About this site
Corrections
This site makes a lot of specific, checkable claims. Some of them will be wrong. Here is how to tell us.
A site organised around evidence labels has no business being defensive about errors. If something here is wrong (a mistranslated stanza, a misattributed inscription, a rune claimed as attested when it is reconstructed, a codepoint off by one), we would like to know.
How to report something
Use the contact form. The most useful reports include:
- The page URL.
- The specific sentence or field you think is wrong.
- What you think it should say.
- A source, if you have one. A page reference beats a link to another website.
What happens next
- Factual errors are fixed, and the correction is recorded here with its date.
- Contested points, where specialists disagree, are not “corrected” to one side. If we have presented a disputed claim as settled, that is itself an error and we will relabel it contested.
- Disagreements about modern practice are a different case. This site documents what modern rune practice says without endorsing or debunking it, so “my tradition reads this rune differently” is useful context rather than a correction.
What we will never do
Change a claim without noting it. Any substantive change to a claim is recorded here, with its date.
Corrections log
- , About this site. Said the site has four tools. It has had five since the bind rune generator was added, and the count is now taken from the list of tools, so it cannot fall behind again.
- , Thames scramasax, Anglo-Saxon futhorc. Said the seax’s 28 runes are the whole of the epigraphic futhorc. Calc is cut on the Ruthwell Cross and the Kingmoor and Bramham Moor rings, and gar on the Ruthwell Cross, and the seax has neither; what it lacks against the Old English Rune Poem’s row is only ior, which no inscription uses.
- , Vimose comb, Meldorf fibula, Hagalaz, Inscriptions index, Caistor-by-Norwich astragalus. Called the comb the oldest runic inscription anyone can put a date on, and the Vimose and Meldorf pages gave the Meldorf fibula as the reason it is the oldest datable rather than simply the oldest. Meldorf is dated too, to roughly a century before the comb; what it lacks is agreement that its marks are runic. The comb is now called the oldest inscription generally accepted as runic.
- , Vimose comb, Bryggen inscriptions. Said organic material would have rotted anywhere else, and that nothing comparable to the Bryggen finds survives from other sites. Waterlogged ground elsewhere preserves wood too, as at Westeremden; what sets Bryggen apart is the size of the find.
- , Runestones and inscriptions. Said every inscription cited on this site carries its signature. The Scandinavian ones in the guide’s table do; the two English ones, the Franks Casket and the Ruthwell Cross, have none, because English material is catalogued in a different tradition.
- , The history and origins of runes. Said the order of the runes, like their shapes, points to a Mediterranean source. The same guide says further down that f-u-þ-a-r-k is not derived from alpha-beta-gamma; only the shapes and the one-sign-one-sound principle point that way.
- , Runes in games, film and television. Stated two popularity claims as fact: that Assassin’s Creed Valhalla drove an enormous spike in searches for rune meanings, and that popular use of the vegvísir accelerated sharply alongside television of this kind and its adoption by Icelandic musicians. No study has established either, and the guide now gives both as impressions.
- , Elder Futhark vs Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. Said the futhorc is specifically English. It was used in Frisia too, as the other futhorc comparison and the alphabet’s own page say.
- , Kylver stone, Runestones and inscriptions, Fehu, Inscriptions index, Vimose comb, Meldorf fibula, Vadstena bracteate, The other early futhark rows, Gallehus horns. Said the Kylver stone is why we know the traditional order of the runes, and the Kylver page’s summary, which also appears on the index and on the pages that link to it, called it the reason we can speak of a traditional order at all. The bracteates, the Breza column and the Charnay fibula give the order as well, and the order in modern use follows them rather than Kylver at one of the two places where the rows disagree. Kylver is now described as the earliest witness to the order, not its source.
- , Kylver stone. Said Kylver stands alone against the bracteates, the Breza column and the Charnay fibula on both points where the early rows disagree. Breza and Charnay break off before dagaz and othala, so on that pair Kylver is outvoted by the bracteates alone.
- , Dagaz. Said the full ...j ï p z sequence rests on a single bracteate die. The Breza column and the Charnay fibula also preserve it before their rows break off.
- , Mannaz. Said both surviving stanzas for this rune are about mortality. Three survive: the Old English and Norwegian ones are about mortality, and the Icelandic one sets the same "increase of the dust" between "the delight of man" and "the adorner of ships".
- , Perthro, Peorð, Ior. Perthro and Peorð said peorð is the only rune name nobody has explained, and Ior called it "the other" unexplained name, as if there were two. Yr, ior and cweorð, all later English additions to the futhorc, are obscure as well. Peorð is the only name wholly unexplained among those the futhorc inherited from the Elder Futhark.
- , Maeshowe inscriptions. Said the inscriptions were cut several hundred years after the Viking Age. They are twelfth-century, a generation or more after it ended.
- , Kragehul spear shaft. Listed four readings of gagaga (a request to a god, an abbreviation, a metrical charm and onomatopoeia) that did not line up with the four scholars’ readings given on the same page. Three of those scholars expand each ga as an abbreviation and gloss the result differently, and MacLeod and Mees take the sequence as onomatopoeia in a metrical charm. The old list split that last reading in two and counted abbreviation, the method behind the other three, as a rival to them. The significance now describes the two approaches.
- , The Anglo-Saxon runic rings, Inscriptions index. Said the formula on the rings does not mean anything. It has no agreed meaning, which is a different claim.
- , The Anglo-Saxon runic rings. Said the rings are where calc can be seen cut on an object, leaving out the Ruthwell Cross, which carries it too.
- , How runic inscriptions are dated, The history and origins of runes, Ribe skull fragment. Said the Ribe skull fragment, or the letters on it, date the reduction of the futhark. The date comes from the layer the fragment was found in; the letters show how far the reduction had got by then.
- , Armanen runes. Read as though the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft was founded in 1914, the year of the second edition of List’s book. It was founded in 1908, the year of the first.