Naudh a sammitch.

I began ruminating on the "N"-stave rune: naudh, need, whatever you wanna call it.

Poetic kenning tends to color any person's view of a rune. A lot of it becomes a matter of finding words that sound similar, which would relate to actually attempting to poke around in the roots of language and association. Learning the runes becomes a lot easier to understand as the mind removes itself from a solid, unwavering view of language.

Now, the N-phonetic rune, which I'll just call Naudh for simplicity's sake, has had Trouble, Toil, and Need listed as possible definitions. I've just recently come to understand nith as one of the possible associations with the rune, which I'm sure someone's figured out before.

Either way, the concept of nith seems to derive from a sense of a person's roundabout nature in understanding the world, deviance from cultural morality, and the emotions such as envy, hate, and malice. A nithing is listed asa person who inspires these concepts. In a modern concept, we could see a nithing as any group that Billy Graham or David Duke spits bile about, up to and including that idiocy of "well, she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want to get raped."

If we were to put the runes in a circle, then across from Naudh would lie the rune Ing, based primarily about the spread of the cult of Yngvi. Conceptually, Ing relates to cultural and social elements relating to one's own culture, such as eitquette, relations with family, and community-based religious practices. However, just as the alienating and belligerently xenophobic tendencies flourish in those who follow the passive, charitable, and omni-loving Christ, so too does the Ing rune bear an incongruity with its representations.

Nith, as a companion definition of Naudh, seems to relate to our own individual needs and alienating qualities. Those who follow somewhat primitive and rapturous practices, who test the borders of law and morality, would then begin to enter the purview of Naudh: entheogenic Mind-altering substances, unconventional romances, personal ethic, etc.

Naudh itself relates to elements that challenge the relative ease of existence. Constraint, Trouble, elements that begin to display themselves when options run out. To connect this with nith, these elements arrive when the sanctuary of cultural/societal existence begins to conflict with individual needs. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem leaves a passage about Naudh as a source of help and salvation when heeded. A resolution to the Naudh/Ing dichotomy comes from balancing external, societal operations with personal "taboos", so that both have enough space. Too much time spent dealing with Naudh leaves a person alienated from society, and too much Ing leaves a person bigoted and unfulfilled, in this framework.

Of course, Naudh also stands for undoing tensions, such as creative struggles of bringing the internal world into the external, through creative, technological, mathematical, or athletic ventures. Aren't symbols cool?