The register rules: Brynhildr
Evidence dossier 071 — Brynhildr. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Brynhildr
- Original script: ᛒᚱᚢᚾᚼᛁᛚᛏᚱ
- 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. 71 of 397
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is ᛒᚱᚢᚾᚼᛁᛚᛏᚱ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Brynhildr.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form brynhildr differs from the canonical Brynhildr 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.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Brynhildr herself has no cult site, votive deposit, or named image — she is a figure of heroic legend, not of cult. The material record attests the legend around her. The Sigurðr carvings of Södermanland — the Ramsund carving (Sö 101) and the Gök stone (Sö 327), both eleventh century — depict the slaying of Fáfnir, the roasting heart, the talking birds, and the slain Reginn, proving the Vǫlsung cycle's visual currency in the late Viking Age. The carved portal of Hylestad stave church in Norway (c. 1200) retells the saga's scenes in wood, and the Kirk Andreas cross on the Isle of Man shows Sigurðr roasting the dragon's heart. The Drävle runestone (U 1163) shows a woman offering a drinking horn to a rider, sometimes interpreted as Sigrdrífa or Brynhildr, though the identification is debated. The textual witnesses hang on thin threads: the heroic lays survive in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda (GKS 2365 4to, c. 1270) — with the famous lacuna of a lost gathering that Brot af Sigurðarkviðu breaks across — and Vǫlsunga saga is preserved in a vellum fragment (NGU 182 4to) and paper copies.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Brynhildr's modern afterlife is Wagner's: the Ring cycle made Brünnhilde the most famous valkyrie in the world, and her immolation — riding Grane into Siegfried's pyre with the ring returned to the Rhine — is opera's great closing image of a world redeemed by a woman's refusal to accept its lies. Behind Wagner stand the Victorian rediscoveries: Morris's Sigurd the Volsung gave English readers the whole arc, sleep-thorn to pyre.
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.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Brynhildr: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form brynhildr is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/brynhildr/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Sigrdrífumál (the sleep-thorn, the waking, the rune-counsels), Grípisspá (the foretold arc), Brot af Sigurðarkviðu, Guðrúnarkviða I–II, Sigurðarkviða hin skamma (her death on the pyre), Helreið Brynhildar (the ride to Hel), trans. Carolyne Larrington, Vǫlsunga saga (the fullest continuous narrative; the identification of Sigrdrífa with Brynhildr), trans. Jesse L. Byock, Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Skáldskaparmál (the Sigurðr and Brynhildr narrative), trans. Anthony Faulkes.
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: Brokkr (read it) · next entry: Búri (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.