The Old English Rune Poem

The Anglo-Saxon futhorc, the runic alphabet used in early medieval England, extended the older twenty four letter Germanic futhark with additional letters to represent sounds particular to Old English, reaching twenty nine letters in its fullest form. The Old English Rune Poem gives each of those twenty nine letters its own short stanza, moving through the row in order and building each verse around the object, animal or idea the letter's name denotes: Feoh, cattle or wealth, opens the poem; Ur, the aurochs, a now extinct wild ox, follows; Thorn, an actual thorn, painful to grasp; and so on through Os, Rad, Cen and the rest to Ear, the grave, at the close.

This structure, a name-word built into a short descriptive or gnomic verse, is exactly what this atlas already records for each of the twenty nine futhorc runes: the poem is not commentary added after the fact but the primary source those descriptions are built from. Where a rune's entry here explains what its name means and what image the tradition associated with it, that explanation traces to this poem's stanza for that letter, one of only a small number of surviving witnesses to how the Anglo-Saxons themselves glossed their own runic alphabet rather than how modern reconstruction has approached it from outside.

Two related poems in other Germanic languages, the Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic rune poems, cover comparable ground for their own, different runic rows, and the three together form the main surviving evidence for how medieval Northern European cultures explained their runes in their own words.

Every modern text of the Old English Rune Poem descends from a single printed source rather than from the manuscript itself, because the manuscript no longer exists. The poem survived into the early modern period in one copy, bound into the Cotton library's manuscript Otho B.x, and the antiquarian George Hickes printed a transcription of it in 1705, in his Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus, a survey of Old Germanic languages. In 1731, a fire at Ashburnham House, where the Cotton collection was then housed, destroyed or badly damaged a substantial part of the library, and Otho B.x was among the losses. Hickes's transcription is therefore not simply the earliest surviving edition; for this poem, it is the only surviving witness at all, and any error, misreading or normalization Hickes introduced in 1705 is now permanently unrecoverable against the lost original.

The poem's content shows its own layered history. Its final stanza, on Ear, the grave, closes on an image of a corpse decaying while joys pass away, phrasing scholars read as reflecting Christian sensibility rather than the poem's otherwise more matter-of-fact, catalog-like tone for earlier letters. That suggests a text with roots in an earlier, non-Christian runic tradition, reworked or extended by a scribe writing after England's conversion, rather than a poem composed whole in either period. Its precise date of composition, somewhere in the centuries before the destroyed manuscript was copied, remains an estimate rather than a documented fact.