The Old English Rune Poem

The Old English Rune Poem is a sequence of 29 short stanzas, one for each rune of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc from f to ea. Each stanza opens with the rune's name, and the rest of the stanza says something about the thing that name denotes: wealth, the aurochs, the thorn, the oak, the ash. The verse is ordinary Old English alliterative verse, two half-lines linked by alliteration, and the stanzas run from two to five lines.

The manuscript that held it, Cotton Otho B.x in the library of Sir Robert Cotton, burned in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731. The poem survives only because George Hickes printed it in his Thesaurus of the northern languages (1703–1705). Every modern edition, including the one printed here, goes back to Hickes. His page set each rune in the margin with its Latin-letter value and name, and some of that apparatus (variant rune forms, four extra runes at the foot) appears to have been added from another manuscript, Cotton Domitian A.ix, as George Hempl argued in 1903. The names at the head of the stanzas sometimes do not match what the stanza describes, which suggests that they too were supplied by a later hand. Hickes also misplaced names: he wrote deg over man and mann over dæg.

The poem is Christian in outlook. Wealth must be shared "if he wishes to win glory before the Lord"; the harvest is God's gift; man is "wretched flesh" that the Lord commits to the earth. The os stanza, whose rune name once meant a god (compare Old Norse áss), describes a source of speech and wisdom, and many readers think the poet took os as Latin os, "mouth".

For the history of runes the poem matters chiefly as a witness to the Old English rune names. Some stanzas are clear. Others are puzzles: nobody knows what peorð was (a game piece and a dice cup are both guesses), eolh-secg "elk-sedge" seems to describe a sharp sedge or reed, the ior stanza describes a creature that lives in water and feeds on land, and the meaning of yr and ear is disputed. The last four runes in Hickes, cweorð, calc, stan and gar, have no stanzas. They are late Northumbrian additions to the row; see the futhorc.

Dickins argued from its metre and grammar that the poem was composed well before the copy was made, and probably before the reign of Alfred. Datings since then have ranged from the 8th to the 10th century, and the question is open.

The poem

Text after Dickins (1915), pp. 12–23, from Hickes (1705). Translation ours.