The Old Icelandic Rune Poem

The Icelandic rune poem gives one short stanza to each of the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark. Each stanza names the rune and then gives three descriptions of what the name denotes. Most are kennings, the compressed descriptive phrases of skaldic poetry: ice is "river-bark", the sun is "shield of the clouds", the giant is "dweller in the cliffs". Early collectors called the poem þrídeilur, "the three-part verses". Dickins noted that the first two lines of each stanza are linked by alliteration and the third has its own.

In the oldest manuscript, AM 687 d 4to, written about 1500, each stanza is followed by two more words. The first is a Latin word that roughly translates the rune name: aurum "gold" for fé, glacies "ice" for íss, iter "journey" for reið. Some are approximate or puzzling. Umbre stands for imber "shower", Saturn and Jupiter stand for the giant and the god, and abies "fir" stands for the birch. The second word is an Old Norse word for "ruler" or "chieftain" that begins with the rune's sound: fylkir for f, þengill for þ, tiggi for t. These words come from the þulur, the versified word-lists of medieval Icelandic poetics. Together they make the poem work as a reference table for the runic alphabet, linking each rune to a sound, a name, a Latin equivalent and a poetic synonym.

The poem is late. Dickins dated it to the 15th century. It covers only the sixteen Viking Age runes, although Icelanders of the time used dotted runes for e, g, d and p. The parchment of AM 687 d is damaged, and several stanzas (nauð, ár, bjarkan, ýr) are partly illegible. Editors fill the gaps from AM 461 12mo and later copies, so the text printed here is an edited text, not a transcript of one manuscript. AM 687 d also has a different order from the futhark at the end, with l before t; R. I. Page's edition (1999) documents this. Here the stanzas are numbered in futhark order, as in Dickins.

Many lines echo the Norwegian poem: wealth as "strife of kinsmen", man as "increase of the dust", Týr as the one-handed god. The phrase "man is the delight of man" is borrowed from the Eddic poem Hávamál.

The poem

Text after Dickins (1915), pp. 28–33, an edited text based chiefly on AM 687 d 4to, with readings from the other manuscripts where AM 687 d is illegible. Translation ours.