Fáfnir: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Fáfnir, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Fáfnir to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᚠᛅᚠᚾᛁᚱ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Fáfnir.
And the marks themselves: a → á (Stress on a). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and references are built of exactly such small truths.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'FAHV-neer' — hold the first vowel long like 'ah', let the f soften to a 'v' before the n, and trill the final r. 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 fafnir is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: fafnir may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → á — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Fáfnir belongs to the common Germanic heroic stock rather than to any cult, and his closest kin are literary. The continental redaction of the same legend-complex survives in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, where Siegfried slays a dragon and wins the hoard of the Nibelungs — though there the dragon and the curse have drifted apart, the hoard's doom attaching to the Burgundian kings instead.
And it never stopped working. Wagner fixed the dragon's modern image: in Siegfried, the third opera of the Ring des Nibelungen, the giant Fafner — who has already murdered his brother Fasolt for the ring — has used the Tarnhelm to become a dragon and sleeps on the hoard in a forest cave until Siegfried's sword Nothung finds his heart; tasting the blood, Wagner's Siegfried likewise comes to understand the Woodbird and, warned by it, kills the treacherous Mime. Wagner conflated Hreiðmarr's sons with the giant brothers of his own invention, but the kinslaying for gold and the blood-taught birdsong come straight from Reginsmál and Fáfnismál.
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
Fáfnir is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form fafnir is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. 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 Fáfnir stands at /sites/fafnir/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: a → á; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — Vǫlsunga saga, tr. Morris & Magnússon (Project Gutenberg #1152), Poetic Edda: Reginsmál, tr. Bellows (Internet Sacred Text Archive), Poetic Edda: Fáfnismál, tr. Bellows (Internet Sacred Text Archive).
The Register Continues
The register holds 293 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: Eurṓpē (read it) · next entry: Fūjin (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.