Syn — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

Evidence dossier 344 — Syn. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Syn
• Original script: ᛋᚢᚾ
• Pantheon: Norse
• Convention: normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them
• False forms on record: 0
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 344 of 397

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is ᛋᚢᚾ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Syn.

Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form syn differs from the canonical Syn 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.

Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Syn is a wholly textual goddess: no runestone invokes her, no place-name preserves her, no votive deposit names her, and no image can be identified with her — a silence she shares with most of the minor ásynjur of Snorri's catalogue and one that underwrites the scholarly reading of her as a personified function rather than an independently culted deity. Her attestation hangs on the manuscript witnesses of Snorri's Edda: the Codex Regius and Codex Wormianus for Gylfaginning 35, and the manuscripts of Skáldskaparmál — including the Codex Regius and AM 748 — for the kenning rule and the ásynja þulur that keep her name in the register of the goddesses. The nearest material context is the word itself: the legal prose of the medieval Icelandic laws and sagas, where synja does its ordinary work of refusing claims, is the closest thing the record offers to a cult site — the door and the þing, preserved on vellum.

Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Syn's afterlife is the quietest in the pantheon and the most grammatical. The proverb Snorri recorded — a denial is set up when a man says no — remained in circulation as a saying about plain refusal, and the verb synja never died: it lives on in modern Icelandic and Faroese as the ordinary word for denying and refusing, so that the goddess's name is still spoken daily by people who have never heard of her.

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.

The Protocol's Position

Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.

The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.

The Verdict

Case closed on Syn: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form syn is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/syn/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 35 (the eleventh ásynja: keeper of the hall door, defender at the þing, and the proverb 'a denial is set up when a man says no'); Skáldskaparmál (women periphrased by the names of the ásynjur) and the ásynja þulur, Cleasby–Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, s.v. syn, synja; Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, s.v. syn, synja, de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. syn, synja (the word's kinship with the family of sannr, 'true'; a law term by origin).

The Register Continues

This is one of 397 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.

Continue the register — previous entry: Suttungr (read it) · next entry: Tàijí (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.