#literally nothing I love more in this fandom than reading someone eloquently state something I had a different view of

[alarrylarrie]

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[nicolepremier]

Nano’s Knife

I’m currently writing a Nano/Akira fic and it occurs to me that I need to explain to everyone what’s really going on with Nano’s knife and its mysterious inscription that appears on so much iconic TnC merch. I was planning to write a brief summary in the author’s notes, but I wanted to go into a little more detail here, since I thought some of you might be curious.

Fandom lore would simply state that Nano’s inscription reads “wish” in some mysterious language, a symbol that he “wishes” to meet Akira again, and leave it at that.

It’s a lot more complex than that. And spoiler alert - the inscription on that knife does not literally read “wish” in any language.

For starters, there is some confusion in the translation from Japanese to English. The word the Japanese use that is translated to English as “wish” is 願い (negai), and that word has another meaning, a meaning that contextually makes a lot more sense. “Negai” also means “prayer,” and the context that it is used in throughout Nano’s route suggests that “prayer” would have been a more accurate and appropriate translation. For example, when Akira finds Nano sitting alone in the church with the black kitten, Nano says that he is there because he is “wishing” for another person’s happiness (obviously Akira’s, though that goes completely over Akira’s head) because it’s the only thing left to one whose fate has already been determined (referring to himself). What he’s actually doing is praying for Akira’s happiness. You don’t go to church to “wish,” you go to “pray.”

This distinction becomes very important when translating Nano’s knife inscription.

The inscription on Nano’s knife is written in Elder Futhark, a pre-viking Norse and Germanic rune system. (Though popular perception today simply refers to them as “viking runes.”) Being of Scandinavian decent from a family who loves anything and everything to do with vikings, I recognized the writing immediately since the same runes are on a ton of decorations all over my family’s home.

If you try and translate Nano’s runes phonetically, you get “hingath,” which is complete rubbish and means absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. It most certainly does NOT mean “wish.”

There is some additional complication due to the fact that N+C is horribly inconsistent with the runes from one set of merch to the next (presumably because they mean nothing to the designers), and the designers sometimes write them in ways that make the inscription even MORE nonsensical.

I actually sent a number of the different versions of the inscriptions to a professor friend who studies runes in several dead languages, and he came up with exactly the same nonsensical gibberish I did - it’s badly written Elder Futhark mixing several time periods that says nothing. He said it wasn’t all that uncommon for people to write nonsense runes on all sorts of stuff just because they like the look of them. For example, a well-known rune translation guide book has runes going around the cover which translate to “These runes don’t say anything, but they sure look cool, don’t they?”

But I wasn’t satisfied.

Elder Futhark is not purely a phonetic language like the Latin alphabet. The god Odin “sacrificed himself to himself” by hanging on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, receiving no form of nourishment from his companions. At the end of this ordeal, he perceived the runes, the magically-charged ancient Germanic alphabet that was held to contain many of the greatest secrets of existence.

The fact that the runes have, since their conception, been thought to be imbibed with magical powers is the reason they have been so extensively used by modern Neopagans in so much of their ritual practice. Simply the act of inscribing the runes, or keeping inscribed objects close, can confer power and blessings. Each rune has multiple meanings, but keeping that in mind, I believe I have cracked the code of Nano’s mysterious knife inscription.

The knife isn’t a “wish” or a symbol of a “wish” - it’s a “prayer.” It’s a prayer to the old gods.

Name: Hagalaz, “hail.” Phoneme: H. Meaning: destruction, chaos, change, invocation

This is a common invocation to begin a prayer to petition the gods.

Name: Ingwaz, “the god Ingwaz.” Phoneme: Ing or ng. Meaning: male fertility, the beginning of something, the actualization of potential via sacrifice

He must offer a sacrifice. The old gods don’t work for free. One must give something up in order for one’s prayer to have a chance of being answered.

Name: Ansuz, “an Aesir god.” Phoneme: A (long and/or short). Meaning: prosperity, vitality.

He’s calling on one or more of the aesir gods for help - Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Loki, Baldur, Heimdall, Idun, and Bragi.

Name: Thurisaz, “Thor, Giant.” Phoneme: Th (both soft and hard). Meaning: danger, suffering, solitude. (Note that this rune is often written with shorter vertical lines so that it looks more like an angular D. Both versions appear on different TnC merch.)

He wants an end to his suffering and solitude. His prayer is a desperate cry for help.

To be clear, I do not believe that Nano is a time traveling viking, or even of Norse decent - if he were, he might have written a more sensible inscription that actually meant something in one of the Scandinavian languages - all of which use the roman alphabet nowadays, and that is NOT the alphabet that Nano’s book uses, since Japanese use romanji as well and Akira has never seen those sorts of letters before. No one writes books in Elder Futhark these days. Here is what I believe happened:

Nano was the son of academics. He mentions in Kou Un (his official afterstory) that his father whose face he can’t remember made the knife. That’s not a normal skill, and even a rudimentary knowledge of Norse runes (and Norse gods) isn’t common knowledge among the general populace. This is consistent with how Nano dresses and presents himself - he isn’t the sort of person who puts a lot of thought into his clothing, but he likely tends to subconsciously gravitate towards what some part of his brain still registers as “normal” - things his father might have worn, and which he probably wore himself as a child before he was taken to ENED. His primary hobby is reading, and his eloquent speech and precise pattern observation makes clear that he’s quite intelligent, despite his naivety and eccentricity.

I headcanon that Nano’s father was an engineer, and his mother was a history professor (probably NOT in Norse studies), both of whom worked for a Russian university with government funding in South eastern Russia, in close proximity to both China and Japan. His father may have been involved in the design or manufacturing of weapons during WWIII. Likely both parents had an interest in historical reenactment and were eager to involve their children. Nano likely spent a good deal of time with his mother as a child since his father would have been kept extremely busy during the war. He was almost certainly taught to read at a very young age and given books on his mother’s favorite subjects to keep him occupied while she worked. When he developed an interest in vikings and Norse mythology as a young boy, he was almost certainly encouraged to pursue it. Therefore, although he was raised Russian Orthodox Christian, he was aware of (and likely fascinated by) mythology from various cultures. His speech in the game illustrates that he does indeed have a distinct interest in Christian mythology in particular, and likely that of other cultures as well, given that his only known possession was a knife inscribed with Elder Futhark. His father likely recognized his interests and made the knife for him as a gift, then let him help inscribe it with a prayer. To a little kid who really liked vikings, that was probably very exciting, so it isn’t surprising that the knife would become his most prized possession, even after his memories were altered and he could no longer remember anything else about his family.

After Nano’s family was killed, he was put into an overcrowded Russian orphanage, then later taken away by the Japanese for use as a nameless test subject in what was often lethal experimentation. At that point he was so scared that he was willing to try just about anything. Having no control at all over his own fate, his only recourse was to pray for salvation. When no one answered his prayers and his circumstances kept going from bad to worse, he almost certainly started to lose faith in the Christian god, and tried to invoke the old Norse gods in hopes that maybe he was just praying to the wrong god and there was still SOMEONE out there who would listen. He may even have forgotten what the inscription on the knife actually meant, only recalling dreamlike bits and pieces. It was a prayer. To be completely honest, I find it completely unrealistic that Nano could have kept that knife hidden for so long from ENED, given that it’s fairly large, he had no privacy, was watched 24/7, and only wore a medical gown inside the facility. I think it is slightly more likely that he was allowed to keep it, given how submissive he was to the researchers, since the end goal was to brainwash him into BECOMING a weapon himself.

In the end, when Nano had lost all hope and knew he was about to lose even himself… the sacrifice he made to invoke his final desperate prayer WAS the knife itself, his last remaining possession, the last reminder he had of his humanity, and with it his last remaining hope of salvation. He gave it all to Akira, in hopes that maybe one day, they would meet again.

Now, Nano’s fate, and his salvation, depends entirely on Akira.