When someone calls your work neo-Nazi, you have two choices. You can dismiss it, or you can actually look into it.
Someone left a comment on one of my posts recently, questioning whether my Algiz rune piece was cultural appropriation. I've been thinking about it since, not defensively, but genuinely. Because it's a question worth asking properly, and I'd rather answer it honestly than dismiss it.
The short answer is that I don't believe it is. But the longer answer is more interesting.
Algiz is the fifteenth rune in the Elder Futhark, the oldest known runic alphabet, used across Germanic and Nordic regions from roughly the 2nd to the 8th century CE. It appears carved into stone, bone, metal and wood. Not as the exclusive property of one nation or bloodline, but across a wide geographic spread, Scandinavia, Britain, parts of central Europe. It predates modern national borders by well over a thousand years, and its reach was never narrow.
The name is thought to derive from a Proto-Germanic word meaning elk, the shape echoing antlers raised, or a figure with arms outstretched. Its meaning, consistently across historical interpretations, is protection. It was carved near freshwater springs. Worn as a charm. Used by people seeking to feel held by something larger than themselves.
Appropriation takes without understanding. Resonance happens when meaning finds the person it was always for.
This is, I think, where the appropriation question becomes genuinely worth examining. Appropriation, real appropriation, involves taking something from a living culture, stripping it of meaning, and profiting from an aesthetic while the people it belongs to are marginalised for the same thing. That's a specific harm. It deserves to be named clearly when it happens.
Runes occupy a more complicated space. They are ancient, not contemporary. They belong to no single living community that holds exclusive custodianship. They have been studied, used, and engaged with by people across many cultures for centuries. They have also, and this matters, been misappropriated in a genuinely harmful direction, by far-right and white nationalist movements who have hijacked specific Norse symbols to signal racial ideology. That misuse is real and worth understanding. It's part of why some people are understandably alert to anyone working with these symbols.
What I can speak to honestly is my own relationship with this piece. I didn't reach for a rune because it looked striking or because ancient symbols were trending. I made the Algiz piece because protection, the quiet, steady, non-dramatic kind, is something I think about a lot. In my own life. In the lives of the people who find their way to Ebb & Flo. The rune's shape, its history, its meaning, felt genuinely aligned with what I was trying to make.
When customers tell me what they wear it for, illness, anxiety, a period of uncertainty, the need to feel less alone, they are not performing an aesthetic. They are reaching for something that resonates with a real experience. One customer told me she felt the Algiz rune had always been hers before she even knew its name. I don't think I can improve on that as a definition of resonance.
The distinction I keep returning to is this: appropriation extracts. It takes the surface of something and leaves the meaning behind. Resonance does the opposite, it finds its way to the meaning and holds it carefully. It asks what something was for, not just what it looks like.
I think that question, what is this for, and am I holding it with care, is one worth returning to. Not as a box to tick. As an ongoing practice.
I don't make rune jewellery because it's fashionable. I make it because some things have been meaningful for a very long time, and that longevity tells you something.
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