Ansuz
voice•wisdom•message
In the poems the rune is called: os (Old English) óss (Norwegian, Icelandic) sound «a» ᚨ
Ansuz comes when a word is trying to reach you.
The meaning
Ansuz is the spoken word and the breath that carries it. It is about speaking truly and listening closely. Two halves of the same craft. This rune gathers where a message is on its way to you. It may be a word from someone older, a dream you half remember, a passing remark that lodges in your chest for no clear reason. Some of the most important things arrive quietly, and pass by anyone too busy to notice. Ansuz asks you to slow down enough to hear.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed
Reversed, Ansuz is communication tangled. Words twisted on the way, or heard wrong, or never said at all. Sometimes it warns of someone speaking sweetly to lead you somewhere. Sometimes it is your own honesty, held back until it curdles into resentment. Before you decide you have been wronged or misunderstood, check whether the true words were ever actually spoken: plainly, out loud, by you.
Reversed readings are a modern practice.
For you
What needs to be spoken — or heard?
The poems
Os byþ ordfruma ælcre spræce,
wisdomes wraþu ond witena frofur
and eorla gehwam eadnys and tohiht.
The mouth is where all speech begins,
the prop of wisdom, the comfort of those who know,
and to everyone a blessing and something to hope for.
why the poem never names it
The poem never names the rune. Each stanza is a riddle whose answer is the name, and the name printed above it in every edition was put there by a later hand.
Óss er flæstra færða
fǫr; en skalpr er sværða.
The river-mouth carries most journeys.
A scabbard carries swords.
on the rhyme
The Norwegian poem is written in rhyming couplets. The second line rhymes with the first, and often that is the strongest thing connecting them. Dickins calls each couplet two semi-detached statements of a gnomic character.
Óss er aldingautr
ok ásgarðs jǫfurr
ok valhallar vísi.
gloss Jupiter oddviti
The god: aged Gautr,
prince of Asgard,
lord of Valhalla.
on the last two words
Each Icelandic stanza ends with two words the poem does not need. One is a Latin equivalent of the rune name, the other an Old Norse word for king beginning with the same letter. The manuscript is running a glossary and an alphabetical king-list through the poem at the same time.
where these texts come from
The earliest surviving list of this row was written in the ninth century, and it says nothing about what any rune means. Abecedarium Nordmannicum, 9th century.
Text after Dickins 1915. Checked against Halsall 1981. Translated here from the originals.
Where it comes from
Ansuz belongs to Odin, the god who hung nine nights on the world-tree, wounded and without food, to win the runes from the dark. He gave up an eye at the well of wisdom for a single deeper draught of knowing. To the North, words were never cheap. They were paid for, and they carried weight: an oath spoken aloud could bind a life. Something of that price lives in every word you say on purpose. Ansuz remembers it.
This is the strangest divergence in the futhark. The name *ansuz meant god. Only Iceland still says so, and it names Odin outright. England reads the word as Latin os, a mouth. Norway reads it as óss, the mouth of a river.
Dickins suspects the church. In England and in Norway there were reasons not to open a stanza with a heathen god, and Iceland wrote later and did not flinch. Dickins will not even commit to a name for the English rune here, and prints a question mark where the name should be.
The Icelandic manuscript goes further than its own verse. Beside this stanza it writes Jupiter, and beside Thurisaz it writes Saturnus. The same hand is quietly translating the North into Rome down the whole alphabet, and it puts the chief of the gods where the chief of the gods belongs.