[Ansteorra] Looking for a translator/artisan...

[Christie Ward]

Zubeydah said:
>Honestly, I know little to nothing about the runic alphabets. I'm looking 
>for something that would have been used in Denmark, perhaps around 900 AD. 
>I am more concerned about authenticity, than whether or not it's a font or 
>hand-drawn. If hand-drawn, the image needs to be extremely legible.

The runes, of course, changed from place to place and evolved over time as 
well.  By the Viking Age, the usual futhark had only 16 runes (which differs 
from the New Age books that usually base themselves on the Elder Futhark, 
which is much older).

For the runic alphabet you need, see: http://www.arild-hauge.com/edruner.htm

Runic spellings are purely phonetic.  In order to get an idea of how various 
sounds were spelled, you can look at how names were interpreted using Lena 
Peterson's Nordiskt runnamnslexikon (Dictionary of Scandinavian Names from 
Runic Inscriptions):

Nordiskt runnamnslexikon (In Swedish)
http://www.sofi.se/SOFIU/runlex/

Nordiskt runnamnslexikon (rough English translation)
A huge zipped PDF. You will need a utility to unzip the file -- for example,
the shareware tool WinZip (http://www.winzip.com) -- and you will need a
copy of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, available at
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html
http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/FTP_Files/NordisktRunnamnslexicon.zip

Each rune represents a sound, and some runes are used to represent more than 
one sound.  For instance, the ON word <dóttir>, "daughter" appears in runes 
as <tutir>, because the <t> rune was used for both <t> and <d>.

It's not particularly simple to translate an English phrase into Old Norse. 
There isn't a "English-to-Old-Norse Dictionary" really available.  Then you 
get to think about the fact that our Old Norse dictionaries show a 
normalized form of Old Norse from 13th c. Iceland -- and there are 
significant differences in spelling and pronunciation in east Scandinavia 
(Denmark and Sweden) vs. west Scandinavia (Norway, Iceland, and other 
colonies in the Atlantic).

Mistress Brynhildr Kormaksdóttir might be able to help you.

::GUNNVOR::