The Rune Poems | Brown & Moynihan (eds.)

Edited by P. D. Brown and Michael MoynihanArcana Europa / Gilded Books, 249 pages, ISBN 9798410339742 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” abo