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I'm a big believer in the principle that if one learns a day's worth of knowledge, one can (and often should) teach a day's worth. Doing so helps to distribute the knowledge more widely, and the process of teaching can also help you learn aspects of the subject that you otherwise might not.
The problem, of course, is that a little knowledge can often be dangerous. Sometimes people may make up facts to sound more knowledgeable on the subject than they really are, or misinterpret information which they have only partially understood. A lot of neopagan authors suffer from this problem, in my experience. Or they may listen to other sources with bad information and simply pass it on without knowing any better.
In my opinion, it's incumbent upon both teachers and students to double-check what they are teaching or what they have been taught. Especially in esoteric subjects, which often suffer from an echo-chamber amplification of false information. Where one teacher passes on incorrect information, it's very easy for it to find its way into the teachings of a number of other people who work from what they learned from that first teacher. Beyond a certain point, if it's not caught soon enough, it becomes self-reinforcing: each teacher pointing to the works of the others as validation of the incorrect material, with no one remembering where or how it originated. It's simply become "modern tradition".
In the interest of preventing this phenomena, let me offer some information I just found while double-checking something I had previously been taught: The Eihwaz rune, far from "never [being] used in actual writing/runic inscriptions", is found in a number of Runic inscriptions made after 400AD. Specific inscriptions can be found listed in Texts & contexts of the oldest Runic inscriptions By Tineke Looijenga, pages 138 through 142. As further verification of the claims made by Looijenga, an image of the rune used in an inscription on the Charnay Fibula from the second third of the sixth century AD may be viewed here. The lack of earlier use does not seem to indicate the Eihwaz rune was somehow prohibited from inscription, but is simply an aspect in the development of the runes over time; the same process of linguistic evolution that would eventually give us the 16 rune Younger Futhark and the 26 to 33 rune Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.
The problem, of course, is that a little knowledge can often be dangerous. Sometimes people may make up facts to sound more knowledgeable on the subject than they really are, or misinterpret information which they have only partially understood. A lot of neopagan authors suffer from this problem, in my experience. Or they may listen to other sources with bad information and simply pass it on without knowing any better.
In my opinion, it's incumbent upon both teachers and students to double-check what they are teaching or what they have been taught. Especially in esoteric subjects, which often suffer from an echo-chamber amplification of false information. Where one teacher passes on incorrect information, it's very easy for it to find its way into the teachings of a number of other people who work from what they learned from that first teacher. Beyond a certain point, if it's not caught soon enough, it becomes self-reinforcing: each teacher pointing to the works of the others as validation of the incorrect material, with no one remembering where or how it originated. It's simply become "modern tradition".
In the interest of preventing this phenomena, let me offer some information I just found while double-checking something I had previously been taught: The Eihwaz rune, far from "never [being] used in actual writing/runic inscriptions", is found in a number of Runic inscriptions made after 400AD. Specific inscriptions can be found listed in Texts & contexts of the oldest Runic inscriptions By Tineke Looijenga, pages 138 through 142. As further verification of the claims made by Looijenga, an image of the rune used in an inscription on the Charnay Fibula from the second third of the sixth century AD may be viewed here. The lack of earlier use does not seem to indicate the Eihwaz rune was somehow prohibited from inscription, but is simply an aspect in the development of the runes over time; the same process of linguistic evolution that would eventually give us the 16 rune Younger Futhark and the 26 to 33 rune Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.
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