icelandic poetic context. For example the kennings for the k-rune kaun, which literally means ‘(a) sore’ include references to battle-wounds, mortal injuries; the y-rune ýr (literally ‘yew’ but in practice ‘bow’) could be referenced in poetry by referring to almost any projectile weapon or sometimes even non-projectile weapons.

The rune names hagall and bjarkan are not otherwise words in Old Norse, they are only rune names. There is a mythological figure with the name Hagall in the Vǫlsunga cycle but bjarkan is nothing other than a rune name. Though it is quite readily analyzable as probably related to bjǫrk and birkir ‘birch.’ I’m not sure what to tell you about that, it’s entirely possible that they were words in use at some point but fell out of use in every context except the runes (true of óss ‘god’ but we can actually follow its falling out of use because it’s shown in the written record).

There is also significant amounts of really clear evidence for runes being used in ways that we really aren’t sure what they were doing with them, like the same rune multiple times in a sequence (three þurs-runes or nine nauðr-runes or eight ansuz/óss runes or nine something like that). Some theories connect these with the names, others with numerology, a lot of this seems possible but remains speculative because it’s completely unfalsifiable. These sequences in set numbers seems possibly related to alliteration to me (we could then also possibly include Sigrdrífumál’s nefna tysvar Tý) but what do I know.

I dunno if any of this helps or if it meets the definition of “represents” or whatever.

[thorraborinn]

I was looking at the Old Icelandic rune poem, and I'm getting steadily more confused by the translation I was able to find online (it's the one Wikipedia has), and wondering if you could tell me whether the problem is me or the translation. In the Fe stanza, it looks like it has "and path of the serpent" for "ok grafseiðs gata aurum fylkir" and I don't speak Old Icelandic but it looks to me like that says "and burial-road of golden kings" which doesn't appear in the translation. Help? Thanks!

In some versions of the Icelandic rune poem, the stanza is followed by two words, one Latin word pertaining to the meaning of the rune (though not always a direct translation), and a word meaning ‘ruler’ spelled using the rune as the first letter. In this case, aurum is Latin for ‘gold,’ and fylkir an example of a word starting with the rune fé when spelling in runes. Other examples include iter ‘journey’ and ræsir for reið, arcus ‘bow’ and ynglingur for ýr, etc. In some cases the relation between the rune name and the Latin is not totally transparent like with Þurs : Saturnus.

So grafseiðs gata is its own thing. A grafseiðr is a ‘grave-saithe’ which is a kenning for a serpent; gata means ‘path’ or ‘way’; the path of a serpent is gold or treasure, apparently, because serpents like lindworms lay on top of gold/treasure.

[thorraborinn]

Hah, actually hold on a sec before you scrap it, because I don’t know that that’s wrong either.

The word bjǫrk is in fact one of the regular Old Icelandic words for ‘birch’ and the rune name bjarkan is very transparently derived from it. Technically, the word bjarkan doesn’t mean anything other than “the b rune” (this is also true of hagall, as the normal word for hail is hagl), but the Old English poem does use the regular everyday term for the birch, beorc (although like in the link above, a lot of redactors have thought that the poem itself is actually describing a poplar). It may be that they’re using either a less precise word than what we’re expecting, or there could be some kenning-like sliding around within the category [tree]. In some collections of rune kennings, it seems that pretty much any kind of tree can stand in for it, or that is even said straight-out.

It’s speculative to apply this to the development of the Younger Futhark rune names, but what I gather from the later kennings is that the “meaning” of bjarkan is kind of a field of things relating to trees within which the poet can kind of play around, and which multiple trees (any tree? not sure, perhaps not ýr ‘yew’ for example) or parts of trees (especially the crown/blooming foliage) can represent. The kennings seem to emphasize trees as trees, valuable in their own right and for their role in their ecosystems and not as material to be used by people. A selection:

ljómi laufa 'brightness of leaves'

viðar vænleiki 'tree's auspiciousness'

fagurt hlíðarþang 'beautiful mountainside forest'

fugla sæti 'birds' seat'

lundur fagur 'beautiful grove'

laufgaður álmur 'leafy elm'

prýði viðar 'adornment of wood'

fagur ljómi 'beautiful splendor'

fax jarðar 'earth's mane'

But anyway, the point in bringing it up wasn’t really to completely disconnect the b-rune from ‘birch,’ just to disrupt the matrix of meanings and associations including the rune, birches, birth, and Frigg and Freyja.

I've seen mention on a few websites that Birch trees are sacred to Freyja and Frigg but list no sources beyond "in Norse mythology" or "according to Norse mythology".

Is there any truth to this or is it just modern day associations?

It seems to be “modern day associatons.” Of course, demonstrating a lack of evidence is difficult, and I might be missing something, but the burden of evidence is on the person who says it. If you’re sincerely interested in knowing where they got it, I’d ask the people who run those websites, and if they can’t produce an answer, or send you off to someone else who also can’t produce an answer, I’d stop reading them.

This post does a pretty good job of laying out the evidence. I’m not gonna bother commenting on some of the ridiculous stuff that the author managed to dig up, I assume my readers don’t need me to tell them that "Nerthus split into Freyja and Hel” is not something worth arguing. One thing that's missed is that in the Icelandic rune poem, bjarkan ALSO doesn't mean 'birch,' though the word is certainly derived from the word for 'birch.' In the earliest written Icelandic rune poem, it's actually glossed abies which is the Latin word for the silver fir tree.

There is a theory about the Norwegian rune poem and its confusing second lines of each couplet, that says these second lines are mnemonics for remembering the shape of the rune. The theory, as articulated here by Jonna Louis-Jensen (link to PDF), holds that the bjarkan rune's shape is compared to the profile of a pregnant person, but that in this case the person is Loki.

I think one of the major vectors for this association is the conflation of Frigg with other goddesses (or proposed goddesses) from elsewhere in Germanic-speaking areas, such as Berchta/Perchta. By conflating Frigg with Berchta, Frigg inherits the association of Berchta and birch that, as far as I know, is entirely etymological, as both Berchta and birch were ultimately derived from words meaning 'bright' (though there was surely a great deal of time in between those derivations, it does seem reasonable to me that a perceived relationship between *berk- 'birch' and *berht- 'bright' could be maintained by Germanic speakers).

The above post mentions and links to another post about Vercana already, but I'll summarize. She was a deity worshiped by speakers of a Celtic and/or Germanic language whose votive stones appear in Roman Germania. Carl Marstrander thought that this was an attempt to write a Germanic *Berkanō, because Germanic *b is believed to have sounded like a "v" in most positions. If the name were *Berkanō, then we would expect this to be a birch goddess, but this is a misreading, because Germanic *b is pronounced like a regular "b" word-initially, and because other similar inscriptions have no trouble representing Germanic *b with Latin "B" (random example: Gabiabus). The weight of evidence demands that we read the stem of her name as *Werkan-. See here for more secure theories about the name. But you might notice that **berkanō persists in rune circles, supposedly the Proto-Germanic name of the b-rune, though this is incorrect (*berkaną is the most correct according to the little evidence we have, Ólafr hvítaskáld's grammatical treatise). Anyway, this theory seems to have contributed to the idea of a Germanic “birch goddess” generally, and made it easy to slide one or another goddess into that archetype or just cause some sort of “association”-seepage.

I suspect that ideas about a "birch goddess" got embedded into the common store of ideas about the runes and that this helped it proliferate. Associations between birch and birth are common but seem retroactive and ad-hoc to me, and I can't really trace them, there doesn’t seem to be anything to connect them in Old Norse. But taking it for granted that people have associated birch trees and birth, it’s quite easy to associate Frigg with birth and motherhood for a number of reasons (her relationship with Baldr, her answering the prayer of a woman unable to conceive in Vǫlsunga saga). Frigg has often been associated with the b-rune by modern rune people, probably because of some invented perception that runes have to be associated with a god, and none of the other ones being obvious matches.

I don’t expect that the relationship between birth, birch, and the b-rune was invented by nazis but they certainly had a hand in proliferating it. Völkische mystics actually severely downplayed the b-rune’s association with birch, sometimes failing to mention it at all (the Armanen name is bar, not obviously related to birches, and easier to fake a linguistic connection to birth). This probably preconditioned the people who took up their work and brought it into Anglophone popular rune magic (and reconnected it to birch). Michael Howard said the rune had to do with “the birch tree and the fertility rites of spring,” Athene Williams’ description is similar, and then the more immediately relevant ones to heathenry (Thorsson, Aswynn, etc) are in the post I linked in the beginning here.

The only sort of “association” I can find for birches in Old Norse comes from a fairy tale, part of which involves people being asked what kind of tree they would rather be. The cook said “birch” because it’s the best wood for a cooking fire. In Urglaawe, Frigg (Fried) is associated with birch, I believe mostly because of her association with the hearth, and with birch’s distinguishing characteristic of being excellent for burning. As best as I understand it, Urglaawer consider their version of Fried to have developed and acquired associations over the most recent centuries. Although even then, in Urglaawe birch has associations with a variety of things including other goddesses as well.

I’m shocked that I haven’t seen anyone try to argue that the bjargrúnar ‘saving-runes’ in Sigrdrífumál which are meant to help with delivery of a child are actually *bjarkrúnar or something. That the route I would have taken if I wanted to fake an argument.

If anyone else knows of something I’m missing feel free to say so but I don’t see a reason to believe this is anything other than a recent invention. As always I don’t really care whether people think it makes sense to them personally though I do encourage questioning any time the things that just make good sense to you happen to align with things that just made good sense to Nazis even when it’s mundane and seemingly harmless, especially when it involves ideals about women and giving birth.