The canonical register: Draupnir
The internet spells Draupnir 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: Draupnir
- Original script: ᛏᚱᛅᚢᛒᚾᛁᚱ
- 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. 101 of 397
The Canonical Form
The attested form is ᛏᚱᛅᚢᛒᚾᛁᚱ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Draupnir.
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 draupnir differs from the canonical Draupnir 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: Draupnir. 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
Draupnir is a literary object: no inscription names it, and no find can be identified with it — but the ring it describes belonged to one of the best-attested object-classes in the northern record. Gold and silver arm-rings are the standard currency of Viking-Age hoards: the great Gotlandic deposits, crowned by the Spillings hoard of 1999 (the largest Viking silver hoard yet found), are full of ring-money cut and weighed as bullion, the archaeological reality behind the poetry's ring-giver. The ring's social weight is documented from both sides of the conversion: Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 4) describes a twenty-ounce ring lying on the altar of the hof at Þórsnes, on which all oaths were sworn, and the Forsa ring of Hälsingland — an iron oath-ring bearing a runic law inscription, the oldest legal text in Scandinavia — survives as the practice's one famous material witness. Earlier still, the ring-swords of the Vendel-period elite, with a ring mounted on the pommel as the sign of the oath between lord and man (attested at Valsgärde and famously at Sutton Hoo), show the ring as the badge of the gift-bond itself. The manuscript witnesses are the usual two codices: Skáldskaparmál and Gylfaginning in the Codex Regius of the Prose Edda (GKS 2367 4to, c. 1300–1350), Skírnismál and Völuspá in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda (GKS 2365 4to, c. 1270). 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 Draupnir, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. draupnir 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/draupnir/ enforces it.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Skáldskaparmál (the wager of Loki's head; the forging of Gullinbursti, Draupnir, and Mjǫllnir; the judgment of the treasures — 'every ninth night eight rings of equal weight drip from it'), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 49 (Óðinn lays Draupnir on Baldr's pyre; Baldr sends it back from Hel with Hermóðr as a keepsake), Poetic Edda: Skírnismál 21–22 (Skírnir offers Gerðr 'the ring that was burned with Óðinn's young son; eight of equal weight drip from it every ninth night' — read as Draupnir) and Völuspá, dvergatal (Draupnir among the dwarf-names).
The Register Continues
Entry 101 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: Drákōn (read it) · next entry: Durgā (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.