RUNES ALL AROUND

A young and exciting graphic designer named Siggi Odds caught our eye recently with an exhilarating exhibition on a project of his involving the Fuþark rune alphabet.

The exhibition consists of household logos in Icelandic cultural and commercial history reshaped with Fuþark runes instead of the Roman alphabet. Siggi selected various logos ranging everything from a leading car retailer to delicious licorice sweets.

HEKLA is a car retailer in Iceland, mainly known for selling Volkswagen cars.

OPAL licorice sweets.

Together, Siggi's works not only offer us with an uncanny view towards our every day surroundings, they also leave us with the alluring question wether we would still use the Fuþark runes if we hadn't taken up the Roman alphabet centuries ago. And there is maybe even a bigger question hidden underneath; would we still be writing in Fuþark if we hadn't converted to Christianity roughly a millennium ago?

Even though Siggi says his project was simply made for fun, it inspired us at the Icelandic Magic Company. His reshaped logos are perfectly in tune with what we think is essential for our cultural heritage to thrive in our modern way of thinking. In other words, we truly believe that in order to stay in touch with our cultural and historical traditions, we need to find them a dynamic context in what we can relate to at all times. This is for example true to ancient Icelandic literature, the Sagas, that people from all centuries have copied, processed, even distorted. That is one of the key reasons why the sagas are still being read here in Iceland. They have been kept alive.

This way of thinking resulted for example in our publication of the book Icelandic Magic for Modern Living. 

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Eygló Gísladóttir took the photos of the HEKLA mug, OPAL package and the front picture of the BÓNUS supermarket street sign. The pictures are taken from the DesignMarch Facebook page.