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Rune poems

IcelandicWikisource has an Icelandic rune poem:

Íslenska rúnakvæðið

Rune poems are poems that list the letters ofrunic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Four different poems from before the mid-20th century have been preserved: theAnglo-Saxon Rune Poem, theNorwegian Rune Poem, theIcelandic Rune Poem and theSwedish Rune Poem.

The Icelandic and Norwegian poems list 16Younger Futhark runes, while the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem lists 29Anglo-Saxon runes.^{[citation needed]} Each poem differs in poetic verse, but they contain numerous parallels between one another. Further, the poems provide references to figures fromNorse andAnglo-Saxon paganism, the latter included alongsideChristian references. A list of rune names is also recorded in theAbecedarium Nordmannicum, a 9th-century manuscript, but whether this can be called a poem or not is a matter of some debate.

The rune poems have been theorized as having beenmnemonic devices that allowed the user to remember the order and names of each letter of the alphabet and may have been a catalog of important cultural information, memorably arranged; comparable with the Old Englishsayings,Gnomic poetry, andOld Norse poetry of wisdom and learning.^[1]

TheOld English Rune Poem as recorded was likely composed in the 7th century^[2] and was preserved in the 10th-century manuscriptCotton Otho B.x, fol. 165a – 165b, housed at theCotton library inLondon,England. In 1731, the manuscript was lost with numerous other manuscripts in a fire at the Cotton library.^[3] However, the poem had been copied byGeorge Hickes in 1705 and his copy has formed the basis of all later editions of the poems.^[3]

George Hickes' record of the poem may deviate from the original manuscript.^[3] Hickes recorded the poem in prose, divided the prose into 29 stanzas, and placed a copper plate engraved with runic characters on the left-hand margin so that each rune stands immediately in front of the stanza where it belongs.^[3] For five of the runes (wen,hægl,nyd,eoh, andIng) Hickes gives variant forms and two more runes are given at the foot of the column;cweorð and an unnamed rune (calc) which are not handled in the poem itself.^[3] A second copper plate appears across the foot of the page and contains two more runes:stan andgar.^[3]

Van Kirk Dobbie states that this apparatus is not likely to have been present in the original text of the Cotton manuscript and states that it's possible that the original Anglo-Saxon rune poem manuscript would have appeared similar in arrangement of runes and texts to that of the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems.^[3]

The Norwegian Rune Poem was preserved in a 17th-century copy of a destroyed 13th-century manuscript.^[4] The Norwegian Rune Poem is preserved inskaldic metre, featuring the first line exhibiting a "(rune name)(copula) X" pattern, followed by a second rhyming line providing information somehow relating to its subject.^[5]

The Icelandic Rune Poem is recorded in fourArnamagnæan manuscripts, the oldest of the four dating from the late 15th century.^[4] The Icelandic Rune Poem has been called the most systemized of the rune poems (including theAbecedarium Nordmannicum) and has been compared to theljóðaháttr verse form.^[5][6]

The Icelandic rune poem is shown below with English translation side-by-side from Dickins:^[7]

The Old Swedish rune poem is possibly the youngest of the four, first being recorded in a letter in the year 1600, but not published until 1908.^[8] The text may be corrupt and it has received relatively little attention from runologists.^[9][10] The runes are in a different order, and a couple are missing:

The text was originally sent toBonaventura Vulcanius by a Swedish student, who claimed to have ”learned it from the old rustics” (a senibus rusticis didici). It was first published in 1908 byPhilipp Christiaan Molhuysen, using roughly the above orthography. A modern edition was published in 1987.^[11][12]

Recorded in the 9th century, theAbecedarium Nordmannicum is the earliest known catalog of Norse rune names, though it does not contain definitions, is partly in Continental Germanic and also contains an amount of distinctive Anglo-Saxon rune types.^[13] The text is recorded inCodex Sangallensis 878,^[5] kept in theSt. Gallen abbey, and may originate fromFulda,Germany.^{[citation needed]}

In theOld Bø Church in Telemark a 12th century runic inscription is preserved which useskennings for runes very similar to the rune poems.^{[14][15][16][17]} Reading the lines from the bottom up and resolving the kennings one gets the name of the woman with whom the rune-carver was in love.

Resolving the kennings the reader gets the following runes:

• ᚴk (kaun ‘boil, ulcer’ = sickness of children)
• ᚢu (úrr ‘drizzle’ = hatred of workmen)
• ᚦþ (þurs ‘troll’ = dweller in the mountain)
• ᚱr (reið ‘chariot, wagon’ = toil of the horse)
• ᚢu (= harm of the hay)
• ᚿn (nauðr ‘need, famine’ = misfortune of the slave)

Together they spell out the nameGudrun.

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• Gothic alphabet
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• Runic magic
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• Rune Poems from "Runic and Heroic Poems" by Bruce Dickins

• Anglo-Saxon paganism
• Germanic paganism
• Old English poems
• Runes
• Runology
• Scandinavia
• Poetic forms
• Cotton Library

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