Rune Poems

The majority of the articles for the runes that I have written have been about the meanings of the rune and how to understand and use those meaning in castings and everyday life. We’ve dealt with the different versions of rune sets that are available to us, the history and even what each rune symbol stands for. You may be wondering how it is that we know as much as we do about each rune set. It’s true that a lot of the information that we get is thanks to archeologists, various texts and the study of history, but much of that information used a common springboard to help further all studies. What am I talking about? Well I’m talking about the various poems for the rune sets, and not just any poems but specific rune poems.

What is a rune poem? Well basically when the runes where being created (or developed) they took on phonetic sounds and were even said to have stood for specific “elements” in nature and/or life. For example the elder futhark rune Fehu has the phonetic sound “f” and is said to represent a wealth (usually in the form of cattle and land) that a person owns. As time passed and the runes traveled and adapted into new societies some of that information was starting to become lost. With the help of historians, poets, runemasters and even those simply interested in the runes various rune poems were written about the rune sets. Not every rune set has a rune poem of its own, but it is from the other rune poems and the history that we know about the runes that do have poems that we are able to better understand the sets that are lacking poems.

You may be wondering what these poems may actually say about the rune staves so I thought it might be helpful to have a look at one stanza from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem (written about 1000 C.E., this version translated by Jim Paul in his book “The Rune Poem” copyright 1996). This stanza is for the first rune in the Anglo-Saxon rune set known to Jim Paul as Feoh.

“Money may console you,
though to get any credit
you have to give it away.”

We can see by the lines that this rune has to deal with money, and with the help from other fields of study we become aware that the money can be in the form of cattle, livestock, or land. The stanza also tells us that in order to gain credit that we have to “give it away.” This is help to us rune readers because we can see that if this rune came up in a reading that our wealth is not going to be the only thing to get us through things. We need to establish credit with those that we are dealing with and one way to possibly do that is to pass on a wealth to them. Now you maybe thinking that this means we have to pay someone off, especially since we just got done talking about money as cattle, land, etc., but in a reading you’d understand that we’d look at the overall question and see what it is that we are talking about. If it were a question about love we would understand that in this case a wealth of love could be our friendship to another person and not something that has a monetary value.

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