Forseti: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Forseti, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Forseti to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is ᚠᚢᚱᛋᛁᛏᛁ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Forseti.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: fOR-seh-ti — three short, even syllables, stress on the first, the r lightly trilled; close to the modern Icelandic pronunciation of forseti, 'president'. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form forseti differs from the canonical Forseti only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. The standing cross-border question is the equation Forseti = Fosite. Jacob Grimm made it, and the philology keeps it alive: Old Norse forseti is a transparent folk-formation — 'the one who sits before' — while Frisian Fosite cannot be derived from it, which is why Lindow entertains that the Norse god was borrowed from the Frisian cult, the form attested four centuries earlier, and re-etymologized into a law-term on the way north.
And it never stopped working. Forseti's afterlife is the word itself. Old Norse forseti was the law-term for the presiding judge — the one who sits before the court — and when Iceland became a republic in 1944 it reached for the same word for its head of state: the President of Iceland is to this day Forseti Íslands, and no other god of the North still signs laws.
The Convention's Own History
The Poetic Edda survives essentially in one manuscript — the Codex Regius, c. 1270 — and normalized Old Norse spelling descends from what that manuscript and its siblings actually write. Þ and ð are not decorations: they are letters of the alphabet the skalds used (and English later abandoned), and ǫ is a nasal vowel the normalization preserves because the sources carry it. The register's rule is the manuscript's rule: spell the names the way the tradition that sang them wrote them down.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Forseti is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form forseti shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Forseti stands at /sites/forseti/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Grímnismál 15 (Glitnir, 'propped with gold and thatched with silver'; Forseti, who 'puts all suits to sleep'), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 17 (Glitnir among the heavenly halls) and 32 (Forseti, son of Baldr and Nanna; the best court of judgment among gods and men); Skáldskaparmál þulur (Forseti in the roll of the Æsir), Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi 10 (the island Fosetesland, the silent spring, the sacred cattle, Radbod's lots), ed. W. Levison, MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 7.
The Register Continues
The register holds 397 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Fionn (read it) · next entry: Freyja (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.