The canonical register: Rhiannon

The internet spells Rhiannon more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Rhiannon
• Original script: —
• Pantheon: Celtic
• Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
• False forms on record: 1
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 309 of 397

The Canonical Form

The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Rhiannon — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.

No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form the tradition’s convention demands.

Where the Flattened Form Stands

The plain form rhiannon differs from the canonical Rhiannon 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.

The Register of False Forms

False form 1: riannon

Origin: the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds.

Violation: rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write.

The Contested Forms

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the tradition’s standard — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Rhiannon. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

The Convention's Own History

Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.

What the Address Bar Allows

IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.

That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.

Where the Name Stood First

Rhiannon is a textual figure: no temple, votive deposit, or inscription names her, and the reconstructed *Rīgantonā has no epigraphic attestation anywhere in the Celtic world. Her evidence is manuscript evidence. The Four Branches survive complete in the White Book of Rhydderch (Aberystwyth, NLW Peniarth MSS 4–5, c. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (Oxford, Jesus College MS 111, c. 1382–1410), with earlier fragments in Peniarth 6; the tales themselves are dated by debate rather than document, most often to the later eleventh or early twelfth century. The geography of her story is real — Arberth, the court of Dyfed, stands by modern Narberth in Pembrokeshire — but no sanctuary of hers is known. The nearest material horizon is comparative, not hers: the two hundred and more dedications to the Gaulish horse-goddess Epona recovered across the Roman west, against which scholars have long read the rider of Arberth. The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.

The Verdict

The register rules for Rhiannon, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. rhiannon carries the name freely — it differs only in display, and the register says so without reservation. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /sites/rhiannon/ enforces it.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, riannon first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — The Mabinogi — First Branch (Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed), Second Branch (Branwen ferch Llŷr), Third Branch (Manawydan fab Llŷr): trans. Sioned Davies (Oxford, 2007); Welsh text ed. Ifor Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (1930), The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest (1838–49), Mac Cana, Proinsias, The Mabinogi, 2nd ed. (University of Wales Press, 1992) — sovereignty reading and the Epona comparison.

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: Rhéa (read it) · next entry: Ṛta (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.