Magni — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
Evidence dossier 220 — Magni. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Magni
- Original script: ᛘᛅᚴᚾᛁ
- 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. 220 of 406
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is ᛘᛅᚴᚾᛁ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Magni.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form magni differs from the canonical Magni 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. Magni is a purely textual figure: no runestone invokes him as a god, no votive deposit or place-name can be securely tied to his cult, and no picture stone has been convincingly read as the lifting of Hrungnir's leg. The material record keeps only his name's raw material: Magni occurs as an ordinary human personal name in Viking-Age runic inscriptions (collected in Peterson's Nordiskt runnamnslexikon), built on the same magn 'strength' element that names the god. The textual witnesses hang by the usual thin threads: Vafþrúðnismál, Hárbarðsljóð, and Vǫluspá in the Codex Regius (c. 1270); Skáldskaparmál in the Codex Regius of the Prose Edda and its sister manuscripts; and the giantess þulur of the Skáldskaparmál, which list his mother Járnsaxa among the troll-women.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Magni's afterlife ran quiet for centuries: the Icelandic given name Magni never died out, and Victorian mythographies kept the Hrungnir duel in circulation as one of Þórr's set-pieces — the Kearys' Heroes of Asgard (1857) retold it for generations of children. The twenty-first century put the brothers back on stage.
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 Magni: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form magni 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 /magni/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Vafþrúðnismál 51 ('Móði and Magni shall have Mjöllnir'), Hárbarðsljóð 53 (Þórr as 'Magni's father'), Vǫluspá 56 (Þórr's death), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Skáldskaparmál 17 (the Hrungnir duel; Magni, three nights old, lifts the leg; Gullfaxi) and Gylfaginning 51, 53 (Þórr's fall; the sons inherit Mjöllnir at Íðavöllr), Cleasby–Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. magn, magni, Magni.
The Register Continues
This is one of 406 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: Macha (read it) · next entry: Manannán (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.