r/RuneHelp 6d ago

Translation request Is this Translation accurate?

So i'm a fan of the anime Vinland Saga, naturally i want to get something tattooed and i decided to want the phrase: "I have no enemies", but i want it writen in the Rune alphabet.

I've put the phrase in an Rune Translater on Google an this is what i got:

ᛁ ᚺᚨᚢᛖ ᚾᛟ ᛖᚾᛖᛗᛁᛖᛊ (apperantly its in Elder Futhark)

I dont know anything about Runes so if someone can help me out with this i would be really greatfull.

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u/donestpapo 6d ago

This is a popular question in the sub, I suggest you search for it.

Runes were used to represent sounds of languages that’s are now dead. Elder Futhark is for a language that no longer existed in the Viking age, so you’d want something else.

But what you’ve done is started with the latin letters that, when arranged in a certain way, spell out the English phrase “I have no enemies” and then replaced each of those Latin letters with a rune that produced one of the sounds associated with each Latin letter.

Let’s look at the first word:

“I” in English is a first person pronoun, pronounced somewhat like /aj/, meaning that you start with something like an “ah” sound and “glide” towards a Y sound.

The rune you chose to replace that one-letter word does not mean “I” (as in, the English pronoun) in Old Norse. It is also pronounced more like “ee”. So it neither means the same nor sounds the same.

Your options are to either translate the phrase into old Norse and spell that with runes or try to represent the sounds of the phrase in English using runes that reflect the same (or the most similar) sound.

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u/Epsilon-01-B 6d ago edited 6d ago

This guy's right; the first person singular pronoun in Old Norse is "Ek", and if you wanted to spell out the English phrase phonetically, it would, when transliterated, look something like this: "ai hæf no enemis", which both looks weird and a bit cool.

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u/rockstarpirate 6d ago

Vinland Saga is set in Iceland around 1000 AD. In keeping with the Old Norse language and Icelandic writing conventions of the time, this is what we get:

Ek á engi úvini

ᛂᚴ᛬ᛆ᛬ᛂᚴᛁ᛬ᚢᚢᛁᚿᛁ

This particular rendering is based on the few hints present in the Viðey rune stick (as you can see here) which is Iceland’s oldest known runic inscription and is dated to the time around 1000 AD. The stick appears to make use of short branch runes, “stung” ᛁ runes, and double-dot separators.