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. The rune poems describe him as “anguish to women” or “torture to women,” and the reason for that isn’t hard to see. Imagine being a woman, kidnapped by the sweaty fist of a giant, hauled helplessly back to his lair where he attempts sexual aggression. The physics don’t work, to criminally understate it.
More, the Icelandic rune poem describes him as “husband of a giantess.” Who is she? Most translations overlook this detail. The original Icelandic, likely penned by Magnús Ólafsson or Sveinn á Barði circa 1600, names her: Varðrún.
Þurs er kvenna kvöl ok kletta búi ok varðrúnar verr. Saturnus þengill.
People quietly omit “Saturnus Þengill” (“Saturn, the prince”) from many translations, even though it clearly situates this rune astrologically. Swedish linguist Hjalmar Axel Lindroth rendered the same line into Latin around 1913:
þurs, rupicola: mulierum formido, saxorum incola, Vardrunae maritus.
From this we learn that the þurs is a cliff-dweller, a terror to women, and explicitly the husband of Varðrún — whose name appears in the Nafnaþulur. Giantesses are never nameless in Old Norse myth; everything has a name. To meet someone without knowing their name was, culturally speaking, not to have met them at all.
Varðrún’s name breaks down cleanly: vörðr (“watchman”) and rún (“secret lore”). A keeper of mysteries. And that, of course, is the domain of giantesses. They predate the gods, retain ancient knowledge, and are the ones Óðinn must always seek out, bargain with, or coerce.
So no, Thurisaz and I didn’t get along immediately. I was prejudiced, and he didn’t care. He entered my life anyway, and when that happens, obstacles rise to test who you are.
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.