The rune poems

Three old texts. The same runes. Three different ways of looking at them.

Fehu — wealth. But what exactly does wealth mean? For one poet — a comfort that has to be shared. For another — a cause of quarrels among kinsmen. For the third — also a beacon of the flood-tide and the path of the serpent.

That is why we do not begin with a ready list of «rune meanings». We begin with the poems.

These are the most important old texts that walk the rune row sign by sign and leave us the images tied to their names. This whole site rests on them.

Three poems that kept the runes in words

The Old English Rune Poem

9th century or earlier · 29 stanzas

The longest of the three. It matters especially for the Elder Futhark, because it preserves images for several runes that the shorter Scandinavian row no longer has.

The first image — wealth:

A curious detail: the poem never names its own runes, so every name above every stanza in every edition was put there by a later hand. The text behaves almost like a riddle. It describes an image — and the reader has to know which rune is meant.

And the poem itself barely survived time: the manuscript Cotton MS Otho B.x burned in a fire. The text we read today survived thanks to a printed copy of 1705.

Read the Old English Rune Poem →

The Norwegian Rune Poem

13th century · 16 couplets

It is shorter. Sharper. At times almost enigmatic. Each rune gets only two lines.

For Fehu:

Two images stand side by side, often held together first of all by the rhyme. That is exactly why the poem leaves so much room for the reader.

It does not explain. It shows — and moves on.

Read the Norwegian Rune Poem →

The Icelandic Rune Poem

15th century · 16 stanzas

Here each rune already unfolds into several short images.

Fehu:

This is already almost a small tangle of associations. One rune — and three different directions to look in. And at the end of each stanza the manuscript adds two more oddities: a Latin equivalent of the rune’s name and a word for king starting with the same letter. As if someone were writing a poem, a dictionary and an alphabet game all at once.

Read the Icelandic Rune Poem →

Why don’t they say the same thing?

Because centuries lie between them. The languages changed. The rune rows changed. So did the world around them. But some images stubbornly keep coming back.

• Fehu remains wealth.
• Isa — ice.
• Sowilo — the sun.

It is the repetition that helps you see the core. And the differences show something else: a rune was never simply one keyword.

And where is the Elder Futhark?

There is an important detail. The two Scandinavian poems already describe the Younger Futhark of 16 runes. The Old English one — the extended Anglo-Saxon row. None of the three is an ancient book called «24 meanings of the Elder Futhark». So when we work with its 24 runes, we have to look at several sources together:

• what survived in the English tradition;
• what the Scandinavian poems repeat;
• how the names of the runes themselves changed.

Not one book of answers. Several old voices that can be compared.

And what is the Abecedarium Nordmannicum?

This is one more early text — 9th century.

It goes through the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark one after another:

But it barely explains what they mean. So for meanings it is not as useful as the three rune poems. But it shows beautifully the order of the runes itself and how it was memorised.

See the source →

This is where the meanings on this site begin

When you open Fehu, Isa or Raidho, we do not begin with a modern esoteric dictionary. First we look at the old texts. What repeats? What contradicts what? What can we really say? And only after that comes the modern reading — set apart and honestly marked as modern.

Source first. Then interpretation.

Explore all 24 runes →