The register rules: Baugi
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Baugi, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Baugi to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᛒᛅᚢᚴᛁ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Baugi.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'BOW-yee' — the first syllable rhymes with English 'cow', and the medial g is not a stop but a soft voiced glide between the vowels, so the second syllable lands almost like 'yee'. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form baugi differs from the canonical Baugi 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.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Baugi himself has no cross-border reflex — no Old English or continental cognate figure, no cult, no charm; he is a person the Icelandic tradition made for one narrative. The myth he serves, however, sits in one of the oldest comparative dossiers in Indo-European study: the theft of the divine intoxicant.
And it never stopped working. Baugi's afterlife is mostly the afterlife of the drink he failed to keep. Skaldic poetry — the entire court-poetry tradition of the Viking and medieval North — called itself by kennings drawn from this myth: Kvasir's blood, the dwarfs' drink, Suttungr's mead, Óðinn's theft, Óðrœrir's wave.
The Convention's Own History
The Poetic Edda survives essentially in one manuscript — the Codex Regius, c. 1270 — and normalized Old Norse spelling descends from what that manuscript and its siblings actually write. Þ and ð are not decorations: they are letters of the alphabet the skalds used (and English later abandoned), and ǫ is a nasal vowel the normalization preserves because the sources carry it. The register's rule is the manuscript's rule: spell the names the way the tradition that sang them wrote them down.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Baugi is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form baugi shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Baugi stands at /sites/baugi/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál — the mead-of-poetry narrative (Baugi, Bǫlverkr, Rati, Hnitbjǫrg), trans. Anthony Faulkes (Everyman, 1987), pp. 61–64, Hávamál 104–110 (Óðinn's own account of the mead theft; Rati named at st. 106; the ring-oath and Suttungr defrauded at st. 110), trans. Carolyne Larrington, The Poetic Edda, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2014), The þulur of giant-names (Skáldskaparmál), listing Baugi among the jǫtnar.
The Register Continues
The register holds 397 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Bꜣstt (read it) · next entry: Bedwyr (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.