The word rune literally means a “secret” or “mystery.” But how does one begin to unravel the mystery of the runes? One good place to start is the traditional rune poems, which are provided here in concise yet elegant—not to mention heavily annotated—translations: the Old English Rune Poem, the Old Norwegian Rune Rhyme, and the Old Icelandic Rune Poem, as well as the lesser known Abecedarium Nordmannicum and the Early Modern Swedish Rune Poem. These oddly compelling verses are a storehouse of gnomic wisdom and early Germanic cultural lore, and their purpose was surely more than just an aid for committing the runic alphabets to memory—as many modern scholars would have us believe. In his introduction, English poet P.D. Brown suggests that the poems were instead tools “to make the mind more generally agile, more adept at making connections, thinking ‘laterally’ and more imaginatively” about what the runes in fact are.
This is also the purpose of the twenty modern rune poems included in this volume, which have been composed over the past four decades by members of the Rune-Gild, an international order that includes scholars and storytellers, poets and artists, musicians and magicians. Like the rune poems of old, these modern compositions encapsulate years—and in many cases, decades—of close study and intense reflection. Traditional and innovative at the same time, and expressed in a myriad of styles, these new poems demonstrate that the runes are much more than an object of idle antiquarian curiosity. They are living mysteries whose depths—like the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil—will never be fully fathomed.
If you would like to pick up a copy of this fantastic new work, by Michael Moynihan and P.D. Brown, it can be found here on the Arcana Europa website.
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The Rune Poems: A Reawakened Tradition |
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