The rune poems
Three medieval poems, one verse per rune, describing what each was called, plus a fourth text that lists the runes and tells you almost nothing about them. They are the closest thing to a primary source on rune names that exists, and they need reading carefully.
Everything anyone knows about rune names rests, ultimately, on these texts and on the linguistic reconstruction that works backwards from them. The Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic poems each take the runes of their alphabet in order and give a short verse for every one, built around the rune's name.
They are not a mystical text and they are not a glossary. They are mnemonic verse, composed centuries after the alphabets they describe, in Christian contexts, by people already looking back at something old. The Norwegian poem in particular pairs a statement about the rune with a proverb that has nothing to do with it, purely for the rhyme.
The Abecedarium Nordmannicum is the odd one out, and you will see it counted as a rune poem and left out of the count about equally often. It runs the sixteen Younger Futhark runes across three lines and, with one possible exception, tells you only where each sits in the row. That is why this site keeps it here but describes it separately: it is evidence for the names and their order, and almost no evidence for anything else.
A note on the translations
The Old English Rune Poem
The longest and most descriptive of the rune poems, covering 29 runes of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. Because the manuscript is lost, every modern edition depends on one 18th-century printed transcription, and the rune names beside the stanzas may be that edition's own work.
- Language
- Old English
- Alphabet described
- Anglo-Saxon Futhorc
- Date
- Composed perhaps 8th–10th century; printed 1705
- Stanzas
- 29
- Manuscript
- Cotton Otho B.x, fols. 165r–v. The manuscript was caught in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731 and survives only as burnt fragments; the leaf carrying the rune poem was lost outright. The text survives because Humfrey Wanley had transcribed it and George Hickes printed that transcription in his Thesaurus in 1705. One thing to know about that print: each stanza is headed by the rune itself, standing for its own name, and the verse never spells that name out: the stanzas work as riddles whose answer is the name. The spelled-out forms sit in the margin, and where they came from is disputed: Hempl (1904) and Wrenn (1932) argued that Hickes added them from manuscript futhorc rows, and Jones (1967) that Wanley did. The alliteration shows the poet had the name-word in mind, so this is a question about the letters on the page rather than about the verse. The poem is the fullest context we have for the Old English rune names; the names themselves are attested elsewhere, in the manuscript rows described on the futhorc page.
The Norwegian Rune Poem
Sixteen terse two-line stanzas, each pairing a statement about the rune name with an apparently unrelated proverb. The second line is usually there for the rhyme, not the meaning.
- Language
- Old Norse
- Alphabet described
- Younger Futhark
- Date
- Probably 13th century
- Stanzas
- 16
- Manuscript
- The medieval original is lost; the text is known from 17th-century copies, principally those of Ole Worm.
The Icelandic Rune Poem
Each stanza gives three kennings for the rune name, followed in the manuscripts by a Latin gloss and an Old Norse word for "ruler". The Latin tags are listed here as notes rather than translated into the verse.
- Language
- Old Norse (Icelandic)
- Alphabet described
- Younger Futhark
- Date
- 15th century or earlier
- Stanzas
- 16
- Manuscript
- AM 687d 4to (15th century), with several later copies.
Abecedarium Nordmannicum
The fourth text usually mentioned alongside the rune poems, and the odd one out. It runs the sixteen Younger Futhark runes in order across three lines, but it is a mnemonic list rather than a poem with a stanza per rune: it says almost nothing about what the names mean, which is why most accounts leave it out.
- Language
- Old Saxon, with Old High German and Old Norse forms
- Alphabet described
- Younger Futhark
- Date
- 9th century
- Lines
- 3
- Manuscript
- Codex Sangallensis 878, p. 321, probably written at Fulda. The text was destroyed in the 1820s when Ildefons von Arx, the librarian at St Gallen, applied chemical reagents to the page, not to preserve it but to force the faded writing to show for a moment. Every modern edition therefore depends on drawings von Arx made himself, which Wilhelm Grimm published: one taken before the reagents were used, in Über deutsche Runen (1821), and one recording what could be glimpsed while they were working, in Zur Literatur der Runen (1828). The two witness different things and neither supersedes the other. The 1821 drawing shows the page undamaged, but only what the naked eye could make out on it. The 1828 drawing is the fuller record of the text, because the reagents briefly brought up letters that had not been legible before, which is why editions lean on it. Popular accounts credit the drawing to Grimm, who published it rather than made it.
How to read them without over-reading them
- They disagree with each other. The second rune is an aurochs in English, dross in Norwegian and drizzle in Icelandic. The sixth is a torch in English and an ulcer in both Norse poems. These are not corruptions of one another; both traditions are old.
- They are Christian. The Norwegian stanza for hail ends “Christ shaped the world of old”. The Old English poem repeatedly turns a rune name into a lesson about God.
- The Old English text survives by luck. Its manuscript burned in 1731. Every modern edition depends on a transcription George Hickes printed in 1705.
- The Old English stanzas never spell their names out. Each is headed by the rune itself, standing for its own name, and works as a riddle whose answer is that name. The spelled-out forms sit in the margin of the 1705 print and may have been added by Hickes or by Wanley rather than copied from the lost manuscript, so the poem is the richest description we have of what those names meant, and weaker evidence than it looks for the letters of the names themselves. Our texts follow every modern edition in expanding the name into the first line. The Norwegian and Icelandic poems are different: each stanza opens with the name written out.
- They describe names, not meanings. A stanza telling you that hail is cold and turns to water is evidence about the word “hail”. Turning that into a divinatory reading is a further step, and a modern one.