On-Line Rune Lore Course
Part 1
Introduction
This text was originally part of the Rune Lore course offered by the Stav Academy written by Shaun Brassfield-Thorpe with some small inclusions by Phillip Brough. It remains largely unchanged except where errors or corrections are needed. It will be offered here in smaller parts than initially published but some continuity will be attempted and each section should make sense on its own. It is presented here edited by Phillip Brough
This text will outline the skeleton framework of the Stav tradition, although naturally in the introductory module it is impossible to include information on all areas of the tradition. Further areas of the tradition and its teachings will be covered in later modules. There are certain vital aspects of the Stav tradition that cannot be taught through text alone. Primarily these include the stances we perform as a basis for the martial art, health promotion and meditation practice, as well as the breathing and incantation techniques (generally called "Galder"). Details of how these can be learned are included elsewhere on the Stav Academy web-site.
Those who have been working within the Stáv tradition will find much in this module that they already know but almost certainly they will discover some aspects of the traditional "system" for the first time. Those who are completely new to Stáv will no doubt discover much that is at first difficult to comprehend, let alone utilise in a meaningful way. No matter what one's background may be, this text together with the modules in this course are designed primarily to convey information on the tradition (and not to teach a dogmatic interpretation of Stav or the Northern mysteries). Unfortunately it is virtually impossible to write anything without colouring the tradition with one's subjective interpretation. Often personal opinions can be useful, but they can also place limits upon understanding if a single perspective is embraced and other possibilities are ignored. Perhaps the best way of introducing Stáv itself is to ask a few basic questions and give some tentative answers. At times the questions we will consider may seem obvious or self-apparent, at other times some things might not seem very relevant - but the reader is asked to empty their mind of preconceptions for the present and begin with a fresh outlook, ignoring prior knowledge or expectations for the time being. Later on, past experiences and opinions can be re-examined but for now let us assume we have no knowledge of Stáv whatsoever.
What is Stav?
What is Stáv? There can be many, many answers to this question, and unfortunately (or not) perhaps the best possible answers are themselves riddles. Stav is more than simply one aspect of a Northern European tradition, and it is perhaps more than just the sum of its parts.
Stáv is not simply a set of health exercises, a martial art, a divination system, an ancient science, a magical training programme or a religion, yet it contains all of these and many other aspects.
Essentially, Stáv is a way of life, a 'philosophy in action'. Knowing what Stáv 'is' can be useful to the practitioner, but it can never be a replacement for 'doing' Stáv.
Having said all this, it may be useful to explain a little about Stáv - what it is, where it comes from, what it can do and why we may wish to practise it. We will attempt to find a useful, working "definition" of Stáv (a true "definition" is not possible as the tradition is effectively limitless in its interpretation).
For now let us take a fairly dry and academic way of approaching this question. Strictly speaking, "Stav" is a name that was and is used by the Hafskjold clan, a Norwegian noble family who have preserved a tradition of Northern European philosophy. The origins of this philosophy are distant and obscured by the mists of many ages but according to oral tradition, knowledge of Stav within the family has survived since before the Viking age of Scandinavia and dates back to (at least) circa the year 500 CE, some 1500 years. It is uncertain whether the term "Stav" was used outside the Hafskjold family or whether this was just their name for their way of life - the use of runes, a martial art and so on. Strictly speaking, Stav is a term that was used to refer to a runic philosophy expressed in action - through everyday activities. These included the practise of a weapons based martial art (in the past, training in a martial art was an everyday activity not a hobby) and a variety of other areas such as crafts, healing arts and rather more. All of these, within the Hafskjold family, were united by their place within the framework of a common, indeed "universal", philosophy - a philosophy rooted in, and expressed through, an understanding of the runes. The Hafskjold family also worked with different traditional approaches that did not involve the use of runes. These were not originally included in the term "Stav" but had other names, as we shall discuss later. In the modern age, since Ivar Hafskjold - the current and 44th Herre of Hafskjold - began teaching outside his own family it has become common to refer to all areas of the Hafskjold tradition simply as "Stav". This is very convenient but can at times be a little misleading or confusing. Hopefully this course and its companion volumes will go some way to expressing and explaining the many aspects of the Hafskjold tradition, "Stav" in all senses of the term.
As there is no commonly agreed term to describe the Northern European traditions as a whole (some people use terms such as "Asatrú", "The Northern Tradition", "The Germanic Mysteries", "Norse Paganism" and so on) it has also become quite common to refer to the broader areas of traditional Northern European culture, philosophy, belief and practise as "Stav". This is not unreasonable, but it means that at times it is necessary to specify "Hafskjold-Stav" to refer to specifically the Hafskjold tradition rather than Northern European traditions in general, or to say "The Stav martial art" rather than just "Stav" to avoid confusing a feature of combat training with that of the tradition as a whole (although most of the time these are indeed one and the same). So let us begin with a very broad definition of Stav at its widest extent, and then move toward a more specific description of the Hafskjold-Stav tradition.
So Stáv is the name we give to the traditional way of life of the North-European peoples, those who would include the groups we now know as Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, English, German, Dutch and to an extent other groups with a somewhat shared heritage such as the Scots, Irish, Welsh, French, and recent offshoots such as Americans, Australians and so on. In describing these groups, I shall generally use the term "Gothonic". This needs a bit of explanation. Most authors employ terms such as 'Germanic' or 'Teutonic' to describe the non-Celtic North Europeans. I have chosen not to do so as terms such as 'Germanic' can easily be confused with German (and the groups in question are far more diverse), while 'Teutonic' is even more inaccurate as the Teutones were one specific tribe and had little to do with most of the direct ancestors of modern groups. In addition, the terms 'Germanic' and 'Teutonic' have a rather negative image these days because of their appropriation by certain misguided political groups.
The ancestors of the modern Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, English and so on, were all descended from one Gothic group or another - but no contemporary group is known as 'Gothic', and so Gothonic would appear to be the best choice for a collective description. Naturally some groups that I have included in the broadest terms, such as Irish, Scots, Welsh and French, are equally or more Celtic in origin. However, at one time or another large parts of Scotland, Ireland and Wales were colonised by either the Scandinavians (in popular terminology, the Vikings) or by one or more other Gothonic groups e.g. parts of Spain (The Vandals etc), France (e.g. Normandy - the Normans were North-Men, 'Vikings' from Scandinavia) and so on. The list is by no means exhaustive - parts of Russia (the Rús were a Swedish 'Viking' group), Poland, Sicily and even Africa were at one time or another settled by Gothonic groups, and more recently the same can be said of much of America, Australia, South-Africa and so on.
In addition to this, while it is easy to separate the Gothonic and Celtic cultures at their extremes, compared alongside each other we can find much in common, so much so that it can often be difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The Roman historian Tacitus decided to distinguish these two groups simply by stating that everyone on one side of a river was Germanic and on the other side, Celtic - rather than basing any such description on a classification of language, religion, practice or belief. Almost two millennia later, academics still argue over ancient inscriptions as frequently they appear to display both Gothonic and Celtic features. The Celtic and Gothonic cultures are not distant relations, or even cousins, they are far more like brother and sister and this is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in Britain, as can be seen from even a casual glance at this region's history.
It should also be realised that to state that Stáv is a native North European, or Gothonic system, is also to say that it is an Indo-European system. Before we go any further with this, a few things should again be stated. In the past, many bizarre concepts have been propagated about the Indo-Europeans, or to use a rather inaccurate and highly value-laden term, 'Aryans'. The term Indo-European has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the shape of one's ancestors' skulls, the colour of their eyes or shade of their skin, or whether their hair is straight or curly. The only way of assessing in any seriousness whether a group is or was Indo-European is by looking at it's language and culture, not just such vagaries as racial origin. The Gothonic groups are linked to others which all share the same, if frequently distant, Indo-European origin. Although theories about the exact nature of relationships vary from source to source - and new academic theories arise fairly regularly - the basic Indo-European family includes : Gothonic (See list earlier); Celtic (Including Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and various regional languages e.g. parts of Manx); Italic (That is, Latin, Oscan and Umbrian and the modern Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian); Albanian; Greek; Slavonic (That is Russian, Polish, Czech, Croat, Serbian etc); Baltic (Including Lithuanian, Old Prussian, Lettic and so on); Armenian; Iranian (Ossetian, Persian and perhaps parts of Kurdish); Tocharian (Now entirely extinct but once based in the Tarim Valley); Indic (Which includes ancient Sanskrit and Praktis as well as the modern Indian languages).
Not included in the Indo-European groups (but obviously closely linked through the passage of centuries) are cultures and languages such as Basque, and Finno-Ugric (e.g. Finnish). By this definition (of language and culture not simply racial origin) those of us who have - (for example) - African ancestry, and who have - (let us say) - English as a first language, and who have been brought up in - (for example again) - Britain, are indeed as Indo-European or Gothonic as those with the whitest of skins, blondest of hair and bluest of eyes, and such individuals or groups are simply a more recent addition to the Indo-European family.
All this is not to say that ancestry plays no part in the traditional Gothonic belief systems, for it is in fact a vital component in the philosophical framework of the old religion. However, such beliefs never had the taint of racial prejudice. A black person obviously has black ancestry and a white person, white - to suggest otherwise would be to fly in the face of the blindingly obvious. However, to accept that one's ancestry and line of descent, or the local environment in which one lives, is a factor in the creation of the individual is in no way the same as suggesting any concept of superiority or inferiority. Gothonic culture has a recorded history of at least two millennia, and extends back far further into the realms of pre-history. Only with the coming of the modern age, and in particular from the nineteenth century in some parts of Europe, did such concepts as racial bigotry really arise, and we in Stáv view them with as much distaste and disdain as a modern Christian would consider the practices of the Spanish inquisition.
The Runes & Language
It is important to realise that while in some ways Stav is the tradition of one specific family, the Hosling (or Hafskjold family), it also represents in a wider extent a continuing aspect of a cultural worldview that was once common across Northern Europe, and is itself drawn from a far wider, Indo-European culture of the distant past. Part of this can be seen if we look at some words and terms, for example the names of the rune staves, and consider these words by examining Indo-European languages. I have drawn largely on Carl Anderson's work 'Word Lore : Origins of Words, from the Threads of Inquiry' in presenting this section
Stav is a Norwegian tradition but this module is written in English. Both English and Norwegian are Indo-European languages with a common ancestry and origin. This can be seen if we compare some of the terms we use in Stav in Modern English and Modern Norwegian and then trace them back linguistically - for example, one term we use is "Thrall" (in English) or "Trel" (in Norwegian) - this refers to a mindset (someone with a dependent or "slave" mentality) and also to a combat strategy in the Stav martial art. At first glance, "Thrall" and "Trel" seem both similar and different words. A little knowledge of the development of the English and Norwegian languages sheds some light on this. In both Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Old Norse (or Icelandic), the sound "th" was written with a rune - Þ. English, as it developed as a language, retained the "th" sound but abandoned the "Þ" character. Norwegian developed differently, an the "th" sound itself disappeared, becoming in time a "t" sound - So a modern English speaker pronounces the name of the Thunder God as "Thor" whereas most Norwegians would say "Tor". If we look at the words "Thrall" and "Trel" we find that in both Old English / Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse / Icelandic, the word was spelled "Þræll". So in spite of apparent differences in modern speech, we can see that our Northern European languages were once very similar.
The Thor Rune
Language very often can be a most useful tool for examining not only how people spoke or wrote but also how they thought, how their paradigm or view of the world was formed. Here we shall just examine a few terms that are connected with time, the day and night etc. These may shed a little light on the way in which our ancestors viewed the world and how we may use the Stav teachings to change our perception of things in the world around us.
This module is written in a language called English. Why is the language called English? Because it is the language that is used by English people who live in England (as well as of course a great many other people worldwide). The term "English" both for the language and for the people of this region stems back to the Angles and Saxons (and Jutes and Frisians etc) who settled in England many centuries ago and are commonly called Anglo-Saxons. These people were the first English people, and the first English speakers, even though their language (called Anglo-Saxon or Old English) was very different from Modern English. The Anglo-Saxons or Old English people were part of the Gothonic or Germanic tribal peoples that inhabited Northern Europe. They were closely related, culturally and linguistically, to the Scandinavians and continental tribes of Europe in Germanic regions. These Gothonic tribes are, linguistically and culturally, even if not always genetically, the ancestors of modern English speaking cultures and people. Elsewhere in Europe languages also developed, Old High German and Middle High German, Low German and so on all developed into the modern languages used today. Old Norse remained almost unchanged in Iceland, but elsewhere became the modern languages of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish etc.
Over long periods of time, the language a people may employ in speech or in writing changes very slowly, although this rate of change has become more rapid with the development of mass communication such as television and the internet. Usually, these changes take place so gradually that the people speaking the language probably won't notice the changes. But after hundreds of years, the changes become apparent - just as they have with for example British English and American English; Icelandic and Norwegian. Eventually a language can change so much that it can't really be called the same language anymore. This factor can be very confusing if one reads a translation of a myth, a rune poem, a saga and so on. Often a word in, for example, Old Norse, can be translated directly into Modern English using a common word. However, most of the time, the words used hundreds of years ago and those used today have subtly changed their inferences during the course of time - so what a Viking in Norway may have understood by a word such as "snow" may be very different from what an academic from a hot State in America may see in this term. This becomes a very important factor when one reads any of the poetry written in Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon and so on - and many of the myths and information about the runes are recorded as poems - because here the poet (generally called a "Skald") often, even in his own time, used very obscure language with double or triple meanings and puns that are almost impossible to translate into modern English.
So language changes - We have to remember this when we study Stav as very often it is easy to see a term and think one understands it because one already knows the word (or something similar) in English. But most of the terms in Stav refer to concepts that date back through the mists of time and are very different to the way things are generally seen in modern society. This should be born in mind as you read these modules and study Stav - it is important to look beyond the surface and seek for the meanings hidden beneath and within.
The English language has been slowly changing for a very long time indeed, just as Norse has altered also - for over a thousand years. But not only the language has changed in this time, the way people "see" things has changed too. If we could travel back in time to meet and talk with people who lived in England about six hundred years ago, we might have a lot of trouble understanding them. Today we call their kind of English "Middle English". If we went back to talk to people who spoke English one thousand years ago years ago, their English would be so much different from ours that we could hardly understand them at all. Their language was probably as close to modern German as it is to modern English - but always we can find patterns and similarities that can be very revealing. We call the language used 1000 years ago Old English or Anglo-Saxon (just as we call the languages of Scandinavia at this time "Old Norse"). Before that time, the language was so different that it really can't be called English (in fact before the 5th Century CE, "England" and the rest of Britain was inhabited by Britons who spoke Celtic languages, not Gothonic tongues). Any language can change so much that it in time develops to a point where it is effectively a new language, with a new name. But always a language (or a culture or philosophy) is drawn from an earlier time, and an earlier model of existence. Sometimes a language will evolve separately in different times and places, and so despite a common origin it develops into multiple new dialects, languages and forms. In many ways this is and will be the case with Stav; on the one hand it is the tradition of a specific Norwegian family, on the other it is a cultural heritage of Northern Europe, and beyond. In time, as it has in the past, it will evolve and develop new forms - all this is in accord with nature and to be welcomed, as long as the guiding principles of the tradition are understood and remembered.
About two thousand years ago there was a language that is commonly called "Germanic" (personally I think "Gothonic" might be a better term but when referring to linguistic development I will keep to the widely used term) . It was spoken somewhat differently in different places, and in time it adapted and developed into a number of different languages, including English (see earlier for a list). Just as English is descended from Germanic, Germanic is descended from Proto-Germanic which in turn stems from another language we call Indo-European. Indo-European was probably spoken perhaps six thousand years ago. We can learn many different things by looking at how a language changes - and perhaps by looking at how some terms have changed we may see how there can be many ways of interpreting the runes.
Often, if one compares different words in similar languages, just looking at the differences in spelling is enough to see both the changes and the common origins. However, sometimes it is also a good idea to know a little bit about how these words are pronounced. If this doesn't interest you very much, don't worry about it at this stage. Some parts of the Stav tradition - some of the chanting methods we call Galder - involve certain combinations of vowels and consonants. This will only become relevant should you study the Galder methods in the future, and indeed the exact pronunciation is not considered to be very important (Norwegian and English have both changed from their ancestor languages of the distant past and who can say which is "right" or "wrong"?) but what is regarded as being vital is the formation of some forms of vowels and consonant combinations as these alter ones breath rhythm and thus both affect and effect ones total being (body, mind and spirit). Looking at the development and alteration in some words may also give further insights on how languages and world-views have changed, since spelling does not always reflect pronunciation (just look at English words such as "Through" {Thru}, "Tough" {Tuff}, "Bough" {Bow}, "Cough" {Coff} and so on!) - and a word can mean many different things depending on who speaks or hears it.
Here are several examples of many different languages - I shall not explain how to pronounce them all - partly for space and partly because I am not qualified to do so in many cases! I shall try to give some meaningful examples however to try to show trends and patterns in the languages.
Unlike modern English, most languages (including Old and Middle English) have few or no "silent letters". Thus the Norwegian word time is not pronounced at all like the English word "time"--the Norwegian word is pronounced something like "Tee-meh". The letter i is usually pronounced "ih", although in the North Germanic languages í and i are often pronounced "ee". This is relevant when we look at the rune "is" which can be used for the vowel(s) pronounced either "i" or "e" in Modern English (thus the Stav Futhark has only four vowels - aside from "is", the rune "ur" stands for "u" and "oo" sounds (but also for "w" - {double-U} and "v"); the rune "ås" stands (in Modern English) for "o"; the rune "ar" stands for "a" - although as ever this is simplifying this a little).
In general, "e" is pronounced "eh" in most of the sample languages, and "a" is pronounced generally closer to as in English "father" while "o" is pronounced generally closer to as in English "box"- although "long o" (ó or ô) is pronounced as in the English "note". On the other hand, "o umlaut" (ö) and "slashed o" (ø) are normally pronounced like the "ea" sound in English "earn" (thus the rune "bjørk" is normally pronounced "byerk").
The Bjork Rune
The letter "y" is often pronounced with one's mouth in a similar position to how one might say "oo" (as in "boot"), but then as if trying to make an "ee" sound without changing the position of one's lips (similar to German "ü", "u umlaut"). Some letters or letter combinations have special sounds. The "ch" sound as in the Scottish "loch" or the name of the composer "Bach" is represented by these letter combinations:
Anglo-Saxon / Old English / Gothic: "h"
Middle English: "gh"
Frisian / German / Dutch / Afrikaans: "ch"
Thus Old English "liht", Middle English "light", and High German "Licht" are all pronounced in very much the same way ("lihcht").
In Old English, "sc" was pronounced like modern English "sh" - the Dutch and German "sch" are pronounced pretty much the same way.
In every Germanic language except English, "j" is pronounced like the consonant "y" in "yellow" (except in Dutch ij which sounds like "ee"). In High German, "s" is pronounced like English "z", and "w" like English "v" (so in High German "Wotan", another name for Odin, is "Votan"), while High German "ei" sounds like the English word "eye". Italian "ce" and Spanish "che" sound something like "chay".
So much for the linguistics - please read a book specifically on this subject if it is of particular interest to you, but don't bother otherwise; I have referred to and quoted from standard works on linguistics is compiling this information in order to explain a few of the concepts found in Stav, but it is a very simple introduction in linguistic terms and far more could be said on the subject. The purpose of looking at developments in language here is not to become a comparative linguist but rather to examine Stav through this route.
Next Part: We will look at just a few terms for the same concept in different European languages and see how some of these relate to aspects of Stav.