June 21, 2007
Happy Summer Solstice
A solstice occurs twice a year, whenever Earth's axis tilts the most toward or away from the Sun, causing the Sun to be farthest north or south at noon.
Note that this year about 20,000 people converged to celebrate this ancient, traditional holiday:
Thousands of modern-day druids, pagans and partygoers converged on Stonehenge early Thursday to cheer the dawn of the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere - the summer solstice.
I hope this day sees you well.
Technorati Tags: culture, living, religion
Posted by keg at 4:46 PM
August 4, 2006
How to Pronounce the Runes
I made a simple recording of a pronunciation of each of the 24 Elder Futhark runes.
Listen to a pronunciation of the Elder Futhark (.MP3, 1:10, 1.1MB).
I've issued this recording under the Creative Commons License. While you can click the link below to investigate the details, basically you can listen to it and copy it as you like - you just can't use it commercially or derive works from it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
[ recording updated 6 August 2006 ]
Posted by keg at 9:17 PM | Comments (1)
July 18, 2006
A Rune Workbook
There are many books on the runes out there. Some should be avoided like the Plague. I'll stick with the positive and mention one that rather should be purchased.
The Runes Workbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Learning the Wisdom of the Staves, by Lean Wild, is a compact reference and supplement to the runes and runework. The spirit of the book is that it be used as a workbook - instructions on keeping a journal (with template), how to meditate, and lots of exercises to be done to learn and internalize the runes are presented. The book stresses that the primary sources for the runic tradition comes from the 24 Elder Futhark runes, rune inscriptions, the rune poems, and the Eddas.
After an introduction on the runes and the Gods/Goddesses, the main of the book is the presentation of the runes of the Elder Futhark. For each rune, there is a description of the meaning of the rune, keywords about the rune's meaning, relevant Old English, Old Norse, and Old Icelandic rune poem stanzes (translated into English). There are also exercises to help internalize the rune, such as galdra, thoughts to meditate upon for that rune, and ways to enact the rune into your life. There is also a chapter on Runic Divination. The book contains a useful Glossary, Index, and Quick Reference page in the back. Also, there are a lot of references listed, such as organizations and services, academic acknowledgements, and further reading. The quality of the book's presentation and binding is high - the pages are thick, and the layout and artwork are tasteful.
If you are curious about the runes and want a simple book to help you work through them, read them, and write them, then this book just might help you on your way.
Posted by keg at 12:35 AM
July 10, 2006
First Rune Post
If we consider the advice given in the Havamal, it is upon us to learn well the Runes - how to read, write, etc. So, towards this goal, I have decided to foster such growth by learning to blog using the runes.
Of course, I could just type in the unicode characters for each rune, but, for me, that does not accelerate the learning process. Instead, I have created a keyboard layout for my computer that automatically maps a keypress to the appropriate letter or rune. For example, the computer you are using now knows to interpret the press of the key "A" as "a", and the press of "Shift"+"A" as "A". So I just did the same thing, adding the 24 runes of the Elder Futhark.
By doing this as an XML file, which is the interface used by OS X, I can simply swap keyboards when I want to type runes for a while by pointing either to my "runic" keyboard or to the "U.S." keyboard. Also, I left the Roman letter key mappings by default. To type a rune, I just have to press "Option" + the appropriate rune letter. (This means that the standard U.S. keyboard is roughly a subset of my runic keyboard.)
For example, I have mapped Fehu to the letter "f", so to type the Fehu rune, I just hit "Option"+"F", which gives ᚠ.
Ideally this would work when writing webpages, but that seems to depend also on the webserver - whether or not the database supports unicode. The one I am using unfortunately appears to garble the unicode formatting. For example, when writing this blog entry, if I type:
< H2> ᚠ < /H2>
I get
< H2> áš < /H2>.
If I want the rune to show correctly, I have to type:
< H2> ᚠ < /H2>
which gives me
< H2> ᚠ < /H2>.
Note: if you do not see the Fehu rune, then your computer does not have the appropriate font installed. You may want to download Junicode or Code2000.
Posted by keg at 2:07 PM
