Talk:Rune poem

Rune poem copies
Is there a reason no one has put up a copy of the rune poems yet? Yasha
 * apart from the copy, prominently linked, on wikisource? dab (&#5839;)

"Prominently" might be a bit overstated. But thanks for the clue by four. ;-) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Yasha (talk • contribs) 02:29, 14 March 2005 (UTC)

Poem origins
Does any one know the origin of the poems? As in where the documents were found, on clay or paper, etc? Seems everywhere I look I find nothing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.95.12.187 (talk • contribs) 17:36, 31 October 2005 UTC
 * I've been wondering about this myself for a long time. The answer might be in the book Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples by Bruce Dickins? I am surprised that this is not mentioned. --Holt (talk) 21:14, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
 * A note in Heusler's Altgermanische Dichtung (1929) led me to Dickins' Runic and Heroic Poems (1915). Thanks to the wonderful folks at the Internet Archive, you can view the online flipbook here. Be sure to read the introduction to the rune poems (pp. 1-11). It also has a good (though early) bibliography. That should get you headed in the right direction. ;) — Aryaman (talk) 22:16, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Trees & Ogham?
I don't think this is necessarily correct:

"The fact that some Anglo-Saxon runes were given names of trees (ᛇ Eoh "yew", ᚪ Ac "oak", ᚫ Æsc "ash", c. f. also AS thorn vs. Norse thurs) may be related to the names of the Ogham signs, all of which are called after trees."

According to some Ogham experts, notably Peter Berresford Ellis, Ogham signs were not all named after trees. Here is a link to an article by Ellis that elaborates.

http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html

There was lively discussion of the whole "tree" thing on the main page for Ogham, and it was more or less agreed that the arboreal connection should be presented pro and con.

Suggest we put a "." after "signs" and strike the "all of which were named after trees" from this article.

--dragonflykarate 13:01, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Character encoding
What character encoding do I need to use to see these runes? In UTF-8 (for me), they all appear as question-marks. - Casey


 * Hi Casey. You need to install Junicode or another font which has the runic range. We're still ironing out the bugs to maximize viewability for the largest amount of readers. - WeniWidiWiki 05:44, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks! - Casey 71.56.223.2 01:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Possible additional redirections
Runic verse, rune verse and/or some other similar expressions could redirect here.62.65.237.196 (talk) 20:27, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Requested move 6 January 2019

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: moved as requested per the discussion below. Dekimasu よ! 23:43, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Rune Poems → Rune poem – It isn't capitalized in the body of the article or in the title of Old English rune poem. It is not treated as a proper noun in A Companion to Medieval Poetry nor in The Old English Rune Poem: A Critical Edition. (When it is treated as a proper noun, it is as the name of one of the poems and it is italicized.) Srnec (talk) 23:18, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Support downcasing, as the title is clearly descriptive. Also, per MOSPLURAL, the singular is our preference. Primergrey (talk) 13:45, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Support. Seems logical. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:41, 9 January 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Should really Nicolai Granii Swedish version be called "preserved"?
A few months ago, you added information about the Swedish version given in a letter written 1600 (exactly, according to the SBL source). You also added a short new section Rune poem, where you (properly and well sourced) played down its importance; you wrote: "Due to its age, it has received relatively little attention from runologists." However, both in the lead and in that section a reader now would get the impression that this Swedish version were an independent record of a fourth version of the old poem. The extant lead text stresses this: "Four different poems have been preserved...". Unless you can provide a source that confirms that this view of the Swedish version is supported by extant scolars, or that the letter itself contains something to this effect, I think that the lead should be changed. We then should go back to mentioning "three different poems" in the first paragraph of the lead, but mention the Swedish version in the second paragraph (together with the Abecedarium).

Now, I do not know more about these things than what I found in the wp variants Rune poem and is:Rúnakvæði, the article by Inmaculada Senra you provided as a source, and the two SBL articles and  on sv:Nicolaus Granius and Johannes Bureus, respectively. The information/impression I get from these sources/articles is that on the one hand "the Swedish (extant) version" actually is not the youngest one; it exists in a preserved letter from Nicolaus Granius to Bonaventura Vulcanius written 1600, while for the Norwegian version we only have the 1636 edition by Ole Worm. However, on the other hand, the Norwegian version was based on a considerably older manuscript which unhappily burned in the disastrous Copenhagen Fire of 1728; but Granii letter was presenting the poem as part of a description of the ongoing work of his old school mate, Johan(nes) Bure(us), who was the central person in the start-up of Swedish rune-research. Now, Bure had access to (and could read, and even to some extent edited 'modern' Swedish versions of) the central Swedish collections of older Nordic manuscripts; including most old Norwegian or Icelandic ones then in Sweden. He also to some extent was an artist and a (bad, according to SBL) poet; and even experimented a bit with old Scandinavian poetry forms, as far as I understood. He certainly also investigated and started catalogising Swedish runestones, and also collected some popular 'oral history'.

On the basis of this, I cannot completely exclude that Bure actually found some pheasant reciting a version of the old poem, and recorded it; but I don't find it likely. There are several much more likely variants. He may well have known about the Norwegian version then extant in Copenhagen; he might even had access to some variant of it (although the SLB article does not indicate that there was much direct contacts between him and Danish colleagues, at least not friendly ones). He may have made a translation of that, or a new poem (in old form) inspired by that. He even may have come up with the idea quite independently, and while being quite ignorant of the older poems. (Recall that this was the guy who created "Runakänslones lärospån"!). He also indeed may have had access to some now lost old manuscript, from Sweden or some other Nordic country, containing an older version of the theorem (and in that case the talk of the preservation of four different poems would be justified).

In any case, Granius probably didn't write down the poem in that letter without also write at least a few words of its background. Thus, just reading his letter might solve the mystery directly, or at least provide some definite clues. Unhappily, the published 1908 edition was titled "Een runendicht" (a rune poem), and thus perhaps only contains an extract of that letter.

Thus,, I would like to ask you not only if you have references to some 'secondary' or 'tertiary' sources mentioning "the Swedish rune poem", but also about primary sources. Do you have access to the poem version? Do you even (better!) have access to Granii letter?
 * Hi! I wish I had better sources on this. I had another quick look and it was not easy to find anything overly useful. Again it's tricky as the source I have referenced does say the Swedish poem as the youngest but it does seem that the dating is at least a bit more complex than that and it'd be good to talk about each in more detail. When it was first published, when scholars date it to have been first made and how it developed in this time and so on. There is also the question of how we define age of the poem. If it were oral before being written down, at what point did it come into being?


 * Regarding the term "preserved", I feel like it would apply to the Swedish rune poem as much as the others. Something can be preserved and not be old and similarly be preserved but not completely. It is also important to remember that the rune poems, if in oral circulation, would have changed over time and thus preservation in this context is only ever of a specific version and at a specific time. Manuscripts too drift with copying and so there are always questions of how well it reflects that which was there in the past. Even if the man who first recorded it did completely make it up, it is still a rune poem that has been preserved and indeed if he based it off a Norwegian rune poem, that is drawing from tradition just as if it were in oral circulation.


 * I guess my stance is that it'd be really good just to have a fuller discussion of the scholarly view of these poems. When did certain components in them arise, what is the recording tradition and to what extent can they be considered independent sources. Unfortunately I don't have the time or good sources to hand to address this but I'll keep it in my mind for sure when I'm reading.--Ingwina (talk) 10:49, 8 December 2023 (UTC)