The rune poems: the runes explained in medieval verse

Without three short medieval compositions, we would know the runes today almost only as sounds. They are the rune poems, verse texts that devote a stanza to each rune, starting from its name. There are three main ones: one in Old English, one in Old Norwegian and one in Icelandic. Born as tools for remembering the alphabet, they have become the most important source for the names of the runes and their traditional meanings.

The Old English poem

The Old English Rune Poem describes twenty-nine runes of the futhorc, one per stanza, in alliterative verse. Each stanza names the rune and develops its image: wealth, the aurochs, the thorn, the ride, ice, the sun. The tone is often moral and Christian, with references to the Lord and to generosity. Its date is uncertain, but the text seems to belong to the Anglo-Saxon period.

Its survival is almost an accident. The poem was in a manuscript of Sir Robert Cotton's library, the codex Otho B. x, destroyed in the fire that struck the collection in 1731. The text has come down to us because it had been printed in 1705 by George Hickes in his Thesaurus of the ancient northern languages. Scholars therefore work from a printed copy, not from the original.

The Norwegian poem

The Norwegian rune poem, datable to around the thirteenth century, consists of sixteen couplets, one for each rune of the Younger Futhark. Each couplet joins two apparently unrelated sentences: the first concerns the rune, the second is often a proverb or an image from nature, linked to the first only by rhyme. So, after saying that wealth causes strife among kinsmen, the text adds that the wolf grows up in the wood.

This poem, too, has had an adventurous history. The manuscript containing it was lost in the Copenhagen fire of 1728, which destroyed the university library. The text survives thanks to transcriptions made in the seventeenth century. One of the best-known copies was published by the Danish antiquary Ole Worm in 1636, in his treatise on runic literature.

The Icelandic poem

The Icelandic rune poem, preserved in fifteenth-century manuscripts, is the most regular. For each of the sixteen runes it offers three kennings, that is, poetic circumlocutions: hail is cold grain, ice is the bark of rivers, the sun is the shield of the clouds. Each stanza is followed by two glosses: a Latin word that translates or interprets the name, and a Norse term meaning chieftain or king that begins with the same letter, such as fylkir for fé.

The Latin glosses themselves show the milieu in which the poem circulated: that of Icelandic clerics and scholars, raised in Christian culture yet still attentive to the Norse poetic tradition. The kennings recall those of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, written in the thirteenth century as a handbook for poets. It was a heritage that medieval scholars cultivated with awareness.

The three poems are neither treatises on magic nor manuals of divination. They are didactic and literary texts, born in Christian settings, which nonetheless preserve an older memory of the rune names. By comparing them, linguists have reconstructed the Germanic names of the Elder Futhark, and modern readers still find in them a lively portrait of how the peoples of the North looked at nature, wealth and fate.