Arawn: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record

The internet spells Arawn more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Arawn
• Original script: —
• Pantheon: Celtic
• Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
• False forms on record: 0
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 33 of 397

The Canonical Form

The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Arawn — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.

No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form the tradition’s convention demands.

Where the Flattened Form Stands

The plain form arawn differs from the canonical Arawn only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.

The Register of False Forms

No circulating form of this name currently qualifies as false under the register's standard — a rare standing. The spelling is short, sturdy, and rarely mangled.

The Contested Forms

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the tradition’s standard — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Arawn. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

The Convention's Own History

Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.

What the Address Bar Allows

IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.

That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.

Where the Name Stood First

Arawn is a textual figure: no inscription, votive deposit, or cult site names him, and the epigraphic record of pre-Christian Wales — Latin and ogham memorial stones of roughly the fifth to seventh centuries — records personal names, not theonyms. His evidence is manuscript evidence. The Four Branches survive complete in the White Book of Rhydderch (Aberystwyth, NLW Peniarth MSS 4–5, c. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (Oxford, Jesus College MS 111, c. 1382–1410), with earlier fragments in Peniarth 6; the tales' date of composition is argued rather than documented — Ifor Williams placed them in the later eleventh century, and current scholarship generally holds a range around 1060–1120. The geography of the tale is real: Glyn Cuch, where the insult happens, is identified with the valley of the River Cych on the Pembrokeshire–Carmarthenshire border, inside the Dyfed the story governs. The nearest material echo of the Otherworld hunt is literary: the Book of Taliesin, the manuscript that preserves Preiddeu Annwfn, is a fourteenth-century Welsh codex (NLW Peniarth MS 2). The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.

The Verdict

The register rules for Arawn, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. arawn carries the name freely — it differs only in display, and the register says so without reservation. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /sites/arawn/ enforces it.

The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — The Mabinogi — First Branch (Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed): trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford, 2007); Welsh text ed. Ifor Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (1930), The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest (1838–49), Preiddeu Annwfn ('The Spoils of Annwn'), Book of Taliesin — the cauldron of the Head of Annwfn.

The Register Continues

Entry 33 of 397 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.

Continue the register — previous entry: Arachnē (read it) · next entry: Archḗ (read it).

The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.