Othala

Othala's traditional meaning, the ancestral estate, land held and handed on within a kin group, is not in dispute and is not the difficulty. The difficulty is that this meaning is exactly what makes the rune attractive to people who mean something else by it.

The old sense

The Old English name is ethel, an estate or homeland, and the poem's stanza is unremarkable: a home is dear to everyone if they can enjoy what is right and proper there in prosperity. Legally, odal land in medieval Scandinavian and Germanic law was inalienable family land, land that could not simply be sold away from the lineage. The rune is named after a property category.

Note that the Old English poem places this rune twenty-third and daeg twenty-fourth, the reverse of the Elder Futhark order used here. Even the position is not entirely fixed.

The modern use

The rune was adopted as a unit insignia by the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen and used more broadly in Nazi-era contexts where descent and blood-inheritance were the point, which is a fairly direct reading of what the rune means, and that is the problem.

It did not stop in 1945. The character is catalogued in the hate-symbol databases maintained by organisations that monitor extremist movements, and has been adopted by neo-Nazi and white-nationalist groups in Europe and North America, in some cases explicitly as a substitute for the swastika where that symbol is banned or too costly to display.

What to do with that

Not silence. The rune is a genuine part of the Elder Futhark with a documented medieval meaning, and surrendering it would be both dishonest history and a gift to the people who want it.

But someone encountering this rune should know that its plain sense (our land, our people, what is ours by descent), is the reason it was chosen, and that a reader who draws it for heritage and ancestry is drawing a character that other people are currently using to mean something considerably narrower.

The atlas records the traditional meaning. It is not going to pretend the other use does not exist.

The Elder Futhark was a script used to write short texts on portable objects, and that is where the evidence for every one of its characters comes from.

Last in the row

Othala stands twenty-fourth and last in the Elder Futhark. Its position is stable in the ordered listings of the row that survive, of which there are only a handful, cut as complete alphabets on objects rather than written out in any manuscript of the period.

Why complete futhark inscriptions matter

The order of the row is known because a small number of objects carry the whole sequence. Without those, the order would have to be reconstructed from fragments, and the numbering used throughout this atlas would be an inference rather than a reading. Those complete inscriptions also show that the order was fixed and taught, which is one of the reasons a modern row that rearranges it cannot be a transmission of it.

What survives

The rest of the corpus is short inscriptions on brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and stones, many of them personal names.

The name

Othala is a reconstructed form projected back from the medieval rune poems, which name the characters of later rows. The word behind it means inherited land or an ancestral holding.

Later use

This character has a documented twentieth-century political history and remains in current political use. That history is recorded separately in this atlas and is not a property of the inscriptional character described here.