I've added an explanation as usage notes, but this is just my interpretation. Maybe a rune expert could help clarify this. – Jberkel14:55, 22 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Neonazi-expert here. I think they are too uninformed to distinguish. It being scanned badly, I am not sure where I am to search, it wasn’t that widespread back in the day either. One sees this and that mentioned if one searches the names of the runes. Currently in the German Metapedia they use the straight ones for both, those are real extensive uses (i.e. they always, in their myriads of articles, use the runes instead of whatever could be used). However round ones also make sense since ᛘ is “man”, so ᛦ is “man down”. Here in this year some white nationalist mixed a straight life-rune and a round death-rune. (Jberkel sees already it isn’t obsolete. Only Nazism is, and the rune usage was never restricted to it and only had some intersection with it.) In this original 1939 example they call the straight up one Man-Rune or Mannesrune and the straight down one Spindelrune or Weibesrune, and in this 2019 esoteric book they talk about Yr- and Man-Runes, which are according to the modern distinguishments the names of the round ones, but both depict the straight ones.
Some dark corners of the Internet you've opened there. Perhaps it's a sign of having worked too much on Wiktionary, the magical thinking that adding {{lb|obsolete}} will make the problem disappear. – Jberkel13:07, 31 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
My understanding is that this is the 'correct' character (the Yr rune, whereas ᛣ is a different letter), and the fact that the Armanen runes use a glyph that has straight arms is just a display issue, like some fonts use a two-storey 'a' and others use a one-story 'a' but we don't represent the latter by using ɑ, it's still a (except in languages where the two are actually contrastive, natch). (It's not as bad a display issue as we have with some cuneiform characters, either, or even as we have with some other runes!) We can handle this via usage notes and/or an image. All of this is a separate matter from whether the use of the rune (regardless of whether displayed with straight or curved arms) is attested, of course, but it probably is; if the RFV is just about the Unicode character I think the entry is fine as it is. - -sche(discuss)00:36, 31 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
My inclination is to untag this on the grounds that the IP's concern was about whether this was the right rune (which it is, the slight difference in shape being merely a display issue, and not even as significant as the display issue that affects the S rune), and not about whether a rune was used with this meaning (which is also the case, but tedious to prove). Objections? Does anyone want to insist we actually need to find this rune (in whatever shape) in documents? Because the difficult of searching for runes in search engines that may not support that or corpora that may not OCR it correctly is...high. - -sche(discuss)22:00, 7 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
Keep. I agree that with @-sche, except that I favour adding a quotation such as Contemporary (1999) use of the "life rune"/"death rune" notation in a grave marker in Niederaula, Germany.the gravestone, and adding a 'homoglyph' or whatever section for overlapping characters. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:47, 18 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
@Fay Freak: The Unicode code charts are often inadequate. One of the differences between U+16E3 RUNIC LETTER CEALC and U+16E6 RUNIC LETTER LONG-BRANCH-YR may be that only the latter can have rounded strokes, but straight strokes are unobjectionable for both. Unfortunately, the Unicode Standard frequently fails to mention such matters even within scripts. It does call out that the usual glyph for U+16C4 RUNIC LETTER GER is the glyph depicted for U+16E1 RUNIC LETTER IOR! --RichardW57m (talk) 12:47, 18 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
It's important to remember, too, that the Unicode standard is focused on semantic meaning, and that the actual glyphs given are mere examples that might not be representative of every instance. This becomes a lot more obvious when you think how varied the glyph for "A" or "&" might be. Theknightwho (talk) 14:28, 25 March 2022 (UTC)Reply
