ᛢ cweorð

Line of descent

History

Cweorð is one of four runes at the foot of Hickes's printing of the rune poem that have no stanza: cweorð, calc, stan and gar. It is known only from manuscript rune lists and has never been found carved on an object. Its name has no meaning in Old English. It looks like a rhyme on peorð, itself a name of unknown meaning.

R. I. Page classed cweorð and stan as "pseudo-runes", invented by scholars and not used by carvers. He suggested that cweorð was made to give the runic alphabet an equivalent of Latin q, the letter used in Latin for the kw sound (Old English wrote that sound cw). That fits a period when runes were being studied in monasteries beside the Latin alphabet. Manuscripts of that time also list cryptic runes and arrange runes in Latin alphabetical order.

For this site the rune matters as evidence of how runes were understood in late Anglo-Saxon England. By the 10th and 11th centuries, at least some runic knowledge was antiquarian: a learned tradition of lists and names, cut off from the living practice of the carvers.

Where it is found

• Hickes (1705), printing of Cotton Otho B.x: rune at the foot of the poem, name cweorð
• Late Anglo-Saxon manuscript rune lists; no inscription

Sources

• Dickins (1915), p. 22, note to v. 91.
• Wikipedia, 'Anglo-Saxon runes' (citing Page 1999, pp. 41–42), checked 2026-10.