The canonical register: Heimdallr
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Heimdallr, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Heimdallr to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᚼᛁᛘᛏᛅᛚᛚᚱ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Heimdallr.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'HAYM-dahl-r' — the ei is the diphthong of 'day', the a short and open, the double l held long, and the final r sounded as a light syllabic trill, as in Icelandic Heimdallur. 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 heimdallr differs from the canonical Heimdallr 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.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for heimdalr: it comes from the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds, and it fails because rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Heimdallr resists the usual syncretic moves — no Roman writer ever matched him, and no continental charm securely names him — but the twentieth century built him a different kind of company. Georges Dumézil made Rígsþula a Scandinavian cornerstone of his trifunctional reading of Indo-European society: thrall, farmer, and noble begotten by one wandering god maps the pattern he traced from the Vedas to Rome.
And it never stopped working. Heimdallr's afterlife runs on the horn and the watch. The name never left the North — Norwegian Heimdal survives in place-names and as a given name, and Icelandic keeps Heimdallur — and in modern reception he has become the fixed image of the gatekeeper: the cinema's Heimdall, sighting across the Bifröst, is now the spelling most of the world meets first, and security software borrows the name when it wants to promise that nothing gets past.
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
Heimdallr is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form heimdallr 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 Heimdallr stands at /sites/heimdallr/.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, heimdalr first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Völuspá 1 and 27 (the sons of Heimdallr; the hearing hidden under the tree) and 46 (the horn at Ragnarǫk); Grímnismál 13 (Himinbjǫrg); Þrymskviða 15 (the whitest of the Æsir, who knows the future like the Vanir); Lokasenna 48 (Loki's taunt to the sleepless watchman); Rígsþula (Rígr and the three classes); Hyndluljóðr 35–38 (the nine mothers), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 15 (the Gjallarhorn hidden in Mímir's well), 27 (the fullest portrait: the white god, Hallinskiði, Gullintanni, Gulltoppr, the senses, the horn), 49 (Gulltoppr at Baldr's funeral), 51 (Ragnarǫk: the blast and the last fight with Loki); Skáldskaparmál (Húsdrápa on the seal-fight at Singasteinn; the kennings 'Heimdallr's sword' for head and 'Heimdallr's head' for sword), Úlfr Uggason, Húsdrápa (c. 983), preserved in Skáldskaparmál — the oldest attestation of the feud with Loki.
The Register Continues
The register holds 397 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: Hē (read it) · next entry: Ḥkꜣ (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.