Hi beautiful people of Iceland.

I’m planning to get a tattoo and this is the [artwork](https://imgur.com/a/vM6VkYd) I would love to get.

Can someone please confirm if –
1. It means “Lightness of Being”
2. It’s Icelandic Runes script.

TIA.

Much love!

8 comments

  2. Many of these runes look alien to me. Some of them are a mix of runes I recognize, but I couldn’t imagine any sensible compound sound they could be representing. Some of them are a mix of runes I recognize, with some turned upside down.

    [Here](https://www.visindavefur.is/svar.php?id=3887) are the two commonly recognized Icelandic Runic Alphabets. There are many more runic alphabets, I picked my first one up from [Richard Garriots Ultima game series](https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/images/thumb/c/c3/Runicsmall.gif/1200px-Runicsmall.gif) because I’m a rampant nerd like that.

    I couldn’t tell you if this is a valid alphabet from somewhere else, but some of these letters, like the upside down A (second letter from left ignoring the triple dot), are pretty weird. I also tried turning the image upside down in case this – but that ends up with even more runes turning upside down. Also that R is backwards, or maybe it is a B with some parts smudged off.

    So it is entirely possible that this is a valid alphabet, and entirely possible it is not. Glad to be helpful :p

    Edit: Got annoyed and looked a bit around and found something similar tothat mystery a in [Vendic Runes](https://imgur.com/a/iA2LAJj), so maybe some more Slavic oriented subreddits may work better for you. Also fwiw “Lightness of Being” as in “(The unbearable) lightness of being” is translated as “(Óbærilegur) léttleiki tilverunnar”, and that doesn’t fit the number of characters there. Still doesn’t prove anything for you since this could be a less modern phrasing that I can’t intuit on the spot.

  3. It’s a cool design.
    That being said, there’s no such thing as icelandic runes. The runic alphabets used here were/are the fuþark alphabets, and those are readily available online.
    If you’re wondering about any text in icelandic, rather than just the runes, then I’d be happy to help.

  4. Some of the symbols look mirrored, some look upside down and some look like nothing at all. “Lightness of being” would be “léttleiki tilverunnar” in Icelandic. I don’t see any way that this could spell that out.

  6. Is there a know Icelandic rune script?
    I’m only familiar with galdrastafir but they’re not runes and them rune scripts used in Scandinavia.

    Is the a Icelandic script that was used here ?

  7. It’s not. It seems to be mostly old futhark runes (which was never used in iceland) and one medieval rune, but some of them are also upside down and mirrored. I can’t read anything out of it, I think it’s safe to say that it’s just gibberish.

    [Here is the runic script I would use if I wanted to get a tattoo in the icelandic variant of runes](https://imgur.com/a/9KlKg4l)

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