Anglo-Saxon rune poem

The Old English rune poem, dated to the 8th or 9th century, has stanzas on 29 Anglo-Saxon runes. It stands alongside younger rune poems from Scandinavia, which record the names of the 16 Younger Futhark runes.

The poem is a product of the period of declining vitality of the runic script in Anglo-Saxon England after the Christianization of the 7th century. A large body of scholarship has been devoted to the poem, mostly dedicated to its importance for runology but to a lesser extent also to the cultural lore embodied in its stanzas.

The sole manuscript recording the poem, Cotton Otho B.x, was destroyed in the Cotton Fire of 1731, and all editions of the poems are based on a facsimile published by George Hickes in 1705.

The poem as recorded was likely composed in the 8th or 9th century. It was preserved in the 10th-century manuscript Cotton Otho B.x, fol. 165a – 165b, housed at the Cotton library in London. The first mention of the manuscript is in the 1621 catalogue of the Cottonian collection (Harley 6018, fol. 162v), as "A Saxon book of divers saints lives and the Alphabett of the old Danish letter amonghs Mr. Gocelins." From this it is inferred that the manuscript had formerly belonged to John Joscelyn (1526-1603).

In 1731, the manuscript was lost with numerous other manuscripts in the fire at the Cotton library. However, the poem had been copied by Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726), and published by George Hickes in his 1705 Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus. This copy has formed the basis of all later editions of the poems.

The rune poem was presumably recorded on a single sheet of parchment which had not originally been part of the manuscript, and was possibly bound with a manuscript of Aelfric's Lives of Saints by Joscelyn. Consequently, the surviving fragments of the manuscript are of no use in determining the hand or the date of the destroyed folio of the poem. Based on a number of late West Saxon forms in the text, it can be assumed that the manuscript of the rune poem dated to the 10th or 11th century, based on earlier copies by Anglian or Kentish scribes. Although the original dialect and date of the poem cannot be determined with certainty, it was most likely a West Saxon composition predating the 10th century.

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