Futhark 101

[bloodygranuaile]

I couldn’t decide what to read next out of my big two bookshelves full of TBR stuff, so I picked up something short and sweet that wouldn’t take enough time to make me cranky if I decided it wasn’t what I wanted, although possibly it would wreck my average page count for the year. The short and sweet something I picked up ended up being Bjorn Jonasson’s A Little Book About the Runes, which, true to its name, is a tiny little book that walks you through the runic alphabet (better known as the futhark). It is very cute and easy-to-read and uses an ancient Nordic rune poem to walk you through the names of each rune. The poem is apparently one of three fairly similar poems, known as the Icelandic, the Norwegian, and the Anglo-Saxon rune poems. This one is the Icelandic rune poem, although there is no particular reason to believe it is specifically Icelandic in origin. Anyway, it’s a nice little baby’s-first kind of reference to have on hand in case I need to use runes for nerd shit in the future.