Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Inheritance, Homeland, and a Symbol Currently in Political Use

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Inheritance, Homeland, and a Symbol Currently in Political Use

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.