The Rune Poems

What a rune poem is for

A rune poem is a memory aid, not a book of meanings.

Runic alphabets are acrophonic: each letter is named for a word beginning with the sound that letter carries. Fehu teaches you f. Beithe teaches you b. That is a fine system as long as everyone remembers the names, and a poem with one stanza per letter, in a fixed order, in metre, is an extremely effective way of making sure they do.

That is what these texts are. They are the runic equivalent of an alphabet song, composed for people learning a script, and their organising principle is mnemonic rather than doctrinal.

This matters for how they should be read. A stanza is not a definition and it is not a revelation. It is a riddle-like clue attached to a name, and its job is done the moment you remember the name.

The gap between the script and the poem

None of these texts is contemporary with the alphabet it describes, and the gaps are large.

The Elder Futhark was in use from roughly the second century to the eighth. It has no poem at all. Every meaning assigned to an Elder Futhark rune is reconstructed backwards from poems about later, different alphabets.

The Old English Rune Poem describes the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, and survives in a manuscript copied in the tenth century.

The Norwegian and Icelandic poems describe the sixteen-rune Younger Futhark, and date to the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively.

Ogham's Bríatharogaim are Old Irish, describing an alphabet that had gone out of epigraphic use by the seventh century.

So the distance between a fourth-century carver and the earliest verse describing his letters is several hundred years and, in the Scandinavian cases, a completely different row. Anyone claiming to know what a rune meant to the person who cut it is working from a document that person could not have read.

The manuscript that burned

The most important of the four nearly did not survive at all.

The Old English Rune Poem was preserved in Cotton Otho B.x, part of Sir Robert Cotton's library. In 1731 a fire at Ashburnham House, where the collection was then stored, destroyed or damaged a large part of it. Otho B.x was among the losses.

The text exists because Humfrey Wanley had transcribed it in 1705, twenty-six years earlier, for publication in George Hickes's Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus. Everything anyone knows about the Old English rune names comes through that printed transcript.

That is not a small dependency. Seven runes of the original twenty-four — Gebo, Wynn, Peorð, Eh, Ing, Eþel and Dæg — were dropped from the Younger Futhark before the Norse poems were composed, so those poems have no stanza for them. The only verse describing them is the English one. Had Wanley not made his copy, the names of a third of the Elder Futhark would be considerably more speculative than they already are.

Where they disagree

The four traditions frequently describe different things under the same letter, and the disagreements are the most useful thing about them.

Uruz is an aurochs in England, iron slag in Norway and drizzle in Iceland. The animal was extinct in Scandinavia, so the name was re-anchored twice, independently.

Kenaz is a torch in England and an ulcer in both Norse poems. Modern rune sets follow England almost universally, and the name Kenaz that they print is built from the English word.

Ansuz is a god in Iceland, a mouth in England and a river-mouth in Norway.

Fehu is a comfort in England, on condition you give it away. In both Norse poems it causes strife among kinsmen and no condition is offered.

A single poem read alone produces false confidence. Read together, they show what is stable — Hagalaz is hail everywhere, Isa is ice everywhere — and what was already uncertain when the verses were made.

The Icelandic apparatus

The Icelandic poem does something the others do not, and it reveals what these texts were for.

Each of its sixteen stanzas gives three kennings and then appends two words: a Latin gloss of the rune name, and an Old Norse poetic term for a ruler. Fé gets aurum fylkir, gold and prince. Týr gets Mars tiggi. Óss gets Jupiter oddviti.

The sixteen stanzas use sixteen different words for prince — fylkir, vísi, þengill, oddviti, ræsir, konungr, hildingr, niflungr, jöfurr, allvaldr, siklingr, tiggi, buðlungr, mildingr, lofðungr, ynglingr.

Skaldic poetry required an enormous stock of such heiti, synonyms a court poet had to have by heart. So the poem is teaching two curricula at once: the runes, and the vocabulary. It is a schoolroom text, and the Latin glosses put it firmly in a monastic classroom rather than anywhere pagan.

Ogham's version

Ogham has no rune poem and has something arguably better: three independent kenning-lists, the Bríatharogaim, ascribed to Morann mac Moín, Mac ind Óc and Cú Chulainn.

Each gives a two-word phrase for every letter. Because the three were composed separately, agreement between them is genuine evidence in a way a single source never is. Where all three describe a flushed face, the letter means redness. Where all three describe fear, it means terror.

That is exactly how the modern deconstruction of the Ogham tree alphabet was done. The medieval glossators assigned every letter a tree; the kennings frequently describe an ingot, a field, a weaver's beam or sulphur instead; and where the gloss contradicts all three lists, the gloss is the intruder.

The Germanic tradition has nothing comparable, because it never has more than one independent witness per rune per language.

How to use them

Three practical rules follow from all of this.

Cite the tradition, not just the meaning. "Kenaz means illumination" is an assertion. "The Old English poem calls it a torch; both Norse poems call it an ulcer" is a description. The second is more useful and it is not longer.

Treat agreement as evidence and disagreement as information. Where independent traditions converge, the reading is firm. Where they diverge, something was already lost.

Do not expect them to be about magic. They are about cattle, hail, ships, shields, milk pails, bees, slag, wounds, honour, the weather and the grave. The one thing the rune poems consistently are not is occult.