On Eir: a letter to a colleague
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Eir, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Eir to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᛁᚱ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Eir.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'AYR' — one syllable: glide from the e of 'bed' into 'ee', and close with a light trilled r; modern Icelanders say it nearly the same way. 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 eir differs from the canonical Eir 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. No interpretatio romana ever found Eir a Latin name: the classical authors who mapped the northern gods left her unmentioned, and the medieval Icelandic writers who knew her wrote no equation. Her real company is native.
And it never stopped working. Eir's afterlife is quiet and remarkably alive. The name never died in the North: Eir remains a living Icelandic given name, and its family survives in the everyday verb eira, 'to spare, to show mercy'.
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
Eir is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form eir 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 Eir stands at /sites/eir/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 35 (Eir third among the ásynjur, 'the best physician'); Skáldskaparmál þulur (Eir among the valkyrie names), Poetic Edda: Fjölsvinnsmál 38-40 (the nine maidens at Menglöð's knees; the promise of protection from sickness), in the Svipdagsmál pair, The Second Merseburg Charm (Wodan's healing charm), in Braune-Ebbinghaus, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch.
The Register Continues
This is one of 397 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Eggþér (read it) · next entry: Ēl (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.