Bragi: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
The internet spells Bragi 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: Bragi
- Original script: ᛒᚱᛅᚴᛁ
- Pantheon: Norse
- Convention: normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 68 of 397
The Canonical Form
The attested form is ᛒᚱᛅᚴᛁ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Bragi.
No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them demands.
Where the Flattened Form Stands
The plain form bragi differs from the canonical Bragi 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 — normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Bragi. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.
The Convention's Own History
Old Norse orthography is a primary source in itself: þ (thorn) and ð (eth) are letters the language used natively, not transliteration marks — English once had them too, and lost them. ǫ (o with ogonek) is a nasal vowel with its own saga-era history, and normalized Old Norse spelling preserves it because the Eddas' editors do. To write th for þ or o for ǫ is not modernization; it is a different spelling of a different word. The Eddic poems survive in one manuscript tradition each — the register spells the names the way those manuscripts do.
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
Bragi is a textual god: no runestone invokes him, no votive deposit names him, and the place-name record offers no secure theophoric site — the silence that leads Simek and Lindow to weigh him as a late literary personification rather than an old cult figure. The runic corpus does know the name, but only as an ordinary human anthroponym: Bragi is well attested as a Viking-Age man's name in Scandinavian inscriptions, which is precisely the problem for cult-hunters, since none of the carvings can be tied to the god. The witnesses are therefore the manuscripts. Lokasenna and Grímnismál survive in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda; Gylfaginning and the Skáldskaparmál frame in the Codex Regius and sister manuscripts of the Prose Edda, with Skáldatal in the Uppsala codex; Hákonarmál rides inside the Heimskringla tradition and Eiríksmál inside Fagrskinna. The famous image of Bragi as an old harper belongs to nineteenth-century art, not to the material record: no medieval carving, pendant, or picture stone shows him. 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 Bragi, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. bragi 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/bragi/ enforces it.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Lokasenna 11–18 (Bragi bars Loki from the feast; Iðunn's intervention); Grímnismál 44 (Bragi best of skalds, in the litany of the best), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 26 (the catalogue portrait: eloquence, bragr from his name, husband of Iðunn); Skáldskaparmál (the frame with Ægir; the mead of poetry; the abduction of Iðunn; kennings for Bragi; quotations of Bragi Boddason's Ragnarsdrápa), Eyvindr Finnsson skáldaspillir, Hákonarmál (Bragi and Hermóðr sent to greet King Hákon), preserved in Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Hákonar saga góða.
The Register Continues
Entry 68 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: Blodeuwedd (read it) · next entry: Brigid (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.