Norse & Germanic
42 findings, grouped by tradition.
Norse34
- FehuThe wealth stanzas are not near-contemporaries: Dickins's 1915 edition assigns the Norwegian poem to the thirteenth century and the Icelandic poem to the fifteenth.
- UruzDickins judged in 1915 that the Old English poet had scarcely seen a live aurochs and may have known one from a drinking horn.
- ThurisazDickins's 1915 note follows thorn beyond runic writing into English book script; its later printed remnant is ye used for the.
- AnsuzDickins's 1915 edition makes Norwegian óss an estuary; the Icelandic poem instead names aged Gautr, prince of Asgard and lord of Valhalla.
- RaidoDickins's 1915 note questions the riding translation and records Chadwick's alternative equipment reading: furniture indoors and harness on the road.
- KaunanDickins’s 1915 edition distinguishes English torch from Norse ulcer, tracing both letters to the earlier k-rune rather than treating their names as interchangeable.
- NaudizDickins’s 1915 edition juxtaposes English hardship that can help with Icelandic enslavement: the latter names a bondmaid’s grief, oppression and toilsome work.
- EihwazIn 1915 Dickins called Eoh's original sound value unknown while translating its name as yew; the tree name does not settle the letter's pronunciation.
- PerthDickins's 1915 note cites Leo's 1877 comparison with a Slavic word for vulva: an early sexual etymology, but no proof of Peorð's meaning.
- AlgizDickins noted in 1915 that the older Épinal-Erfurt glossary spells the plant ilugsegg, which cannot be connected with the word for elk.
- SowiloThe Deutsches Historisches Museum dates its doubled SS-rune badge to after 1933; the modern insignia is a separate object from the medieval sun stanza.
- TiwazIn 1915 Dickins thought Tir's English stanza fitted a circumpolar constellation better than Mars, despite the rune's inherited association with the god.
- BerkananIn 1915 Dickins translated English beorc as poplar rather than birch, citing medieval glossaries and the stanza's account of shoots without seed.
- EhwazDickins's 1915 edition gives eh a horse stanza in the English poem; neither sixteen-rune Scandinavian poem contains a corresponding e-rune stanza.
- MannazDickins noted in 1915 that Hickes had printed a day-rune label above the man-rune’s correct m value: the transmitted chart contains an editorial mismatch.
- LaguzThe Old English sea stanza survives through Hickes’s 1705 printing; its manuscript was destroyed in the Cotton library fire of 1731.
- DagazHickes's 1705 print, the poem's only witness, labels the day rune m, mann, after a scribe of Cotton Domitian A. ix; Dickins (1915) restored d.
- OthalaDickins’s 1915 notes distinguish the earlier o-rune from its English descendant, whose sound value changed to æ: the same inherited sign did not keep one sound.
- YggdrasilHávamál 138 never names Odin's hanging-tree. Pettit (2023) thinks it 'probably Yggdrasill' and the name's sense uncertain: perhaps 'Terrible Colossus', later read as 'Yggr's steed', his gallows.
- The NornsPast, present and future is in neither Völuspá nor Snorri: the gloss has been traced no further back than Paul-Henri Mallet's French Edda of 1756.
- FreyjaYnglinga Saga ch. 4, about 1230, says Freyja first taught the Æsir seiðr, the magic of the Vanir. It names no pupil: chapter 7, on Odin's own seiðr, never mentions her.
- ÆgishjálmurThe name appears in an Eddic poem, but the drawn eight-armed stave first appears in Icelandic grimoires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The old name and early modern picture are usually sold as one Viking-age object.
- The Icelandic Witch TrialsSuch staves are not Icelandic in origin: Margaret Cormack (2025) notes that these characteres appear in European magical texts from the second century CE.
- The Rune PoemsTwo poems outlived their manuscripts only in copies: the Old English, printed by Hickes in 1705 before the fire of 1731; the Norwegian, whose manuscript burned in 1728.
- The Web of WyrdIts first known appearance is on the cover of Jan Fries's Helrunar (1993), which never discusses it; the phrase 'web of wyrd' comes from Brian Bates's 1983 novel.
- Folkish and Universalist HeathenryDeclaration 127, named after Hávamál stanza 127, appeared in August 2016 as a disavowal of one folkish body, the Asatru Folk Assembly, not of folkish heathenry at large. By February 2022 it had 180 signatory organisations in over 20 countries.
- The Elder FutharkRalph Blum's Book of Runes (1982) sold the 24-rune row, plus a blank, as the Viking Runes; Sven Jansson dates the 16-rune row that replaced it to about 800.
- RagnarökRagna rök means 'fate of the gods'. 'Twilight' rests on røkkr, the form Snorri used around 1220 and Lokasenna 39 shares; Cleasby and Vigfusson (1874) called it a corruption.
- Giants and JötnarOdin is half giant in the sources themselves: Snorri, around 1220, makes his mother Bestla the daughter of the giant Bölþorn, and Hávamál 140 has Odin learn nine mighty songs from Bölþorn's son, his mother's brother.
- Elves and the ÁlfarLight-elves and dark-elves are Snorri's division: Anthony Faulkes (2005), following Anne Holtsmark (1964), finds no source older than Snorri, around 1220, for it, and svartálfar and Svartálfaheimr are named in no poem. The older witness is cult: Sigvatr Þórðarson's verse on an elf-sacrifice at a farm in Gautland.
- Dwarves and the DvergarThe maggots are Snorri's, not the poem's: Völuspá 9 has the gods decide who should shape the dwarf-host from Brimir's blood and Bláinn's limbs, and only Gylfaginning, around 1220, says the dwarfs first quickened as maggots in Ymir's flesh. Snorri's own quotation of the stanza even reads 'bloody surf' for Brimir.
- The ValkyriesThe word was English as well as Norse: Old English glossaries render wælcyrge by Bellona, Allecto and the Furies, and Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi, headed as preached in 1014, lists wiccan and wælcyrian, witches and valkyries, among the sinners of England.
- The DraugrGrettis saga never calls Glámr a draugr. Its prose counts him among the aptrgöngumenn, 'again-walkers', and calls him an unclean spirit; the word comes only in a verse on the barrow-dweller Kárr. Ármann Jakobsson noted in 2011 that most modern Icelanders, knowing Jón Árnason's 1862 folktales, call all such beings draugr.
- Rune CastingBy his own account Ralph Blum did not originate the blank rune of his Book of Runes of 1982. He says it came in a set from Redhill, Surrey, in 1976, glossed 'The path of karma'. He adds that he ordered and interpreted the runes, partly through the I Ching, before seeing any runic text.
Germanic8
- GeboThe Gyfu stanza reaches Dickins's 1915 edition through Hickes's 1705 printing; the manuscript itself perished in the fire of 1731.
- WunjoDickins's 1915 Wynn stanza names prosperity and adequate housing alongside freedom from sorrow: its definition of bliss includes material conditions, not subtraction alone.
- HagalazDickins's 1915 Norwegian poem follows hail's cold grain with Christ creating the world: its surviving gloss is explicitly Christian, rather than uniformly pagan.
- IsazDickins's 1915 edition places the broad bridge and blind traveller in the Norwegian poem, not the Old English ice stanza: these images belong to different witnesses.
- JeraDickins's 1915 English poem gives benefits to rich and poor in both Ger and Dæg: the harvest stanza is not its sole expression of shared provision.
- IngwazDickins's 1915 Ing stanza has four Old English lines and calls its subject a hero: the text does not itself identify him as a god.
- The Armanen RunesList dated his runes to 1902, when cataract surgery kept his eyes bandaged for months; Goodrick-Clarke calls him 'the first writer to link' eighteen runes to Wotan's Hávamál spells.
- AriosophyList's runic doctrine began after a cataract operation in 1902 left him blind for eleven months. He was the first writer to match an eighteen-letter rune row to the eighteen spells Odin recites in Hávamál.