Dusting off the blog to share this video. A group of Norse heathens including religious leaders and scholars came together to make a statement in support of water protectors at Standing Rock, drawing parallels between the Dakota Pipeline and the story of the Eddic poem Gróttasöngr. In the poem, King Fróði maintains a period of peace and abundance through the work of the giantesses Fenja and Menja, but rather than maintain a fair relationship and equilibrium he abuses them in attempt to claim more power and wealth. As a result, they turn on Fróði and spá his downfall (it is implied that they are both predicting and influencing his future; see The Norns in Old Norse Mythology by Karen Bek-Pederson for more on this topic).

Here, the greed of Fróði is compared with Dakota Access — the danger due to the pipeline’s proximity to important water sources, the bulldozing of burial sites, the brutal mistreatment of protesters, etc, not to mention the further contribution to a culture of reliance on fossil fuels.

Donations can be made at http://standwithstandingrock.net/donate/ or by check made out to:

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
#1 N. Standing Rock Avenue
Fort Yates, ND 58538

Here are more suggestions for how to help.

See also this message from Lakota Chief Arvol Looking Horse.

Pronunciation

Totally forgot to post on the blog thing here that I added a page on Old Norse Pronunciation, covering several different points in the development from Common West Norse to Modern Icelandic.

I said it on the page and I’ll say it again here: 100% technical accuracy is highly unlikely. But it’s also not a shot in the dark. Using historical linguistics we can, to a large extent (with a lot of help from a 12th-century Icelander’s description of his own language) recreate the phonemic structure of the language (that is, not the actual sounds, or phones). Within that structure there is plenty of room for both temporal and regional variation. However, the changes that are noted are likely the ones that, once they happened, stuck and spread, making way for future developments in the language leading to the Icelandic that is spoken today.

So no, this is not perfect, and even if it were, I would have no way of knowing, but I feel relatively confident that it’s at least an improvement over most of what can be found on the internet and definitely helpful for a student trying to understand the relationships between sounds.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Update

Since I haven’t updated in forever, I wanted to post to say that I just finished with something that was taking up all of my time and intend to rededicate myself to this website. I have learned a lot in the past few months and am probably going to revamp a lot of the content that’s already on here along with new stuff. I expect that this will start probably next week or so.

Update to “late additions to the runes”

I stumbled across a page from AM 738 4to with an expanded Norwegian Rune Poem with verses for additions to the standard sixteen “base” runes. I had some trouble translating it, but I’ve posted a normalized version of the text and my tentative attempt at a translation on the “late additions to the runes” page. For convenience, I’ll reproduce the part I just added after the break.

For Danerne

I noticed that of the views this page gets, after the United States, most come from Denmark. If any of you have access to Det Kongelige Bibliotek, aside from being an amazing library in general it also has a lot of online resources, including including the usual journal articles, but also whole ebooks for download. That was how I got, among other things, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic by Don Ringe, Runes and Germanic Linguistics by Elmer Antonsen, and Texts and Contexts of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions by Tineke Looijenga, for example.

I think you have to actually connect to the internet through the library – I wasn’t able to download anything from home when I was in Denmark. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass because usually you have to download a chapter at a time, and sometimes the books have figures missing and other annoying problems, but it’s still a great resource.

This probably applies to plenty of other libraries all over the world, I just happen to be aware of this one case and thought it was worth pointing out for anyone who didn’t know, but is interested. I have no idea if you can access the same stuff from other libraries in Denmark but it might be worth a shot.

Some folktales

This is kind of off-topic to the rest of the stuff on this website, but we had already done these and I don’t have a folktales website, so we thought it couldn’t hurt to put them here, since a lot of people into Norse language and runes also have an interest in folklore.

My friend and I (mostly my friend) picked out a handful of stories we liked from a couple of Icelandic folklore collections and translated them for another friend of ours. To my knowledge, these haven’t been translated to English before, but I could be wrong. The originals were found in collections by Sigfús Sigfússon and Þorsteinn M. Jónsson (attributions given on individual pages).

Here is the list. Right now there are six stories.

I don’t have specific plans to add to these but if anyone is interested in more, or stories related to a particular topic, let me know, but it will probably take a while to respond.

Runic transliteration and transcription

Anyone interested in working with actual runic inscriptions will usually not be looking at the actual inscription itself, but a representation given by a runologist who has seen it. Since you need to know what you’re looking at, this is a description of the tools runologists use to do that called transliteration and transcription. Read it here: https://ordstirr.wordpress.com/runes/reading-rune-transliterations/

New page on late innovations to the runes

One of my interests is how late medieval and early modern poets and scribes continued to propagate information about runes, and occasionally tweak things here and there, like by adding new names and kennings to runes that previously were merely variants of others.

The earliest ones mentioned here picked up and are copied with somewhat high frequency (though are not universal). Others look like they are late innovations that couldn’t carve out a permanent place for themselves, but are interesting inventions anyway.

Read the page here.

Hiding runes in poetry

Sorry for the lack of activity, I’ve been very busy with school lately.

I just posted a short description of a practice described better in an Icelandic article from the journal Skírnir regarding hidden messages in rímur using rune names. I’ve noticed that the heathen community seems to have “discovered” the late medieval/early modern Icelandic runic tradition but there is not much written about it, and especially not in English. I thought this might help put in context the massive lists of rune kennings found in the manuscripts.

Read the post here: https://ordstirr.wordpress.com/runes/spelling-with-rune-kennings/

Skálmöld

My #1 language learning tool — the Icelandic viking metal band Skálmöld — is releasing a live CD/DVD of their concert with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra (Sinfóníuhlómsveit Íslands) on December 17th.

If you don’t know them, they have two albums, both of which are concept albums telling heavily Norse myth-inspired stories. The first, Baldur, is about a farmer named Baldur taking up sword and shield to avenge the death of his family (with the help of the gods). The second, Börn Loka, follows Hilmar Baldursson as he encounters each of Loki’s (genitive: Loka) children (nominative: barn ‘child’, plural: börn… you do not get a free pass on grammar for this post).

The lyrics are very cool and actually make great motivation for listening closely and trying to understand (though be aware that it’s usually not exactly beginner-level), but my primary reason for mentioning them (other than that everyone likes the music… even my mom kind of likes them) is that it’s a good idea to listen to the sounds of a language you’re learning spoken by natives.

Both albums have lyrics strictly following ríma-style metres. I’ve found that the alliteration and rhyme makes it much easier to pick up on things your untrained ears might otherwise miss. The vocals are primarily death-metal style. I find them fairly understandable but I’ve been listening to death metal for 10+ years so maybe I’m not the best judge there… but there is also plenty of clean singing and some old-style chanting and lots of choir vocals.

Here is a video they just posted from the upcoming live album of the song Hel from Börn Loka, featuring Edda Tegeder Óskarsdóttir from the awesome death metal band Angist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-n_BxhvkVg

I recommend following along with the lyrics, which can be found here: http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Sk%C3%A1lm%C3%B6ld/B%C3%B6rn_Loka/350048

Gjöriðið svo vel og góða skemmtun :þ