Rune poem

Rune poems are poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Four different poems from before the mid-20th century have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, the Icelandic Rune Poem and the Swedish Rune Poem.

The Icelandic and Norwegian poems list 16 Younger Futhark runes, while the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem lists 29 Anglo-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 from Norse and Anglo-Saxon paganism, the latter included alongside Christian references. A list of rune names is also recorded in the Abecedarium 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 been mnemonic 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 English sayings, Gnomic poetry, and Old Norse poetry of wisdom and learning.

Rune poems

English

The Old English Rune Poem as recorded was likely composed in the 7th century and was preserved in the 10th-century manuscript Cotton Otho B.x, fol. 165a – 165b, housed at the Cotton library in London, England. In 1731, the manuscript was lost with numerous other manuscripts in a fire at the Cotton library. However, the poem had been copied by George Hickes in 1705 and his copy has formed the basis of all later editions of the poems.

George Hickes' record of the poem may deviate from the original manuscript. 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. For five of the runes (wen, hægl, nyd, eoh, and Ing) 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. A second copper plate appears across the foot of the page and contains two more runes: stan and gar.

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.

Norwegian

The Norwegian Rune Poem was preserved in a 17th-century copy of a destroyed 13th-century manuscript. The Norwegian Rune Poem is preserved in skaldic 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.

Icelandic

The Icelandic Rune Poem is recorded in four Arnamagnæan manuscripts, the oldest of the four dating from the late 15th century. The Icelandic Rune Poem has been called the most systemized of the rune poems (including the Abecedarium Nordmannicum) and has been compared to the ljóðaháttr verse form.

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

Swedish

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. The text may be corrupt and it has received relatively little attention from runologists. The runes are in a different order, and a couple are missing:

The text was originally sent to Bonaventura 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 by Philipp Christiaan Molhuysen, using roughly the above orthography. A modern edition was published in 1987.

Abecedarium Nordmannicum

Recorded in the 9th century, the Abecedarium 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. The text is recorded in Codex Sangallensis 878, kept in the St. Gallen abbey, and may originate from Fulda, Germany.[citation needed]

The Rune Poem Puzzle from the Old Bø Church

In the Old Bø Church in Telemark a 12th century runic inscription is preserved which uses kennings for runes very similar to the rune poems. 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:

• ᚴ k (kaun ‘boil, ulcer’ = sickness of children)
• ᚢ u (úrr ‘drizzle’ = hatred of workmen)
• ᚦ þ (þurs ‘troll’ = dweller in the mountain)
• ᚱ r (reið ‘chariot, wagon’ = toil of the horse)
• ᚢ u (= harm of the hay)
• ᚿ n (nauðr ‘need, famine’ = misfortune of the slave)

Together they spell out the name Gudrun.

See also

• Bríatharogam
• Gothic alphabet
• List of runestones
• Runic magic
• Apple Pie ABC
• Alphabet song

Notes

• Acker, Paul (1998). Revising Oral Theory: Formulaic Composition in Old English and Old Icelandic Verse. Routledge. ISBN 0-8153-3102-9
• Dickins, Bruce (1915). Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples. Cambridge University Press. ()
• Lapidge, Michael (Editor) (2007). Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-03843-X
• Page, Raymond Ian (1999). . Boydell Press. ISBN 0-85115-946-X
• Senra Silva, Inmaculada (1 January 2006). . Epos: Revista de filología (22): 393. doi: (inactive 12 July 2025). ISSN .{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)
• Senra Silva, Inmaculada (2010). . Futhark: International Journal of Runic Studies. 1: 109–122.
• Van Kirk Dobbie, Elliott (1942). The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Columbia University Press ISBN 0-231-08770-5
• The Rune Poem (Old English), ed. and tr. T.A. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English. Cambridge, 1976: 80–5.
• Foys, Martin et al. (eds.) , (Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-). Online edition of the Old English Rune Poem, annotated and linked to digital facsimile of its first transcription, with a modern translation.

External links

• from "Runic and Heroic Poems" by Bruce Dickins