Freyr — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Freyr, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Freyr to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᚠᚱᛅᚢᚱ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Freyr.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: fRAY-ur — the ey is a single falling diphthong (between the 'ay' of 'day' and the 'oy' of 'boy'), and the final -r is the nominative ending, lightly syllabic as in modern Icelandic Freyr. 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 freyr differs from the canonical Freyr 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. Freyr's name is a title, and titles travel. His Proto-Germanic frawjaz 'lord' is the Gothic frauja — the very word Ulfilas uses for the Lord (from frawjaz) in his Bible — and the Old English poetic frēa, 'lord' of kings and of God.
And it never stopped working. Freyr never left the North. His cult geography is written across the map in hundreds of Norwegian and Swedish place-names — Frøysland, Frøsvoll, Frösåker, Fröslunda — the densest theophoric landscape of any god after Þórr and Óðinn.
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
Freyr is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form freyr 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 Freyr stands at /sites/freyr/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Skírnismál (the wooing of Gerðr); Grímnismál 5 (Álfheimr as tooth-gift); Lokasenna 42–43 (the sword sold, Ingunar-Freyr); Vǫluspá 52–53 (Freyr against Surtr); Vafþrúðnismál 38–39 (Njǫrðr the Vanir hostage), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 23–24 (the Vanir, rain and sunshine, ár ok frið), 37 (Beli slain with the hart's antler), 44 (Skíðblaðnir), 49 (Gullinbursti at Baldr's pyre), 51 (Ragnarök); Skáldskaparmál (the dwarfs' gifts; Úlfr Uggason's Húsdrápa), Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: Ynglinga saga 10–13 (King Freyr at Uppsala, the Fróði-peace, the three-year mound); Þjóðólfr of Hvin, Ynglingatal (the Ynglings).
The Register Continues
Entry 123 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: Freyja (read it) · next entry: Frigg (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.