Holy crap!

You mean--after (*counts on fingers*) all these years, the most common fonts finally have o with that multiply-unprintable ogonek!?

GRAAAAAR!

*breathes!*

Gather 'round, children. It's story time...

Long ago, deep in the mists of antiquity, Allfather Odin murmured something in Balder's ear--but this isn't that story.

Slightly less long ago, Allfather Odin murmured something in KveldulfR Gundarsson's ear, and eventually the first edition of Our Troth came to be, and was published and distributed as best they knew how.

In this manuscript, widely heralded as the best darn heathen thing ever, the clever typographers had made way for every oddball character that our several liturgical languages could throw. I've never met these folk; perhaps they were LaTeX dwarves, as this seemed to be of their crafting. The wily eth (Ð/ð), the nasty thorn (Þ/þ), the acutely-accented Y (Ý/ý), and many another thing, all were handled rightly as the mighty runes they were.

In Old Norse, one of these tricksy letters is the "hooked o", the "o with a tail", more formally, "O with an ogonek", where ogonek is Polish for "little tail". An ogonek is like the cedilla you might know from French when it's tucked under their C (Ç/ç), but shaped a bit differently and the other way 'round.

Oh, let he who hath font, see Ǫ and understand, and see ǫ also!

When the first edition of Our Troth, at least in its paper incarnation, had passed over Sea, eventually there was hue and cry that this might be accessible on the World Wide Web. This happened--after a fashion, but this webcrafter was no wily LaTeX dwarf, but of a cruder sort entirely: it had been passed from hand to hand, even through Microsoft Word and Saved As HTML, and somehow this stripped out all letters which were beyond its ken--yea, the eth, and the thorn also, and there was no saving the poor hookèd-o! The accents on all other vowels were stripped and, likely, sent to Finland.

For it had come to pass in the turning years that as character sets were decided upon by good men and true, that the race of PC would know one set of letters, and the race of Apple another, and the other races of computers a third and fourth and even more strange, but we do not speak lightly of those darker tongues. These would agree on the common letters, great and small yet without accents, and on the accented ones as known in Western Europe.

But the keepers of lore in their land of fire and ice had trouble: bitterly they fought that their runes might not be lost from the tree. Envoys were sent to the tribe of Mac, and IBM, and ISO also who rules most of the Unix Lands. The lords of IBM both heard and not-heard (for their ears were part-poisoned by dark speech), the lords of ISO heard fair and true, but the lords of Mac heard not at all. Moreover, the lords of IBM placed their runes in ways strange to those who followed the ways of ISO, and vice versa.

Even so, the lords of ISO could allow the thorn, and the eth also, but neither the accent upon the y, nor the o with its little tail. Their speech could hold only so many letters, and with this, they were full and naught could be done.

Thus, in Iceland, they turned their tailed O's to ones with umlauts, as was already spelled by their cousins to the east and south, that all might rightly read.

But never on a Mac. The lords of Apple shut their character set to all these, although eventually relented when they sold to the peoples of the lands of ice and fire--this was one balm to these ills, and others, too, offered some help, but none that could be read by all peoples at all times without much kenning of the Runes of Interoperability, and that has plagued the Office of Ye Scop from that day to this, and still does, betimes.

In the fullness of time, when Paxson was Steerswoman, this HTML was given into my hand to set right. Far did I travel, eventually acquiring one of the original holy tomes from

seasword and

auntiematter, who may yet come to miss it, for lo, I did only borrow it, but it has been long since that borrowing.

I pondered for many hours what this Vluspa was, in which there seemed to be set great store, until a raven flew, crying, by my window, and I knew the true answer--at which point there was much Searching and Replacing to restore the o and its tail with its wider-loved sibling, ö, so that any might know the Völuspá for real and aye. So did I toil, for many long weeks, and by and by that version of Our Troth was made available, intact, and with as good a spelling as might be managed.

When, after that, Odin, never sated nor rested, spoke once more into the ear of KveldulfR and many others, not least

dr_beowulf, a second edition of Our Troth was called for, I was ready, well-wily in the ways of these subtle runes. Indeed, when in the manuscript there was a call for characters stranger yet, I met that call, and added half-a-dozen more to show my mettle, that all might know a wynn from a yogh, although not a Boo-Boo from a Guru, as that was Beyond the Scope of the Scop.

But hwæt! There's more!

Only now, this very day, perusing an ancient manuscript (Idunna 36), wherein dwelt an article by this very same KveldulfR, could I finally avenge the innocent wrongs done it by

dpaxson, lamented of by both within those same pages--and so I did, with the eths and thorns and ý's also. Indeed, as I saw her note asking across the ages for the help I had not, then, known to provide, I smiled.

While the Troth has long since decided that if ö was good enough for Iceland, it's good enough for us, I included, and enshrined, one matched pair of O's with their little tails at the end of the article, where KveldulfR complained and

dpaxson apologized. I had thought I would have to go into the dark and woolly wilds of Junicode to achieve this thing--but no! It was not so!

No, now it's right in the middle of Times New-Bloody-Roman.