Váli — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Váli, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Váli to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᚢᛅᛚᛁ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Váli.
And the marks themselves: a → á (Stress on a). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and references are built of exactly such small truths.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'WAH-lee' — begin with a 'w' as in 'water', hold the 'ah' long, and end with a light 'lee'. 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 vali is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: vali may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → á — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Váli has no clear non-Germanic counterpart, but his function resembles the Indo-European avenger figure: a youthful warrior born to settle a blood-debt. He is sometimes confused with Váli, the son of Loki and Sigyn, a much less prominent figure.
And it never stopped working. Váli remains a minor but haunting figure in modern retellings of Norse myth. He embodies the idea that some violence is inescapable, that vengeance can be both righteous and tragic.
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
Váli is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form vali is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. 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 Váli stands at /sites/vali/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: a → á; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Poetic Edda, Völuspá, Poetic Edda, Baldrs draumar, Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda.
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 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: Valhǫll (read it) · next entry: Varuṇa (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.