Running wolf

Hmm… There are some parts of this where it’s hard to say, and parts where I disagree. For one thing, there is no evidence of changing the meaning of runes by reversing them (since runes could, at least in the Elder period, be written in either direction – in the Younger period some runes like n and a had the same shape only reversed, so writing right-to-left would have been confusing), and furthermore since it’s the þurs ‘monster, ogre’ rune, you certainly wouldn’t get an actual monster/ogre/giant by REVERSING it, you’d get that by leaving it the way it is.

The only evidence I can think of that the þurs rune had any more specific meaning than ‘(any) monster/ogre’ is one of the two oldest copies of the Icelandic rune poem which glosses each rune name in Latin. The entry for þurs translates it to ‘Saturnus’. But it’s a quite late source, from around 1500, and conflicts with the evidence of the kennings for the þurs rune, which aren’t really discernible from any other normal giant-kenning (kletta íbúi ‘crag-dweller’, flagða faðir ‘father of giantessess’, for example). Also Saturn, while very old, isn’t exacly a dead ringer for the Roman equivalent of Ymir.

On the other hand Old Norse poetic use of words does allow words to be substituted that are more general or specific in meaning, so þurs could stand for Ymir because he is a þurs, although not to the exception of other þursar.

Anyway – and I don’t mean to assume, but this is very common – if you’re having trouble writing it out in full and getting it to “feel right” I can’t help but wonder if you’re using the Elder Futhark, which will always cause you problems when you try to write a Norse word, since there was no y (or ø, ǫ, æ) in the Elder period. We’re not sure what Ymir would have been back then since we don’t know the length of the y; some guesses are *Jūmijaʀ or *Umijaʀ.

Since runes were constantly changing there are many ways to write Ymir depending on the place and time. Here are a few ways to do it according to different styles, but be aware that this is not necessarily exhaustive.

(Öpiʀ was a very prolific runestone carver, or perhaps more than one person working with the same name. “Iceland 1200′s” is basically the more typically Icelandic of the two different styles represented in the two oldest versions of the Third Grammatical Treatise by Ólafr hvítaskáld Þórðarson).

This golden torque was made by Celts in southern Russia ca. the 4th-6th centuries BCE.