The Rune Poems: Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic Verses and Their Kennings

No one in the age of the runes wrote down a handbook explaining what each rune meant. What survives instead are three medieval poems that give a verse to each rune: one in Old English, one in Old Norwegian, one in Old Icelandic. They are the closest thing we have to a voice from inside the runic tradition, and almost every modern rune meaning rests on them somewhere. All three are quoted here in the translation of Bruce Dickins, published in 1915 in Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples.

They are not easy texts. They are terse, sometimes obscure, and written for rows that are not the Elder Futhark most readers use today. But they are worth the effort, because they show what a rune name called to mind for people who still used the runes, and because their images are often stranger and richer than the keywords of modern books.

The Old English Rune Poem

The Old English Rune Poem has twenty-nine stanzas, one for each rune of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc. Its only manuscript was burned in the fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and the poem survives because George Hickes printed it in 1705.

Each stanza opens with the rune and its name and then gives a few lines of description, often with a moral turn. It is a poem of the hall and the road: wealth must be given away, the horse is a joy to princes, the oak feeds pigs and sails the sea. Its world is that of a lord and his retainers, where generosity earns honour and the open road and the sea are hard.

It is also a Christian poem. Wealth brings honour “in the sight of the Lord”, and the day is “the glorious light of the Creator”. Whatever pagan meanings the rune names once had have been softened or turned, and the poem should be read as what it is: the work of a Christian English poet who knew the runes as part of his learning, not as a sacred script.

The Norwegian Rune Poem

The Norwegian Rune Poem has sixteen couplets, one for each rune of the Younger Futhark. Its medieval manuscript burned in Copenhagen in 1728, and the text survives in earlier copies.

Each couplet has two lines that often seem to have nothing to do with each other: “Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen; the wolf lives in the forest.” The first line speaks of the rune; the second is usually there for rhyme and sound, since the two lines of each couplet rhyme in Old Norse. Scholars still argue about whether the pairs hide a connection. Some second lines seem to echo the first; others look like proverbs chosen only for their sound. Either way, the poem has a hard, northern texture, full of frost, iron, wolves and the sea.

The Icelandic Rune Poem

The Icelandic Rune Poem, from manuscripts of the fifteenth century, also has sixteen stanzas. Each gives the rune’s name and three kennings, short riddling descriptions. Wealth is “source of discord among kinsmen and fire of the sea and path of the serpent”. The manuscripts add after each stanza a Latin word and an Old Norse word for a ruler or chieftain that alliterates with the rune.

Of the three poems, the Icelandic is the most compressed and, for many readers, the most useful. It does not moralise as the English poem does, and it does not wander off for the sake of rhyme as the Norwegian does. It simply turns each rune three ways and lets the reader see it.

Why the three poems differ

Why do the poems differ? They were made for different rows, in different centuries, in different places. The English poem knows twenty-nine runes and a Christian court; the Norse poems know sixteen and a world of ice, iron and the sea. Where they share a rune, they often agree in spirit: both Norse poems open Wealth with “source of discord among kinsmen”, and the English poem, from the other side, urges that wealth be shared out freely.

None of them was written for the Elder Futhark, whose runes had no surviving poems of their own. When a reader of the Elder runes quotes a poem, it is the stanza of that rune’s English or Norse descendant. For runes that dropped out of the Younger row, such as Gebo, Wunjo or Ehwaz, only the English poem has a stanza, and for runes that were added in England, such as Āc and Æsc, only the English poem has one at all. Keeping this in mind prevents a common error: treating a fifteenth-century Icelandic kenning or a Christian English verse as the original meaning of a second-century rune. The poems are witnesses, late but precious, not the source.

What a kenning is

A kenning is a name for something that is not its name: the whale-road for the sea, the sword’s sweat for blood. Norse and English poets used them constantly, and the Icelandic Rune Poem is built of nothing else. For each rune it gives three.

A kenning works like a small riddle. It names a thing by what it does, what it resembles, or a story attached to it, and the listener has to make the leap. That leap is the pleasure of the form, and it is also why kennings suit rune reading so well: they make you look at a familiar sign from an unexpected side.

Reading the kennings of the Icelandic poem

Wealth is “source of discord among kinsmen and fire of the sea and path of the serpent”. Discord among kin is plain enough; inheritances have split families in every age. The fire of the sea is gold, because gold glitters under water, and old stories tell of treasure sunk in rivers and seas. The path of the serpent is gold again: the dragon Fáfnir lay on a hoard, and a dragon’s bed is gold. So the one rune holds a warning, an image and a legend at once.

Ice is “bark of rivers and roof of the wave and destruction of the doomed”. The first two are pictures anyone who has seen a frozen river will recognise: ice covers the water as bark covers a tree. The third is a warning. Ice is fatal to the one who trusts it, and the man who walks out on it unready is already doomed.

Sun is “shield of the clouds and shining ray and destroyer of ice”. The sun sits behind the clouds like a shield, shines, and melts what Ice has bound; the two runes answer each other across the row.

Týr is “god with one hand and leavings of the wolf and prince of temples”. The first two kennings point to the same story: the wolf Fenrir bit off Týr’s hand when the gods bound him, so the god is what the wolf left behind. The third recalls that Týr was once a great god, honoured in shrines.

Man is “delight of man and augmentation of the earth and adorner of ships”. People take joy in one another, add to the life of the earth, and fill the benches of the longships.

Using the poems in a reading

Reading the kennings is a way of reading the runes slowly. Each one asks you to see the rune from three sides: often one practical, one poetic and one drawn from myth. When a rune falls in a reading, it can be worth setting aside its modern keyword and asking which of its three kennings speaks to the question. Wealth as discord, as hidden gold, or as a dragon’s hoard are three very different answers.

The English stanzas add something else: a moral voice, the advice of an older person to a younger one. The Norwegian couplets add sound and mood. Between them, the three poems give a reader not one meaning per rune but a small cluster of images, and the image that fits is usually the one that tells you something you did not already know.

Sources: Bruce Dickins, Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (1915): the Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems.