One Seax to rule them all...

Status
Not open for further replies.
R

ruel

Joined
Nov 22, 1999
Messages
532
Catching up on this week's posts, the threads on the saexes have me thinking:

I have the most powerful of all the HI seaxes etched by Keith, with the full Futhark taken from the Thames Beagnoth seax. It just occured to me, with all the LotR talk, that I could use the magic of this blade to rule all the others!

sauron.jpg


:D
 
good one. Except there are three or four other rune sets, which contain some runes that the Nortumbrian set does not have. Who can say which set of runes is the master set? If it is determined on age alone, it would be the elder futhark, consisting of 24 runes. (Not to mention, not all the HI seaxes had viking runes ethced on them, one has a Celtic code called Ogham etched on it).

Incidentally, JRR was a fan of languages and thus modified the runes for his own use in Middle earth (which is a name he got from the viking word for the world, Midgard, which means middle yard) [Thus, Utgard means outer yard, and Asgard means God yard. I think the name "Goddard" is related to this last one.]

The runes were part of the dwarf language of writing, and the elves flowing text was an expression of Arabic or devengari,perhaps. JRR had a designer's eye, so he was more considerate of the look of a written language when designing/modifying them.

keith
 
Thats plain silly!:)

Keith

P.S. On the topic of wraiths, the vikings used to bind the hands and feet of dead powerful shamans/vitkis/volvas in their graves so that they could not become a Revenant, a spirit who walked between the worlds and belonged to none. For the Norse, who consulted with the dead in an oracular fashion quite often, the thought of a dead person walking about outside their mound was an aberration.
 
*
the thought of a dead person walking about outside their mound was an aberration.
Click to expand...

I think dead people walking about would be considered an aberration most anywhere. ;)

* That sort of binding was carried out well into the 18thc. in Central and Eastern Europe, and was one of the many reactions to the vampire craze of that time. It was an understandable reaction to what appeared to be corpses bursting from their shallow graves: An effect of post-mortem abdominal bloating. See Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death for a forensic anthropologist's take on it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top