Mannaz
self•humanity•community
In the poems the rune is called: man (Old English) maðr (Norwegian, Icelandic) sound «m» ᛗ
Mannaz comes when you have to see yourself honestly among others.
The meaning
Mannaz is the human being: the self that only becomes itself among other selves. It is about who you are, how you think, and the web of people that shapes both. This rune gathers around the questions of your place among others: your role, your name in the world, the help you owe and the help you are owed. Its wisdom runs two ways at once. Know yourself clearly, without flattery and without cruelty. And remember that no one is fully knowable alone, because you find out who you are, in the end, by how you meet the people around you.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed
Reversed, Mannaz is the self cut off or fooling itself. Isolation that calls itself independence, an enemy assumed where a friend was standing, a mirror you have quietly stopped looking into because you no longer like what it shows. The self is not lost. The honest sight of it is. Come back to the people who tell you the truth, and to the harder truth you keep from yourself. You cannot see your own life clearly while hiding from everyone who could reflect it back.
Reversed readings are a modern practice.
For you
What do others see in you that you refuse to see?
The poems
Man byþ on myrgþe his magan leof:
sceal þeah anra gehwylc oðrum swican,
forðam drihten wyle dome sine
þæt earme flæsc eorþan betæcan.
A man in his gladness is dear to his kin.
Yet each of them has to fail the other,
because it is the Lord’s judgement
to give that poor flesh over to the ground.
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.
Maðr er moldar auki;
mikil er græip á hauki.
Man is the earth’s increase.
The hawk’s grip is a wide one.
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.
Maðr er manns gaman
ok moldar auki
ok skipa skreytir.
gloss homo mildingr
Man: the joy of man,
the earth’s increase,
and the adorner of ships.
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.
The oldest Icelandic manuscript has the runes without their names, and a later one has the names without the runes. That is the same evidence as Hickes putting two names on the wrong runes, arriving from the other side.
Where it comes from
The old poems circle one sober note again and again: a human is the joy of humans. We are gladdened by one another, made warm and real by company. And yet each of us must one day fail the other, because all of us are mortal. Mannaz holds both of these truths without flinching from either. It does not pretend we will not lose the people we love. It says: knowing that, cherish them all the more, for the company of others is on loan, and that is exactly what makes it precious.
One phrase all three reach for. Moldar auki stands in both Norse poems, and the English poem says the same thing at four times the length. The earth is going to get more of you. England blames God for it and Norway states it and moves on to a hawk, for the rhyme.
The Icelandic stanza opens with a quotation. Maðr er manns gaman is Hávamál 47, and Dickins says it is doubtless borrowed. So the fifteenth century put the most quoted line in Old Norse ethics directly on top of the line about dirt, and the whole stanza is that collision. Man is man's delight. Man is the earth’s increase. Man is what makes a ship look good.
The rune names printed above these stanzas were not written by the poet. They were added by later hands, and in the 1705 edition that preserves the poem two of them sit on the wrong runes. Day is labelled Man and Man is labelled Day. Dickins traces both to a different manuscript, Domitian A.ix, and calls the scribe who moved them ignorant.