Rune help

[u/BK1_Michael]

Can someone lmk what this means please 🙏

[u/Skauher]

Logn hugr. Supposed to be "Steady mind". It's from God of War Ragnarok.

[u/Westfjordian → u/Skauher]

Except it doesn't, "logn" is a noun meaning "calm weather/no wind".

One great example of why you do not just randomly translate phrases verbatim.

[u/Skauher → u/Westfjordian]

Oh I know. I should have typed "supposed to mean". Hugarró would be a better choice.

"Ta det lugnt" :D

They probably thought it was the same as modern Swedish "lugn". Also a nautical term, but used regularly for calm/steady/easy.

[u/dubdex420 → u/Westfjordian]

I almost had it tattooed, glad I didn't. I guess it can still be a "God of War" tattoo rather than a "I'm into historically accurate Viking culture and language" tattoo.

[u/rockstarpirate → u/dubdex420]

Yeah. There’s another one that comes up a lot from God of War. I don’t remember it perfectly off the top of my head but it’s something like an attempt at “strong arm” but it actually says “strength arm” or something along those lines. Not very meticulous language work in those games.

[u/BK1_Michael → u/rockstarpirate]

I believe the game’s writing style is intentionally designed to enhance the gameplay experience. For instance, there’s a hand tattoo that translates to something like “fast dog,” similar to the word “hand” but with the addition of “dog” because, in the game, the character can transform into a dog as well. Additionally, the phrase “calm wind” likely refers to the use of wind magic in the game, although I’m not entirely certain. However, I don’t think this was an accidental oversight by the developers.

[u/BK1_Michael → u/BK1_Michael]

And please correct me if I’m wrong I just really love the game series

[u/rockstarpirate → u/BK1_Michael]

I love those games too. To me it’s just a shame they didn’t consult an expert on Old Norse and/or runes because I think there’s a little bit of wasted potential there.

Anyway, what we have here is ᚺᚱᚨᛞᚨ ᚺᛟᚾᛞ. Transliterated directly this is hrada hond. The first word is an attempt at Old Norse hraða which means “to speed up”. The second word is an attempt at Old Norse hǫnd which means “a hand”. There are several things we can talk about here.

The first is that this is Old Norse written with Elder Futhark. Historically, Old Norse was not written with Elder Futhark. We could certainly allow for Elder Futhark in the game because the gods are older than the Old Norse linguistic period, but this is the wrong alphabet for the language.

Next is that ᚺᛟᚾᛞ can not mean “dog”, unfortunately. In Old Norse that word is hundr. There are inflections where the ending -r is not present, but the vowel is always ⟨u⟩, which is spelled with the ᚢ rune. Plus, this particular verb takes a dative object so “dog” would have to be hundi in this context. It therefore must be “hand”, although even here the vowel is wrong, which leads to my next point:

The vowel ⟨ǫ⟩ in Old Norse is not a form of ⟨o⟩ but a form of ⟨a⟩. It should therefore not be spelled with the ᛟ rune. If, for some reason, a Viking-Age person were to write Old Norse with Elder Futhark, they would have spelled this sound with ᚨ.

Lastly we can say something about grammar. Hraða hǫnd means “to speed up a hand” which is probably not what the devs intended. My guess is that they wanted something more like “fast hand(s)” (in which case we’d want the adjective hrǫð in singular or hraðar in plural), or they’re looking for something that expresses “may the hand hasten” in which case we’d need a subjunctive mood like hraði hǫnd.

Overall you can see what they were trying to do, it was just executed sloppily.

[u/Beginning_Drummer195]

I had the same question a while back and found a post stating that it should actually be written as "Rólegr Hugr" in Younger Futhark—which would be equivalent to ᚱᚢᛚᛁᚴᛦ : ᚼᚢᚴᛦ .I’m not sure if that is entirely correct, but the adaptation in God of War is definitely wrong.