The Curious Letter of Eau Claire, a multi state riddle solved with good old crowd sourcing...

SOMEWHERE IN EAU CLAIRE, WISCONSIN, EARLY SEPTEMBER 2017...

SEPTEMBER 16: COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO

So I solved a little riddle in September 2017, thought I would share the story. I came across a strange picture online that a woman had posted, it was a note that was left in her neighbor's mailbox. Along with this note was a walking stick. The note, which is posted above was cryptic, indecipherable and the neighbor didn’t know if this was a threat, a gift or a joke as they couldn’t understand the symbols. This riddle took place in the tiny town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin and it sparked over a hundred people in the town and subsequent people in cyber space to search for the key to understanding this little riddle and the accompanying walking stick. This search went on for days, hundreds of people had been taking a crack at it. Unsolved, the intrigue and confusion grew among the tiny towns residents. I happened across this riddle in a facebook post and recalled seeing this script somewhere. It turned out that it was a rare middle age Icelandic Runic script called “Seeress’ Runic” and after some rummaging I had the cypher in hand. I guess it pays to keep strange Icelandic magic books around the house. So, I translated the symbols to the corresponding English, which wasn't a complete translation because many of the English letters are not available in Runic but I could get a good idea using the table below.

SEE: SEERESS' RUNES

With my translation the message read as follows:

IKNOÓUÚV
XŸOÓMAÁXŸ
NOÓTBE
AÁBLETOÓ
READTHIS
BUÚVTTHAÁNK
XYOÓUÚV
SKOÓGR

I sounded this out in my head and came to the conclusion that this was the closest you could get in English to, "“I know you may not be able to read this but thank you “skogr."

However, I did not know the significance of the word skogr, was it a name a proper noun or a place? I was informed by another fellow searcher that skogr was Old Norsk for "wood." This would make sense as there was a walking stick, made of wood, left by the mailbox. I also thought that this could have been a derivation of the Nordic practice of saying "Skal!" or "cheers." A plausible way to end a thank you note.

After a feverish back and forth with the woman who had originally posted, she was elated to finally have a translation of the strange letter. I was assured that hundreds of people in Eau Claire would be thanking me, after all, we discovered that the riddle was a simple thank you note and not a death threat, or witchcraft(an explanation that had been put forward). Even after I translated it, she was still concerned that simply by the virtue of using Runic language, this may have been an act of witchcraft. I assured her that everyone in town was quite safe. Later we were to discover that an old Norwegian man, proud of his heritage and apparently an avid Pagan, had been gifted an apple by the woman days earlier, while they were standing right near the very same mailbox. So as any model citizen would do, he returned the favor by gift of a walking stick.

Skorg!