EN (English)
ᚱ
Reið
riding, a journey; a wagon; thunder
Progress that somebody else is paying for in effort
- Sound
- r /r/
- Position
- 5
- Group
- Freyr's ætt
- Descended from
- Elder Futhark Raidho (*raidō)
- Unicode
- U+16B1
- Timing
- In transit
- Yes / No
- Yes, and check who is doing the work
Upright
- a journey
- riding
- movement
- a route
- progress
- the toil of the carrier
- a vehicle
- commitment to a course
In the rune poems
Ræið kveða rossom væsta; Reginn sló sværðet bæzta.
Riding is said to be the worst thing for horses; Reginn forged the finest sword.
Reið er sitjandi sæla ok snúðig ferð ok jórs erfiði. iter ræsir.
Riding is a blessed sitting, a swift journey, and the horse's toil. Journey; prince.
Across the scripts
ᚱ
Raidho
The ancestor, reconstructed as *raidō. Its Old English stanza contrasts how easy riding sounds indoors with how hard it is on a real horse.
ᚱ
Reið
Younger Futhark
Unchanged in shape and name. Old Norse reið also means a wagon and, separately, thunder, which is where Þórr's connection comes in.
ᚱ
Rad
Old English rad gives both road and raid, which began as one word: a ride, and a ride made against someone.
Three meanings in one Norse word
Old Norse reið carries more than the Elder Futhark name did, and the extra senses matter for how the rune reads.
It means riding, the act. It means a wagon or chariot. And it means thunder — reið in the sense of the rolling noise, which is why Þórr, whose wagon is drawn across the sky by goats, is sometimes connected to this rune in modern practice.
The wagon sense is the load-bearing one historically. Germanic religion has a documented processional wagon tradition: Tacitus describes the goddess Nerthus carried through the countryside in a covered cart, and the Oseberg ship burial contained an elaborately carved wagon that had never been used for ordinary transport. Movement in procession was religious movement.
None of that is stated about the rune. It is the semantic field the name sits in.
Both poems side with the horse
This is the consistent thread and it survives across all three rune-poem traditions, which is rare.
The Norwegian stanza is blunt: riding is said to be the worst thing for horses. The Icelandic gives three kennings and puts the same point third, after the pleasant ones: a blessed sitting, a swift journey, and jórs erfiði, the horse's toil.
The Old English stanza on the Elder Futhark page makes a related move by contrasting the warrior talking about riding indoors with the man actually crossing the mile-paths.
Three independent traditions, three reminders that the comfort belongs to one party and the labour to another. For a rune commonly glossed in modern books as travel and progress, that is a consistent and easily ignored qualification.
Reginn and the sword
The Norwegian second line looks like another metrical filler, and it is — væsta against bæzta — but the name it reaches for is not random.
Reginn is the dwarf-smith of the Völsung cycle: foster-father to Sigurðr, brother to Fáfnir, and the maker or reforger of the sword Gramr, with which Sigurðr kills the dragon. Reginn then plans to kill Sigurðr for the hoard and is killed himself.
The Norwegian poem uses these fragments repeatedly. Fróði appears under Ár, Loki under Bjarkan, Reginn here. A student learning the alphabet was also being walked past the edges of the heroic corpus, and the poem assumes they already know the stories well enough for a name to be enough.
That is what these texts are: memory aids for a culture holding a large body of material orally.
In reading
Reið is movement with a route, and the sixteen-rune reading of it is essentially the Elder Futhark's with the horse pushed further forward.
It marks a thing under way: a journey, a project mid-course, a process with stages that have to happen in order. It is not the decision to begin and it is not the arrival.
What the Norse poems make it ask, more insistently than the English one, is who is carrying the effort. In a working question that is usually literal — which person or resource is actually bearing the load — and in a personal one it tends to point at whoever is being ridden.
The wagon sense gives a secondary reading of ritual or procedure, movement whose order is the point. That is a defensible extension rather than something the poems say.
As a letter
Straightforward /r/, and one of the most common letters in the corpus. Old Norse grammar is full of it, since the nominative singular of a great many masculine nouns ends in -r.
It is worth distinguishing from ᛦ ýr, which represents a different r-like sound, the reflex of the old final z. For several centuries Scandinavian carvers kept the two apart, and where they stop doing so is a useful way of dating an inscription.
Questions to sit with
- Who is actually carrying the effort in this, and are they going to hold up?
- Are you on the horse or are you the horse?
- The route has stages that have to happen in order. Which one are you trying to skip?
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