*Deep breath and…* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!
November 27, 2009
If you’re as yet unaware of the Blisland Massacre I seriously suggest you first read the summary, or, even better, the full story. A lot has happened since september, so there’s also a brief timeline outlining the more important and/ or bizarre events of my life in recent times. Join me; let’s not let the cries of over a hundred deaths go unheard – Taz
Shortly after the last post I thought I was finally coming into some luck when I received an email from the folks at omniglot.com. If you cast your mind back to when I was first attempting to decipher the Hawkstor Papers, Omniglot was the site that identified the runes as Old Gutnish and provided the translation “star god of Stord.” On saturday I received an email from them stating:
Dear Taran,
Following your somewhat intriguing email last month one of our more intrepid omniglots has been studying the scripts with some amount of fervour. While the proto-chinese still remains a mystery, the bulk of the script, written in what you assumed to be some form of Urdu, and what we initially took to be an Urdu-Hebrew hybrid, has been matched to Tocharian, albeit a rather curious representation thereof. You’ll have to forgive the delay in getting this to you as the somewhat wild flourishes and embellishments made it more than a little difficult to correctly identify it. Tocharian, an extinct and extremely obscure system, was discovered only relatively recently, so you can imagine how excited we are to have such an example as this to study; an excitement which is only amplified by the singular hand and contemporary setting in which it was written, and by the mystery surrounding its discovery.
We, that is myself and the members of the forum, ask if you could possibly provide us with the original script so that they may be studied more closely. In return we will be only too happy to translate the passages in full. This way the papers may help you in the investigations you mentioned previously just as they will help us investigate this enigmatic linguistic fossil.
For now it may interest you to know that while Tocharian is very much in the Indo-european tradition, the people who spoke occupied an area of land that now forms part of North Western China. Secondly, while the earliest examples of the language only date back as far as the 6th-8th century AD, the Tocharian race appears in history as far back as the 2nd-1st centuries BC, meaning that the Tocharian language, or some earlier form of it, may well have existed alongside what we now call Oracle Bone Script and may even have co-existed with the example of proto-chinese you submitted to us.
I hope this helps you and your reading and I look forward with great anticipation to you reply.
Simon Ager,
and the omniglot community.
While this little revelation doesn’t actually help me at all, right now at least, it’s interesting as hell, right? That’s ancient China implicated twice in this whole affair. However, unless the whizzes at omniglot manage to translate the text it still leaves me pulling my hair out looking for a lead to follow. In the mean time here are the links to the alphabet and those it was mistaken for. But before you have a look just be aware that the Tocharian script I had has significantly more tails, spikes and so on. Hebrew. Tocharian. Urdu. Simon also provided me with this link to an awesome site about Tocharian.
In the mean time, with the promise of new information from the Hawkstor papers I decided to set about those sheets that remain with me with a renewed fervour. For now I’ve focused what time I had reading into that wonderful Gutnish phrase “star god of Stord,” and have done so with minimal returns. I still can’t find anything in norse mythology that ties to stars without involving the discarded frost-bitten toes of Thor’s mate, Aurvandil.
This in mind I decided to split my inquiry, focusing in turn on the two components individually, that is Stord and Gotland (home of the language). Unfortunately this has brought little to bear. The only historical significance to be found in Stord comes screaming out of the 10th century. The Battle of Fitjar (Stord) took place there in 961 AD and saw the fall of the ubiquitous Erik the Blood-Axe by the host of his half-brother, Haakon the Good, third King of Norway, who also died as a result of injuries sustained during the conflict. This, however, is entirely a matter of history and has nothing to do with stars or gods and even Stord’s involvement seems to be entirely coincidental. For a land littered with peaks and tarns and what have you, Stord appears to be a mythologically dead land.
As for Gotland. Well, there’s a lot more mysticism there, but most of it seems to be wrapped up with these actually quite awesome hammar stones. But, again, no allusions to stars are made. Rather they seem to tell the story of Hildr, who was taken to Hoy, in Orkney Islands. The battle the ensued to recapture her saw the death of her father, so Hildr, in her grief, stayed around and resurrected the dead fight on until the Ragnarok, thus the eternal battle “Hjaðningavíg” came to be. Don’t worry though, the curse was broken with the arrival of Christianity… apparently.
If nothing else, I know that if “star god of Stord” a genuine reference to something, it’s not the sort of thing I’m likely to find in any conventional work.
In the mean time, I’ve got myself the names of a couple of hypnotherapists. Now I just need to find the time to see them.
Until then, rest assured, I will be pulling my hair out and screaming into buckets, which I will then burn in the hope that the frustration within does not infect the world around me and send me round the frickin’ bend.
Taz
