Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs ("giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being Thurisaz.

It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative [θ], like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative [ð], like th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), however the pronunciation of words beginning with a þ often depends on that word's position within a sentence, being pronounced [θ] if the word is at the beginning of a sentence but [ð] otherwise. Þ in modern Icelandic also has a voiceless allophone [θ], which occurs in certain positions within a phrase.

Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942) was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born to Jewish parents, and regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobych, in the province of Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent most of his life there. He was killed by a German Nazi officer.

Bruno Schulz was the son of cloth merchant Jakub and Henrietta Schulz née Kuhmerker. At a very early age, he developed an interest in the arts. He attended school in Drohobych from 1902 to 1910, after which he studied architecture at Lviv Polytechnic. His studies were interrupted by illness in 1911 but he resumed them in 1913 after two years of convalescence. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna.

After World War I, the region of Galicia, which included Drohobych, returned to Poland. Schulz taught drawing in a Polish school from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a teacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole source of income.

Bjarni Bjarnason is an Icelandic writer born November 9, 1965 in Reykjavík. He started writing poetry in his teens and by twenty had a play. He has received the Tómas Guðmundsson Award, Halldór Laxness Literature Award, and in 1996 was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize. In year 2001 his 12th book was published. . As this is written (in August 2011) his 17th is on it´s way into the bookstores. See more on Bjarni Bjarnason and all his books in GOPfrettir.net/open/BB.