Hearthside

These posts are sometimes the hardest to keep up with, since it is a long-term project that may or may not yield anything interesting. In addition, I have found this year particularly difficult, at first due to personal time constraints, but also because this year has been surprising me! Rune Rasmussen talks of a 19 year cycle which he associates each year with a rune in the Swedish rune poem. What I am doing each year is looking at the rune poems, plus historical data, to see if I can predict trends for the year. Think of it as a Heathen Farmer’s Almanac or something.  I had initial thoughts based on the rune Sol as to what that might mean for 2024, and went to historical data to see if I might be correct. However, the data wasn’t showing me a particular trend. It seemed that both warm weather and rain were likely for a Sol year, but sometimes these weather patterns would go to the extreme, causing flooding or drought. The Dust Bowl started in 1930, which was a Sol year. This year...