Honestly, Thurisaz didn't come looking for me. I have a problem with what he represents. Read the elemental basics of what the rune represents, and I'll expand on it here.
I have a problem with Thurisaz! He's a brutal giant, a Jötunn and a Þurs (monstrous class of giants). The rune poems describe him as "anguish to women" or "torture to women," and the reason for that isn't hard to see. Think about what it would be like to be a woman, kidnapped by the sweaty fist of a giant, hauled helplessly back to his lair where he attempts to sexually aggress you. The physics don't work, to understate it criminally.
More, the Icelandic rune poem colorfully describes him as "husband of a giantess." Who's she? Most translations from the original Icelandic overlook this detail. The original Icelandic, likely penned by either Magnús Ólafsson or Sveinn á Barði, circa 1600, mentions her name, Varðrún:
Þurs er kvenna kvöl ok kletta búi ok varðrúnar verr. Saturnus þengill.
We don't see "Saturnus Þengill" included in most renditions of the Iceland rune poem. People just leave it out! It means "Saturnus, the prince," and it suggests the planet Saturn rules over this rune. Here's the same line rendered into Latin by Swedish linguist Hjalmar Axel Lindroth1, approx. 1913:
þurs, rupicola: mulierum formido, saxorum incola, Vardrunae maritus. Vardruna proprium nomen faeminis gigantum.2
Many people over the last four millennia have taken a crack at rendering these lines into English. What follows is a pretty consistent translation among sources, but note that they still omit the giantess's name and any mention of Saturn.
Thurs - Giant. Torture of women and cliff-dweller and husband of a giantess.3
You're going to hate me, but I asked ChatGPT to translate the Icelandic and Latin lines into English, and here's what it came up with.
- (Icelandic) The þurs is the torment of women, cliff-dweller, husband of Varðrún.
- (Latin) Þurs, the cliff-dweller: a terror to women, a dweller among stones, and husband to Vardruna. Vardruna is a proper name used among female giants.
What we can discern from this is that the kenning "cliff-dweller" means this þurs lives among rocks, by extension mountains, and that he's married to a giantess named Varðrún. Like we see, most translations leave this fact out, dismissing the troll-kona as nothing more than a nameless spouse. But that's not the Old Norse way! Everything had a name: horses, brooms, everything. In ancient Scandinavian society, if you told your neighbor about a man you met in town, and you didn't know that man's name, then no. You didn't meet any man at all.
Varðrún absolutely has a name, and she's listed in the Nafnaþulur4, a section at end of the Skáldskaparmál, the third part of the Younger (Prose) Edda. I summarized all this, plus Norwegian rune poems, in my newsletter "The Giant-Rune and His Wife."5 And in this detour I covered how the band Wardruna got their name: in a 2008 interview with Dark City Magazine6, Einar Selvik says it means "guardian of secrets" or "she who whispers."
Giantess specialist Lotte Motz breaks the etymology down: vörðr (m.) "watchman" + rún (f.) "mystery, secret lore."7 It's no stretch at all to interpret Varðrún as the keeper of mysteries and lore—but then, so were most giantesses in Old Norse mythology. They existed before the gods, they retained ancient knowledge that Óðinn certainly coveted, enough to raise a völva (seeress) from the dead to obtain it. Should we interpret the translated Latin verse to mean that "secret-keeper" is simply a kenning for all giantesses ("a proper name used among female giants")? I don't think so: I think Varðrún's name is unique to her and describes her role, just as Friðr means "beautiful," Skaði comes from "to harm," Hyrrokkin means "wrinkled," and Bakrauf means "anus."
So, no, Thurisaz and I got off on the wrong foot immediately. I was prejudiced against him, and he had no interest in anything I had to offer. However, he entered my life regardless, and when that happens, obstacles rise up to test who you are as a person.
Respecting Boundaries
Early this week I dropped my wife off at work because I needed the car to caregive for my mom. I spent the evening with her, watching TV and setting up her pills for the week, then drove back into the city to wait for my wife's shift to end. I parked downtown and walked over to a bar next to where she worked, ordered a Guinness, and sat out front to enjoy a brief gasp of warm weather.
Some of her coworkers began to drift by. I made note of which ones greeted me and which pretended not to notice me: there's some drama going on in her workplace, with one particularly vindictive coworker who has no reservations about being the worst person she can, if she thinks her cause is just. This hurts my wife, whose enjoyment of the creative people she works with is curtailed by this drama-queen making her feel unwelcome. I think my wife kicks ass, and I fucking hate it when one shitty person slowly chases off the quality people, not only because of that for its own sake, but because other people in the environment turn a blind eye to it, preferring not to get involved.
Her shift ended, more people came out, and some of us chatted outside. Someone (a friend my wife was hurt to lose in this drama) invited my wife to hang out for a while, and this was a convivial environment my wife felt kicked out of because of this unevolved soul. But I took this as a sign of encouragement, nudging my wife, telling her that she was wanted and valued, and fuck it if we were going to let some crappy person take over and boot her out.
In this, I did not respect my wife's clear boundaries: for her own reason, she didn't want to go back there. But with me there, and the invitation, she decided to give it a chance or at least show me what she was talking about. And it was cool to start with, but then the crappy person showed up and slowly drew attention to herself, pulling it away from us, making sure we were alone in this group. We left, and I apologized because I saw what harm my Uruz-driven "fuck it, we own this place" attitude had done to my wife's peace of mind. I brought her right into the lion's den, I didn't take her concerns with sufficient gravity, and she was shattered by the experience. Now I know better, and I have to find other ways to support her. Because she really kicks ass, and it hurts me when she can't see that in herself.
Tearing Boundaries Down
At the end of this week, more drama, scene drama. I'm in and out of an online community, centering on a sexual kink. We talk about it, write stories about it, make pictures about it. It's how we connect. The general topic is heavily siloed, not everyone is into everything other people bring to it, but mostly people just focus on what they're looking for and make loose connections with people.
One group of people undertook to create an archive for these written stories, promoting the next generation of writers, providing all this for free. A couple individuals pointed out a problematic tag (descriptor, content warning) pertaining to a questionable and taboo kink, one that exploits ugly history and racialized power structures, and that's where it gets its energy from. It's that naughty, it's that dangerous; it's also a form of tension release, exploring forbidden things. I mean, a lot of what this community gets off to, even celebrates, comes off as fucked up and deeply perverse … if you're not part of the community and aren't coded to take it in its appropriate context. A lot of BDSM sounds threatening and illegal, if you're an outsider who doesn't understand its history and conventions.
Ugh, it's painful to describe this all in cryptic terms.
So a couple watchdogs pointed out this questionable tag, the admin of the site said they were aware of it, and their decision to include it came after a lot of consideration and conversation. But some people felt the explanation came down with an air of dismissiveness. And the people complaining aren't the type to walk away: if they don't like it, it must not exist for anyone, and you invite awful, ugly behavior from these people until you comply.
As soon as I read about this, my heart started pounding. I felt bad for the schmucks trying to do something nice for the community and attracting this kind of ire. I was at the receiving end of this: I hosted a writing contest for this community, a group of new people showed up and made demands on how I should run my contest, then spread gossip about me in other channels and tried to blackball me in the community, my colleagues watched this happen and said nothing, and so I shut it down. It's hard enough to get something started: when people criticized my contest, I offered to train them in how to run their own. Nobody wanted that. They wanted nice shit provided for them, for free, to which they would contribute nothing. Someone else should do all the work, they just wanted to dictate how it was managed. Seeing it play out again triggered me.
And in many ways, I don't like the direction my former community's heading. I don't speak up, of course, because you can't kink-shame and because there's an ideology around certain topics, with a backlash to any attempt at discussion. The more diverse and inclusive it becomes, the larger the group of people they ostracize and kick out, from lurkers to the founders of the community. I've been struggling with having to silence myself for a few years, hosting raging arguments inside myself, while remaining terrified of what I might say in a careless moment around these watchdogs, what that could do to my reputation. (It certainly couldn't damage my book sales …)
Then Uruz was like, why the fuck do you care? The only thing you lose is your own identity, trying to please a bunch of faceless morality police who just showed up looking for things to judge. You've given up so much, you've made yourself so small, to appease a bunch of people you don't even like and who will never like you. Fuck that: you have a legacy to be proud of. You've done some incredible things no one else dared to do, regardless of whether anyone acknowledges it. You've been through some shit, you've seen everything. Either walk away and own your space, or fucking say something.
And then Thurisaz showed up, hardly saying a word. Just big and solid, looking down at me, waiting for me to make the next move. He pointed to the boundary, a low wall of unmasoned stone, one that seemed to creep closer and closer around me each year. Low enough to hop over. Or I could take some time and dismantle it, clear it out. But that's not Thurisaz's way. If there's a boundary, you fucking smash it down and stomp it back into the earth.
So I spoke up. Not saying everything boiling inside me for the last few years, just … calling a couple things out, speaking my piece. They feel comfortable shooting their mouths off, why shouldn't I?
Nothing happened, not really. There was some back-and-forth, but nothing like I'd been envisioning all this time. I guess that was a boundary I'd built for myself, not to keep anyone else out but to pen myself in. Thurisaz's sneering contempt comes with a little relief, if that's truly all it was.
On to the next rune.
Sources
- Wikidata – Hjalmar Lindroth
- R.I. Page, The Icelandic Rune-Poem
- Wikisource – Rune Poems
- Encyclopedia Mythica – trollkvinna
- That's About the Size of It: The Giant-Rune and His Wife
- Dark City Magazine, "Wardruna – Secrets of the Runes" (Internet Archive)
- Lotte Motz, "The Giantesses and Their Names"