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thorraborinn · 2 months ago

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Hi there! I saw this article with some new runic inscription finds a while ago (www sciencenorway no/archaeology-runes-viking-age/rune-stick-and-game-piece-with-runic-inscriptions-found-in-eastern-norway/2430016) and I've tried a couple of times to find more about the stick that apparently says "from daring dice games come all kinds of outcomes." Do you know of a database where I could find it and the exact inscription in, I assume, old norse. I'd like to see the original untranslated words :)

I'm not as on top of this stuff as I once was, so it's possible I've missed something. But I believe that this is still too recent a find to have made it into any of the sources that are currently accessible like Samnordisk runtextdatabas.

The article doesn't attribute the translation but it was probably provided by Kristel Zilmer of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, as she provided the image itself and all the other information in the article about runes. Zilmer has been busy recently as both the museum's go-to person for the press, and researching a number of other runic finds, so she probably just hasn't gotten around to publishing this one yet. Her CV does list something called "Runefunn i 2022 of 2023" but that doesn't seem to be something findable. So I'm inclined to think that she just provided her

Back in the day new finds would be published in Nytt om Runer but that hasn't been around since 2004. Now there is a project in the works to digitize the museum's archives in a web-accessible format but it isn't complete yet; the project is being led by none other than Kristel Zilmer (link in Norwegian).

I don't mind admitting that I personally have quite a bit of difficulty reading this. I'm getting:

þvi . a=lt . af . [s?]tirþar? . ?af?e . ?eka=r . ma=rk . sko=t

Several of those ?'s might be i but might have the twigs cut off. I suspect Zilmer is interpreting the word I wrote ?af?e as tafle, dative of tafl 'board/dice game' which you might recognize from the chess-like game hnefa-tafl. I think ma=rk is probably being read as (OIce) mǫrg 'many', and skot might be exactly what it looks like; skot at it's most literal means 'shot' but has a wide variety of uses, see also skjóta 'to shoot.'

If I were just looking at this fresh without a translation at hand I'd be very uncertain of what I wrote [s?]tirþar?. I'm seeing a very short vertical line in the beginning that looks like it could be an s, although it's quite different from what I'm calling an s in skot. If it ends with an -ar than it's probably a feminine noun in the genitive case rather than an adjective, since there's no noun to give an adjective an -ar ending. I can't find any words starting st that fit the description, and sd- is impossible in Norse, so we should probably conclude there's no s there. I might not have thought of this without the translation already provided, but I believe Zilmer is reading it as (in normalized Old Icelandic) dirfðar, genitive of dirfð 'boldness.' An f in most positions is pronounced like a "v," including here, so if you picture it as dirvðar you might see why they might not bother to write the f.

If we've done this right so far the only remaining ? is the one in ?eka=r, nor am I entirely confident that the last letter is an r (but it probably is, because we expect a verb here, and -ar is an expected ending for a singular, third-person verb). I'm not sure how this inscription is dated, or much about the development of Norwegian, so I don't know if je is possible here -- it wouldn't be in Old Icelandic. The only other runes it could be are t and l, and t makes this (sort of) legible: tekar tekar. In earlier language we'd expect tekr but maybe this is late enough that they're sticking epenthetic vowels in there, like in Nynorsk teker 'takes.'

So I'd provisionally suggest something like this, attempting to reflect features of the language it's written in, followed by the equivalent in Old Icelandic:

Þuī allt af dirfðartafle tekær marg skot Því allt af dirfðartafli tekr mǫrg skot

Which I would definitely have trouble translating directly but I can certainly see the provided translation making sense.

But I'm really seriously not confident in this at all. And I don't think I could have done even this if I weren't trying to retrofit it into an already-existing translation.

I think your options are to wait a while, either for Kristel Zilmer to publish a paper including this find or to finish the digitized runic archive project, or you could always send her an email and ask directly. Her contact info is on her page on the museum's website.

#runes #ask #anon

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thorraborinn · 2 months ago

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@a-shade-of-blue @greggorylee @rainy-fog @m0nsterwife @murderbot

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thorraborinn · 2 months ago

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thorraborinn · 2 months ago

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Now I find myself thinking warjaʀ should be considered alongside terms like hringbrjótr, compounds where the second component is an agent noun formed to the stem of the verb + a nominative ending. In that case, maybe it was originally only done in compounds. By Snorri's time brjótr exists as a simplex too but I don't know whether that could have been done while that pattern of formation was productive. In that case it might be better to make a longer compound word, *man(n)akunjawarjaʀ. I mean, you could always do weird stuff like pull words apart and use them like fridge magnets in poetry so I guess even if this is true we can leave the original and call it "poetic." I dunno, this is why this is something you have to think on an research and can't just run through a translation grinder.

Would it possible at all for you to point me in the direction of how to translate elder futhark runes ie: “Thor, Protector of Humanity”. I’m entertaining the idea of woodburning Norse art.

lol you're gonna hate this. Nobody asks me shit like this anymore so I'm gonna take it too seriously.

Really the answer is "no." I can try to do it for you but I don't think it makes sense for me to say "learn Proto-Norse" and hope for the best. Learning how to do this is a lot more difficult than learning Old Norse or Old English (and tbh "learn ON or OE or OHG" is the actual advice I'd give here). I know you're asking about doing this in general, and not for that phrase in particular, but you happened to provide a good example so I'm going to try a translation and show all my work.

I did put together a very non-exhaustive list of sources on runes available here but honestly that will not get you far here. Turning Proto-Norse into runes is easy, it's the language part that's hard. I also made a big list of deity names in Elder Futhark. Apparently the font embedding broke so it looks like nonsense, and I'm not gonna fight with it now. But the bolded text in each entry can be transliterated into runes. I haven't looked at this in years, but did just update Thor to be more in line with what I have here. Also, don't trust Wikipedia or Wiktionary for this stuff, you can use them as a research tool but verify independently or just use them to find other sources.

If I were in your position, I would consider using Old Norse and the runes that wrote that. Völuspá even gives us a near parallel: Miðgarðs véurr, and one of many ways to write that might be ᚦᚢᚱ ᛬ ᛘᛁᚦᚴᛆᚱᚦᛋ ᛬ ᚢᛁᚢᚱ.

I should make sure sure you're asking what you want to be asking. I'm assuming you want to translate into language that was spoken when the Elder Futhark was used. Some people say "translate" when they mean the less-commonly-known-but-more-accurate "transliterate" (turn "abc" into "ᚨᛒᚲ"). Maybe you just want to go ᚦᛟᚱ ᛬ ᛈᚱᛟᛏᛖᚲᛏᛟᚱ ᛬ ᛟᚠ ᛬ ᚺᚢᛗᚨᚾᛁᛏᛁ and call it a day, and there's nothing wrong with that but you don't need my help for it so I'm guessing that isn't what you mean.

Anyway I'll give you my crack at a translation of the phrase you provided now in case you don't want to read the rest of this but the explanation is after the break:

*þonaraʀ warjaʀ *man(n)akunjas þonaraʀ warijaʀ manakunjas ᚦᛟᚾᚨᚱᚨᛉ ᛬ ᚹᚨᚱᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᛬ ᛗᚨᚾᚨᚲᚢᚾᛃᚨᛊ

(the i ~ ij thing is on purpose. word boundary markers optional)

Thor

There are some unclear phonological aspects of *þun?raz > Þórr. Haukur Þorgeirsson recently addressed this (this article is currently paywalled but for some reason the whole thing loaded just fine for me a few hours ago, not sure why), and I find his conclusions satisfactory, which complicates things. Haukur proposes an earlier *Þunurr but doesn't rule out *Þonarr (or earlier reflex of these). By Haukur's analysis the former is easier to resolve within Old Norse but the latter is more convenient with some other proposals already made, especially by comparative linguists. So we find ourselves with two proposals for the god's name in Elder Futhark-era language: ᚦᚢᚾᚢᚱᚨᛉ *þunuraʀ and ᚦᛟᚾᚨᚱᚨᛉ *þonaraʀ. I'm conditioned to favor *þonaraʀ, but I can't find fault in Haukur's preference for *þunuraʀ within the context of his own paper.

The only reason I'm not siding with it is that it seems impossible to resolve with Old High German donar and Old Saxon thunar (both 'thunder'; compare *eburaz > OHG/OS ebur, not **ebar). So while Haukur's got me convinced that *þunuraʀ seems like a more likely immediate precursor to Þórr, I can't shake *þonaraʀ being what seems to me, at least for now, a necessary precursor to the OHG especially. And for now, "seems necessary" beats "more likely." Of course variation is possible but that isn't a way to handwave conflicting data, it's a whole separate thing to investigate, and I haven't done that yet.

If I were researching something for myself, or for something permanent like a tattoo, I'd keep going and make sure I'm more confident. Even Haukur leaves open possibilities I haven't mentioned here. If nothing else, at least *þunraz no longer seems necessary to maintain (as Ringe 2014 thought following Noreen 1923).

Alternatively, one who does prefer *þunraz as the Proto-Germanic could probably be convinced to allow an epenthetic vowel for Elder Futhark-era language, so we're safe there.

I probably could have left all this out. *þonaraʀ is a fairly normal, mainstream way to reconstruct Þórr. But that wouldn't have been an accurate depiction of the situation. However we work this out, it highlights that what we're doing is not speaking/writing ancient, dead, unattested language. Or, if we are, it's only incidental to the primary thing we're doing, which is trying and sometimes failing to understand how attested words relate to each other, and taking sides in arguments about that.

protector

Selecting a word for 'protector' is difficult. It was only with some hesitation that I went with warjaʀ, a word only attested in compounded personal names like Landawar(i)jaʀ on the Tørvika A stone. It's highly likely to be derived from *warjan- 'to protect/defend.' What's a little weird, though, is that it seems to always be written warijaʀ, in apparent violation of Sievers' Law. I won't get into details here because this post is gonna be long enough as it is, but let it be known the word (and others -- the (i)ja thing recurs a bunch in the Elder corpus) is controversial and my preference for leaving it as it's attested would probably not be universal.

Snorri calls Thor verjandi Ásgarðs, Miðgarðs 'protector of Ásgarðr, Miðgarðr.' To be honest, this isn't the most common use of verjandi; usually it means 'defendant' in a trial, but we can get its meaning from context. We should stop to question whether it could have been used that way some 700 years before Snorri, and once we're satisfied that we can use it we run into trouble again with the non-phonological change of the suffix *-andz > -andi. The *-andz suffix is poorly attested in the Elder Futhark. We have the Tune stone's witada witanda-, but it's a compound word and doesn't give us the nominative ending. Then there's the Eggja stone's suwimąde swimmande and gąląnde galandi which are late enough to be basically fully Old Norse, and doesn't tell us much about earlier language. In Old Norse, these -andi words have the same endings as an n-stem in the singular, and maybe they did in Proto-Norse, but we don't have nominative (or even uncompounded in any case) forms from early enough to be sure. *warjandʀ or *warjanda? Or something else? If not for this, it's the word I'd probably use, and if we want to come as close as we can to technical dictionary accuracy, we'll have to be okay with a shot in the dark at the morphological state of the language.

Also derived from verja are vernd, verndari, vǫrn, vǫrðr. Both vernd and vǫrn mean roughly 'protection' and it makes more sense to say that Thor gives or provides them than that he is them. A vǫrðr is a guard or warden -- Heimdallr is definitely a vǫrðr but I'm not certain Thor is. Most likely, verndari is a later, Norse-era formation, which is unfortunate because it is the word I'd use if we were translating to Old Norse (might go a little bit something like ᚦᚢᚱ ᛬ ᚢᛆᚱ(ᚿ)ᛐᛆᚱᛁ ᛬ ᛘᚭᚿᚴᚢ(ᚿ)ᛋ).

In Old Norse there's also gæta. It isn't attested outside of North Germanic which means relying on internal reconstruction, which isn't great. Kroonen's (2013) *ganhatjan- makes sense and PN *gą̄tijaʀ does seem pretty reasonable as a reconstruction. Semantically, I'm not sure if it's a good fit, though I'm having trouble articulating why. Its meaning should be something like 'to watch, tend, take care of' and in most modern language is more like what Iðunn does with her apples, or what a shepherd does with their flock, than what Thor does with humans, but I don't know that we can be so precise with Proto-Norse and in either case I don't think it's wrong. Actually, perhaps gætir Miðgarðs would be a better way to put it (hint: gætir Miðgarðs < *gą̄tijaʀ miðjagarðas ᚷᚨᛏᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᛬ ᛗᛁᛞᛃᚨᚷᚨᚱᛞᚨᛊ).

The Norse word hlífa might be closer to what we're looking for, though it might only seem that way because we have little evidence to contradict it. In Norse it means 'to protect/defend/shelter (from something)' and works here, but its attestations in other Germanic languages are a little weak and don't inspire confidence in the semantics.

Given all this, I can't help but feel it's best to return to war(i)jaʀ. Though unattested outside of names, it presumably had an independent existence at some point, and is transparently derived from the verb *warjan- 'to defend.' And maybe most importantly, it is actual, attested language. This is a rare opportunity to forget about what I said at the end of the "Thor" section and connect to real language committed to real record by real people.

As an aside, véurr, mentioned way above, is probably etymologically equivalent to vé + warjaʀ, so *wīhawarjaʀ ᚹᛁᚺᚨᚹᚨᚱᛁᛃᚨᛉ.

humanity

We catch a break with 'humanity.' There are complications but they won't end up mattering. There are a few ways to say 'humanity' but they all start man(n)-; we can have our pick of -kin or -kind to end it but -kin is more common, which in PN is *kunja. But the 'man' words in early Germanic languages are a little weird. Sometimes it has one n, sometimes two; it's always two in Old Norse, but it's hard to say if that was true in elder runic language. Fortunately we can sidestep this: in most runes you only write a letter once, even if the sound is long. But to use a connecting vowel or not? Gothic has compounds in mana-, manna-, man-, and mann-. So *man(n)akunja or *man(n)kunja? Well, as Martin Syrett (1994) pounds out, Germanic in general and Gothic in particular are not consistent when it comes to stem vowels in compounds. There's a tendency to spread -a- as a connecting vowel even where it doesn't belong. So we should feel pretty safe that even if *man(n)akunja isn't the inherited form from Proto-Germanic, it was always a possibility. Finally, worst comes to worst, you could just let ᛗ stand for the whole word, given that it's the 'man' rune anyway.

Last, we'll have to put that in the genitive case to make it 'of mankind.' We don't have examples of neuter ja-stems in the genitive from the Elder Futhark but there isn't really strong reason to believe it wasn't *-jas, so: *kunjas.

We've arrived at my answer:

*þonaraʀ warjaʀ *man(n)akunjas þonaraʀ warijaʀ manakunjas ᚦᛟᚾᚨᚱᚨᛉ ᛬ ᚹᚨᚱᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᛬ ᛗᚨᚾᚨᚲᚢᚾᛃᚨᛊ

Anyway I hope you don't mind me going completely over the top answering this, I don't think I realized before starting to answer this that I needed to get it out of my system.

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thorraborinn · 2 months ago

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Would it possible at all for you to point me in the direction of how to translate elder futhark runes ie: “Thor, Protector of Humanity”. I’m entertaining the idea of woodburning Norse art.

lol you're gonna hate this. Nobody asks me shit like this anymore so I'm gonna take it too seriously.

Anyway I'll give you my crack at a translation of the phrase you provided now in case you don't want to read the rest of this but the explanation is after the break:

*þonaraʀ warjaʀ *man(n)akunjas þonaraʀ warijaʀ manakunjas ᚦᛟᚾᚨᚱᚨᛉ ᛬ ᚹᚨᚱᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᛬ ᛗᚨᚾᚨᚲᚢᚾᛃᚨᛊ

(the i ~ ij thing is on purpose. word boundary markers optional)

Thor

Alternatively, one who does prefer *þunraz as the Proto-Germanic could probably be convinced to allow an epenthetic vowel for Elder Futhark-era language, so we're safe there.

protector

As an aside, véurr, mentioned way above, is probably etymologically equivalent to vé + warjaʀ, so *wīhawarjaʀ ᚹᛁᚺᚨᚹᚨᚱᛁᛃᚨᛉ.

humanity

We've arrived at my answer:

*þonaraʀ warjaʀ *man(n)akunjas þonaraʀ warijaʀ manakunjas ᚦᛟᚾᚨᚱᚨᛉ ᛬ ᚹᚨᚱᛁᛃᚨᛉ ᛬ ᛗᚨᚾᚨᚲᚢᚾᛃᚨᛊ

Anyway I hope you don't mind me going completely over the top answering this, I don't think I realized before starting to answer this that I needed to get it out of my system.

#runes #ask #anon #thor

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thorraborinn · 3 months ago

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Is this the only social media you have/way of contacting/keeping in touch with you?

Yeah, I'm not on other social media and you have to know me personally to get my email.

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thorraborinn · 3 months ago

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thorraborinn · 3 months ago

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thorraborinn · 4 months ago

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My name is Osama Basil, a web developer from Gaza. Over the past 10 months, I’ve witnessed the devastation of war firsthand. My office, where I devoted myself to my work, was destroyed, along with my source of income and future aspirations.The situation in Gaza grows more difficult each day, with destruction becoming a constant part of our reality. We've lost friends, colleagues, and loved ones, leaving our community deeply scarred.But I refuse to surrender. Despite the displacement and loss, I am committed to rebuilding my career and life. The war took my job, dreams of marriage, and a chance to pursue a master’s degree in programming and web design. After fleeing to Rafah with my family, I’ve been living in a tent for months, grappling with unstable access to electricity

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thorraborinn · 4 months ago

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thorraborinn · 4 months ago

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The sign [Present/Absent] contains within it a clear reference to the two-foldedness of reality, but Baudrillard writes that this two-foldedness is fundamental to us as subjective observers living within a simulation made out of representations, words, signs, values, not fundamental to the real itself. The fatal error is to conduct a metaphysics on top of this that suggests that the split we observe is real, when it is merely an illusion of reality. The secret is that there is no reality that is beyond the real, reality is made out of the real, in reference to it. Laruelle would say that there is no such thing as Black/White, only Black, a truly all-encompassing Black that glitches momentarily in the eye of the observer, as the observer’s internally rendering system fails to account for the infinite recursion of Black. In the language of Achim Szepanski, rhythm arises from the noise, but is saturated with indeterministic distributions of noise at all levels. For Thomas Nail, everything is chaos in motion, but due to the probability alone, within infinite chaotic movement, patterns of motion arise. Sometimes, patterns are of such disciplined consistency or determination that either we notice them directly, or we notice other more identifiable patterns that metastasise on the surface of the ones we can’t notice. When this happens, the layers of patterns become entangled. Yet, these metastable patterns of motion are always, in the most fundamental way, made of chaos. We can no longer speak of the void, in the traditional sense, the void only exists within the classically rationalist frame, as now we know of quantum fluctuations, and now we know that the opposite of our assumption has always been true: the emptiest of space is rather the fullest, or most informationally dense and thus unidentifiable. We arrive at what looks quite a lot like a Spinozist deity, a reflexive, self-generating universe that moves chaotically, and in doing so, produces metastable conditions, at least conditions that appear stable to an observer. Appearing stable is good, enough to build a life around, to settle, have children, start a project, build a house, a community, grow roots. Yet, we also know explicitly that the conditions we are rooted into will change, and apparently much sooner than later. Nonetheless, it is both miraculous and inevitable that such stable rhythms can metastasise, that such unimaginable complexity can develop on top of them. It can seem as if a leaf falls from a tree, and in the time it takes for the leaf to land, an entire universe is born and dies on the leaf’s surface.

Sinclair, P., 2024. Music is older than the World. Becoming, [online] 27 November.

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