My Name

Summary

My name is Reiðrún, or you can shorten it to Rúna.

I prefer the use of the characters ð (eth) and ú (u-acute) wherever Unicode is supported. They are essential to the name's Old Norse identity and provide critical cues for its historical pronunciation. In informal contexts or where character sets are restricted, Reidrun and Runa are acceptable alternatives, but note the pronunciation does not change.

Phonetic Breakdown

For those familiar with IPA notation, the precise values are:

• Reiðrún: [ˈrɛiðˌruːn]
• Rúna: [ˈruːna]

How to Say It

If you aren't as much of a linguistics nerd as me, you can get really close with these approximations:

Full Name: Reiðrún

• The "Reið" part: Pronounce it like the English word "ray," but start the vowel a bit shorter and end with a voiced "th" (like in the word them). Roll the "R" at the start.
• The "rún" part: Pronounce it exactly like the word "rune." Again, roll the "R" slightly.
• The result: RAYTH-roon (Remember: the "TH" is buzzy/voiced, not breathy).

Nickname: Rúna

• The "Rún" part: Like the start of "rune."
• The "a" part: A short "ah" sound.
• The result: ROON-ah.

Runic Spellings

For historically-accurate inscriptions in the viking period, you would be using Younger Futhark. There are two different versions of Younger Futhark: "long-branch," which is the Danish version that was more common for monumental inscriptions, and "short-twig," the Swedish/Norwegian or "Rök" version, which was more frequently used for everyday communication and inscriptions.

Long Branch

• Reiðrún: ᚱᛁᚦᚱᚢᚾ
• Rúna: ᚱᚢᚾᚬ

Short Twig

• Reiðrún: ᚱᛁᚦᚱᚢᚿ
• Rúna: ᚱᚢᚿᛆ

Should You Keep Reading

That pretty much covers everything you need to know if you want to understand what my name is and how to write and pronounce it. If you're also curious about WHY it's my name, then the rest of this may interest you.

The Story Behind the Name

Raidō

When I first got into Norse mythology and heathenry, I found the idea of rune divination pretty early on. The "ᚱ" rune, called "Raidō," is the one that resonated deeply with me.

In Proto-Germanic, raidō translates as "riding". But it encompasses more than just that specific concept. More broadly, raidō represents a journey, movement, change.

All my life, I've considered myself something of an adventurer. I enjoy physically seeing and exploring the world around me. I've always loved hiking and camping. I've longed for many years to move away from my home state to the Pacific Northwest that I find so beautiful to embark on a bigger journey. I've also longed for the journey of sailing my own ship out in the ocean.

On a deeper personal level, I've often seen my life as a great many important journeys.

Finding the therian community and eventually the furry fandom was a major journey I'm grateful I embarked on. More recently, coming to terms with the fact that I was attracted to men while living as a boy who grew up in a Mormon household in Utah, that was a huge journey that has earned me love and many friendships I deeply cherish.

Leaving the church that I grew up in, and the dominant one in the community that surrounded me was the beginning of a major journey. I drifted for a while, not knowing what I believed for years, eventually finding my way to Norse Heathenry.

And more recently, I have come to accept the journey I've been on to understand my gender, and to recognize that I am a woman. This journey may well be my hardest one yet, but it is already proving to be a journey that has changed me for the better in so many ways.

Years ago I chose raidō to represent me because one of my deepest values is appreciating life for the journeys. It was something I always wanted my name to remind me of: to be present in each moment and not worry so much about the destination that I forget to appreciate where I'm standing now, and to remember that the only way to find these journeys is to leave behind your comfort zone, and take that first step.

I chose to use Raidō (spelled as Raiðo in an attempt to update it from Proto-Germanic to Proto Norse while retaining it's "ancient" sound) as my name around 2020.

Outgrowing Raiðo

After I came out as transgender, I had thought about changing the name, because to my ear, Raiðo sounded slightly masculine, or at best, neutral. I assume this is because I speak some Spanish, and so lacking any conflicting linguistic context, an "-o" ending just sounds masculine to me.

Interestingly, when I dug into the linguistics behind the Proto-Germanic language, I found out that the "-ō" ending makes it an "ō-stem" noun, which are exclusively feminine in Proto-Germanic, and therefore would have been used almost exclusively in female names. So from a historical perspective, Raidō is explicitly feminine.

That said, this is a very ancient language that most people are not familiar with, and it had evolved dramatically by the viking age. Viking age speakers didn't have a gender associated with an "-o" ending, and in fact, didn't really have that ending, so to them it would have just seemed like an archaic gender-neutral word.

However, there were more modern issues with the name that I was running into over time that eventually motivated me to make the change.

First, there's the simplest issue: English speakers frequently confused the name with "radio".

Then there's the fact that it is a male given name in Estonia (equivalent to Raymond).

It's also the exact name of one the 24 Elder Futhark runes, and combining that with the given name meant I was constantly fighting to get simple usernames.

And also because my spirituality has evolved beyond those early days. Rune divination is associated with a lot of modern neopagan practices that are not really historically connected, and personally I'm more of a reconstructionist. I care about the real history and culture, and while I'm happy for anybody having fun forging their own path, I just didn't enjoy feeling like I was associated with that via my name.

Reconstructing Reiðrún

I set out to redefine myself through a new name that reflected my values and story, including the deep meaning I had found in my old name, but in a way that addressed the issues I'd come to face with "Raiðo".

I gave myself a few specific rules I wanted to follow:

• the name should retain as much of the deep meaning I found in raidō as possible
• the name should be a historically plausible Old Norse female given name (meaning it needs to have been a sensible name, but not necessarily an attested one)
• the name should be unique enough that I can feel as though I have a distinct identity in the modern internet
• the name should not be easily confused for other words or totally unrelated names
• the name should either be very simple on its own, or have a nice, clear, simple nickname that can be used

Interestingly, from the start I liked the name "Runa", but knew that it was such a common Nordic name that there was zero chance of being unique and using that name on its own. But looking at the typical patterns of Old Norse female names, it did steer me toward using names with the "-rún" suffix, plus I just liked the sound of it compared to some of the others.

Looking through a wide variety of names, nothing really stood out to me immediately, and I realized that a good starting point for incorporating the meaning of raidō into the name would just be to look at whether that name was retained in Old Norse names.

Raidō evolved into "reið" by the Old Norse period, retaining the same meaning, but also gaining an association with thunder because of its connection with Thor's wagon and the low rumble of thunder. In fact, one of the Old Norse terms for the rumble of thunder is "reiðarþruma", which means "rumble of the wagon."

It was used in names, but very rarely attested in any surviving documents. The only surviving attestations, in fact, are for male names like "Reiðarr". Note that this doesn't mean it never did appear in female names, just that nobody ever wrote a female name containing that word down. I suspect if it really was as uncommon in female names as it appears, this was because Old Norse society generally held a pretty strong sense of gender roles. Even though women had a great degree more agency in viking culture than in many other cultures of their time, female given names tended toward more domestic concepts. That said, it clearly wasn't a hard rule, because there are numerous exceptions, and concepts like "war" or "battle" were actually quite common in female names of the time.

So while a female name starting with "reið" was not common, and in fact, seemingly not attested at all, doing so could have been done as a deliberate choice to create a "stronger" name.

The closest viking age female given name I could find to an evolution of raidō was "Hreiðunn" (spelled in the modern day as "Reiðunn" or "Reidun"). This gave me an interesting linguistic trick to play with. "Hreið" means something like "nest" or "home", and so was common in female names. But it is almost identical to "reið". It's so close in fact that we can only tell the modern "Reidun" evolved from "hreið" instead of "reið" because we have the historical context to look back at. Otherwise the two words evolved into the exact same sound.

Personally I love the idea of choosing a first theme to my name that is a little outside of the confines of the domestic terms that were preferred for women in the viking age, because I'm not trying to be a tradwife. But I also love the idea that the first theme sounds interchangeable with another term that is unambiguously feminine.

The name "Hreiðunn" already gave me a very good start. It's a dithematic name, the most common type in the viking age, where it's composed of two words. In this case, the first word is "Hreið", which means "nest", which I intended to replace with "reið", meaning "riding/journey". The second word is "unnr", which means "wave".

I liked the idea of using "Reiðunn", to make the name mean something like "journey wave", but the problem is that, as I mentioned before, Reiðunn is actually a common female name in Iceland, simply because they've dropped the "H" from "Hreiðunn". So this fails the "uniqueness" requirement, unfortunately. Even though it does sound beautiful.

So I brought back in my preference for the "-rún" suffix instead. It sounds quite close to "-unn", but also brings with it a slightly more powerful meaning. The word is "rune", but it meant more than just letters in the viking age. Rune had an association with magic and with secrets, both in the sense of "keeping secrets" and "secrets of the world."

So finally, I had "Reiðrún". It's a little more complex to pronounce than "Reiðunn", but it's very similar. The meaning deepens to something like "journey secret-knower."

The only remaining problem now is that I felt as though the name is sufficiently complex to pronounce that it would warrant a nickname. So I researched how Old Norse female nicknames were derived, and I was extremely pleasantly surprised.

Typically, when a name is a strong feminine noun, as Reiðrún would be, the Old Norse rule for shortening female names is to take the second half of the dithematic name (the suffix), turn that back into a standalone word, and then add a feminine inflection (a noun) to the end of the word to turn it into a weak feminine a-stem noun.

In this case, the second theme is "rún", and the typical feminine inflection is "-a", so the most likely nickname would be "Rúna." I was of course thrilled that the nickname for this name I'd constructed was the name I wished I could have used from the start.

Another possibility, though less commonly attested, would be to use another rule where you instead take the first theme (also a strong feminine noun) from the name and add an inflection to again turn the strong feminine noun into a weak one. You might arrive at something like "Reiða", which is already a word in Old Norse that means "carry" or "equipment", but this term also sounds like it's applying the adjective "reiðr", which means "angry/wrathful". I don't necessarily feel opposed to this nickname, but strongly prefer the "Rúna" version instead.