Nanna: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Nanna, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Nanna to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᚾᛅᚾᚾᛅ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Nanna.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'NAHN-nah' — two equal beats, the double n held a fraction long in the middle, both vowels short and open, as in Icelandic Nanna. 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 nanna differs from the canonical Nanna 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. Nanna's closest kin are inside the corpus itself: she is the divine pattern of which Brynhildr is the heroic echo — the woman who mounts her dead beloved's pyre, as Brynhildr has herself burned beside Sigurðr in the Völsung cycle. Lindow notes the motif as the Norse 'faithful unto the pyre' type, and the parallel is structural, not borrowed.
And it never stopped working. Nanna's afterlife runs quietly through the Baldr story's long reception: every retelling of the death of the shining god, from the Kearys' Victorian 'Heroes of Asgard' onward, keeps her two scenes — the burst heart on the shore and the gifts entrusted to Hermóðr. Nineteenth-century romanticism made much of the wife on the pyre; twentieth-century scholarship made her the test case for how little the Edda needs to say.
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
Nanna is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form nanna 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 Nanna stands at /sites/nanna/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 32 (Nanna daughter of Nepr, wife of Baldr, mother of Forseti; Glitnir) and 49 (her death on Hringhorni; the linen for Frigg and the gold ring for Fulla, sent from Hel with Hermóðr); Skáldskaparmál þulur (ásynja heiti), Poetic Edda: Grímnismál 15 (Glitnir, the hall of her son Forseti); Völuspá 62 (the return, which names Baldr and Höðr and not Nanna), Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, Book 3 (Nanna daughter of Gevarus, wooed by Høtherus and desired by Balderus), trans. Peter Fisher, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson.
The Register Continues
Entry 240 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: Myrddin (read it) · next entry: Narasiṃha (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.