'Hleotan'' and the Purpose of the Old English ''Rune Poem''

Folklore, Vol. 92, No. 2. (1981), pp. 168-173. Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.

168

Folklore vol. 92:ii, 1981

Hleotan and the Purpose of the Old English Rune Poen1 MARIJANE OSBORN

RUNES, the letters of the early Germanic writing system, had meaningful names in addition to their phonetic values: for example, where we call the letter

f

'eff,' the Anglo-Saxons called the corresponding runic letter

feoh,

meaning 'wealth' (originally 'cattle').Three poems have come down to us which give meanings for these letters of the rune list. The earliest of them is in Old English and was probably composed in the eighth or ninth century. The other two are respectively in Norwegian of the twelfth or thirteenth century and Icelandic of the fifteenth century. The Old English poem is the longest of the three, with stanzas for the twenty-four original runes (which were inscribed in three groups of eight on weapons) plus five added vowel-runes, amounting to twenty-nine stanzas in all, as against only sixteen in each of the other two

poems, which were composed after the Scandinavian rune list was shortened.1

The Old English poem, as E. V. K. Dobbie remarks, 'in its general character and contents ... is not markedly different from the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems. '2 It shares with them, in addition to the rune-list order and what rune meanings all three have in common, an element of mysteriousness, a cryptic quality.

C. L. Wrenn's suggestion that the stanzas of the Old English

poem could have been 'intended as riddles, the answers to which were the respective rune-words,'3 could apply to all three. Nevertheless, it seems improbable that either of the Scandinavian poems is intended as more than a lexicon (a rhetorical lexicon in the case of the Icelandic poem, which gives three kennings-obscure but traditional metaphors-for each rune). But the Old English poem, when compared to the others, gives the impression of being more than a list. In it the enigmatic quality seems functional rather than rhetorical. 'Like a riddle-master,' one critic has noted, 'the rune-poet used wordplay, antithesis, and ambiguity to challenge the reader to enlarge his perspective and deepen his sensitivity to the world in which he lives and moves and has his being'4 I believe that this oracular enlarging of perspectives is

Rune Poem. but in a way hitherto not guessed at, and moreover that this purpose is responsible for the way the Old English poem focuses, much more than the other two poems, upon the

indeed an important purpose of the

everyday things of this world. I believe that the purpose of the poem is in some

sense divinatory, but not necessarily pagan.

In fact it is in the descriptions for those runes having an overtly pagan or supernatural meaning in the Scandinavian poems that the English poem

os purs

6ss

consistently deviates, giving

(Icelandic

giving

'giant') the meaning 'thorn'-but with the

porn

(Scandinavian

'god') the meaning 'mouth,'

possible hint of an underlying story about giants, and describing

tir

(Scandina­

vian Tyr, a martial god) as an innocuous constellation. 5 The poem offers a picture of the secular life of the time. but from a point of view that permits

169

HLEOTAN ANDTHE RUNE POEM

reference only to the Christian deity. This kind of deviation suggests that the two Scandinavian poems probably best retain, in those lines where they are similar, whatever original rune verse tradition there once was. The poet takes other liberties as well, such as changing the emphasis from bad to good in the first stanza and reversing the order of the final two runes so that this poem, unlike the two Scandinavian poems, has an overall design, moving from the good life in the hall (the feoh stanza) to the ironic and dismal 'going to bed' of the corpse after death (the ear stanza).6 But the quality that most vividly distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon poem from its Scandinavian counter­ parts is its moral tone; many of the descriptions in the poem include outright moral directives, and most of the others contain at least an ethical nuance. Although the most obvious purpose of the English poem is to elucidate the rune names, this ethical stance along with the sense of structure and the care about lexical nuance mark it as an example of wisdom literature rather than simply a functional list. But the very fact that the poet uses techniques that we associate . today with a complex literary consciousness can be misleading. It is likely that the poet is manipulating his materials, expanding and structuring the lexico-descriptive elements through antithesis and wordplay, for a philosophical rather than an aesthetic purpose. The manipulative wordplay giving us a clue to this purpose begins in the first stanza: 7 (Feoh) by� frofur

fira gehwylcum;

miclun hyt daelan sceal !Yeah manna geh�ylc domes hleotan. gif he wile for drihtne

Bruce Dickins translates the stanza as an appropriately pious beginning for a poem that defines the parameters of Anglo-Saxon life within the framework of the rune list: (Wealth) is a comfort to all men; yet must every man bestow it freely, if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord. 8

The phrase domes hleotan appears elsewhere in a Christian context clearly meaning 'to gain honour' as Dickins translates it here; moreover the echoic line 61 in the man stanza clearly refers to the divine decree. Thus his interpreta­ tion is generally accepted. Hleotan, however, also has the more specific meaning 'to cast lots' (Old English hleot, hlit becomes modern English 'lot'), and the primary meaning of dom is 'doom, decree, judgment,' so the stanza may be retranslated to emphasize quite a different meaning: (Wealth) is a comfort to everyone; but every man must share it generously if he wishes to cast the lots of judgment before his lord.

Now the scene is secular, in the meadhall where gifts are exchanged to confirm the mutual loyalty of thane and lord. The lord himself, in his hieratic function, dispenses in addition to material wealth the spiritual treasure of wisdom. It may be recalled that in the Old English poem The Wanderer the unhappy protagonist misses his dead lord's larcwidum 'words of lore' (line 37) as much

MARIJANE OSBORN

170

as his physical presence (until he finally learns to contemplate wisdom on his own, sitting sundor aet rune, line 111). The first stanza of the Rune Poem suggests that the lord's wisdom function in this situation is to read (or 'judge') the meaning of the symbolic lots, to offer his advice within this framework. I shall translate the passage once more, attempting here to capture the rhythm of the verse form as well as the careful ambiguity in which secular and Christian traditions are fused: Wealth is a comfort to one and all. But he must share it who hopes to cast His lot for judgment before the lord.

The rune feoh (wealth) has always come first in the futhorc (this term for the rune list derives from the traditional order of the first six letters in the list), but if the other two poems are any indication, the maxim associated with it was cynical: 'Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen.' Not only does the poet rephrase this maxim so as to begin his poem with the positive vision of wealth being shared out in the 'gift-hall,' but he also manages to enlarge his meaning to include on the one hand an allusion to the eternal life that stands in contrast to the corporal death with which the poem concludes,9 and on the other a reference to the age-old folk custom of giving value for value when seeking oracular advice. The seeking of oracular advice before undertaking a sea journey, in particular, is mentioned twice in Beowulf, once clearly but with the nature of the divination unrevealed (lines 204-205), and later more obscurely but with the word 'lot' perhaps implied (line 1 1 29); 10 the poet apparently regarded such divination to be a folk custom among his northern ancestors. In neither of these occurrences in Beowulf, however, are runes, or rather the Old English runstafas 'rune­ staves,' mentioned, as they are in a non-oracular context elsewhere in the poem (line 1 695). Nor are they mentioned in the famous passage where Tacitus describes the Germanic ritual of sortilege in the first century A.D. I give Mattingly's 1 948 translation (heavily revised since then) to demonstrate how suggestive this passage is to a speculative reader of Latin: For auspices and the casting of lots they have the highest possible regard. Their procedure in casting lots is uniform. They break off a branch of a fruit-bearing tree and slice it into strips; they distinguish these by certain runes and throw them, as random chance will have it, on to a white cloth. Then the priest of the State if the consultation is a public one, the father of the family if it is private, after a prayer to the gods and an intent gaze heavenward, picks up three, one at a time, and reads their meaning from the runes scored on them. If the lots forbid an enterprise, there can be no further consultation that day; if they allow it, further confirmation by auspices is re cjuired.11 ( Germania

X)

The procedure described here is a standard three-lot oracle, the first for the venture, the second to cross it, the third for the outcome. But the word that Mattingly translates 'runes' is merely notis 'marks' in the LatinY2 We are offered no evidence for the nature of these marks, rune-like or otherwise. In any case, one would scarcely take the ethnographical romanticism of Tacitus as a dependable source of information concerning a folk custom of centuries later; if anything, I am suggesting that the reverse might be the case, that such a literary source influenced or reassured the poet. The scene in the feoh stanza

HLEOTAN ANDTHERUNEPOEM

1 71

of the Rune Poem, which the os stanza shows to have been composed or at least revised by someone familiar with Latin, is remarkably like that scene described by Tacitus, with the difference that in the poem the phrase domes h/eotan does associate the casting of lots with runes through the context in which it occurs. The only extant references to the use of runes for divination that are more or less contemporary with the Rune Poem are some Latin notices accompanying an alphabetically arranged rune list that began to be circulated on the continent in the ninth century. Two of these notices suggest opposing attitudes towards such oracles. In Runica Manuscripta Derolez proposes that the writer of the first of these, who is speculating about the origin and use of the runes, may be an English scribe accustomed to finding runes in a Christian context and thus not automatically prejudiced against them: These forms of letters are said to have been invented among the people of the Northmanni; it is said that they still use them to commit their songs and incantations to memory. They gave the name runstabas to these letters, I believe, because by writing them they bring to light secret things.13

He is referring to the fact that run as the first element in a compound has an adjectival function, and means 'secret.' The second notice, which Derolez implies was probably by a continental scribe who more readily associated runes with heathenism, adds disapprovingly that the Northmen 'are still given to pagan practices. '14 Other sources suggest that in Denmark particularly such practices as those condemned by this writer were still extant, or thought to be, like the sacrifices at the Danish court mentioned with such horror in Beowulf (lines 1 75-180). The stanzas for lng and Tir suggest moreover that the Rune Poem poet may have accepted this manuscript tradition connecting the runes with heathen worship in Denmark.15 The practice of 'bringing to light secret things,' remarked upon by the rune list scribes, probable refers to nothing more serious than divination, which the Church tended to regard as superstition rather than idolatry, and frowned upon chiefly because of the way it inclined its practitioners to be fatalistic and neglect moral responsibility: Seek no� th ough lots how things will turn out for you, but do the best you can; God will easily � decide his will about you and your need. though he does not tell you about it first.16

But a creative use of signs and portents, as opposed to the merely superstitious use, was also current. Such use was recorded in the Old and New Testaments, in the writings of the Church Fathers, and popularly ascribed to Gregory the Great himself, 'our Gregory' as English writers called him. The most famous story told of Gregory is about his seizing upon name portents to promote the conversi?n of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. 17 So a tradition for enlarging perspectives though the evocative flexibility of augury was known within the Church itself. In any case, pagan methods were not frowned upon if used discreetly and for the right purposes; the syllabus for 'ecclesiastical arithmetic' at the Canterbury school of Theodore and Hadrian, established c. 670, 'included computistics and some astrology and horoscopes, besides the more obvious ecclesiastical subjects.' 1 8 Unlike the simple casting of lots to determine the auspicious or inauspicious outcome of an enterprise, the system of the

MARIJANE OSBORN

172

Rune Poem, with the practical and moral advice-giving element, encourages the consulter of the runes to 'do the best he can.' Though it is entirely possible that the Rune Poem poet was reviving or record­ ing a genuine tradition of runic oracles, it is in my own view equally likely that the system is of his own devising, perhaps a fusion of native and foreign elements as the runes themselves had been at an earlier date. He may have believed, himself, that his system was a genuine recovery of an ancient and native practice, possibly with the good faith of a continentally based English antiquarian conversant with the lore of 'Danish' runology. It is within such a clerical and antiquarian milieu, I suggest, that the poet dared to fuse the discredited folk tradition of casting lots (possibly never associated with the runes in actual practice) with the mnemonic maxims of the rune list, shifting the emphasis of these maxims as he saw fit and inventing new ones as needed.19 He thereby created a little cosmos reflecting the secular life of his time, yet complete enough in its symbol system to respond effectively to the serious 0 questor even today. 2 This, I think, is the discovery to be made through the riddle-like ambiguities and the artful antitheses of the Rune Poem, a discovery to which we are alerted by the word hleotcm at the beginning: the poem is a native list of oracles (natively conceived whether in the eighth or ninth century or before) through which, to use Jung's words on the I Ching, 'thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them' may bring to light secret things.21 It is my o"'n feeling about the poem-though this may be too extreme for most people-that it is in fact a guide to 'divinatory medita­ tion,' a kind of meditation drawing upon signs in the secular world as a focus for deeply absorbed contemplation.22 Although the Rune Poem may be regarded more simply as a method for ordinary fortune-telling on the one hand, or as a well-conceived picture of the secular life of the times, on the other, its flexibility, wide range, and responsible moral tone make it an excellent focusing device for meditation upon purpose and event in the everyday world. lt is our native equivalent to 'the olkest book in the world,' and is based on traditional sources which, in Western terms, may well be quite ancient.

University of California at Davis.

NOTES

1.

Bruce Dickins edits and translates all three poems

In

Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

his Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old

1915), pp. 12-33.

2. Elliot van Kirk Dobbie, editor, The Anglo·Saxon Minor Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. xlvii. 3. A Study of Old English Literature (London: Harrap. 1967), p. 163. As Wrenn explains, the manuscript of the poem was lost in the fire that destroyed much of the Cotton collection in 1731. and the text survives only in a printing by George Hickes in 1705, with the runes added from another manuscript, Cotton Domitian A. ix, fol. lOa. 4. J. R. Hall, 'Perspective and Wordplay in the Old English Rune Poem' Neophilo/ogus. LXI (1977), p. 458. 5. purs appears in Old English in Maxims Il, 42-43: purs sceal on fenne gewunianl ana innan lande. Among the non-supernatural rune names only. the definitions for ur and cen, both of which had apparently lost their original meanings, are essentially different in the two later poems.

HLEOTAN ANDTHERUNEPOEM

1 73

6. Discussed by J. R. Hall. op. cit., pp. 457-58. 7. Hall asserts that 'the wordplay begins in the second stanza' (op. cit., p. 453). 8. Text and translation are from Runic and Heroic Poems, pp. 12-13. 9. Hall, p. 458. While remaining, strictly speaking, within the limits of his subject matter, secular life in this world, the poet cleverly implies the sentiments of Bede 's Death Song about the 'necessary journey' everyone must take, when 'what to his soul of good or evil/after his day of death will be adjudged.' 10. Frederich Klaeber, editor, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 3rd ed. (Boston: Heath, 1950). 11. Tacitus, On Britain and Germany. A Translation of the 'Agrico/a and 'Germania by H. Mattingly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), pp. 108-09. 12. 'Runes' to 'signs' is one of the numerous changes that S. A. Handford makes in this passage in his revision of Mattingly's translation in 1970: For omens and the casting of lots they have the highest regard. Their procedure in casting lots is always the same. They cut off a branch of a nut-bearing tree and slice it into strips; these they mark with different signs and throw them completely at random on to a white cloth. Then the priest of the state, if the consultation is a public one, or the father of the family if it is private, offers a prayer to the gods, and looking up at the sky picks up three strips, one at a time, and reads their meaning from the signs previously scored on them. If the lots forbid an enterprise, there is no deliberation that day on the matter in question; if they allow it, confirmation by the taking of auspices is required (p. 109). 13. This text is recorded and translated by R. Derolez in Runica Manuscripta: The English Tradition (Brugge: De Tempel, 1954), pp. 354-355. 14. Ibid. pp. 354-355. 15. See also 'Old English lng and his Wain' Neuphilo/ogus Mitteilungen. in press. ·

·

16. The Distichs of Cato is edited by R. Cox in Anglia, XC (1972), and translated by Michael Swanton, Ang/o-Saxon Prose (London,1975), pp. 174-179. Here the translation is mine, from the following text: Ne sec tfu no purh /ietas hu pe gewurtfan scyle. ac do swa tfu betst maego; eatfe geradep god his willan be tie 7pine tfearfe. peah he hit pe ar ne secge.

17. Bede recounts in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 11, 1, the incident with the slave boys in Rome where Gregory associates their tribal name Angles with Angels, their place­ name Deira with de ira (i.e. the wrath of God), and their King's name Aelle with alleluia. 18. H. M. Farmer, 'The Studies of Anglo-Saxon Monks (A. D. 600-800), ' in Los monjes y Ios estudios (Abadia de Poblet, 1963), P. 89. 19. See 'A Celtic Invader in the Old English Rune Poem. 'NM, in press. 20. Hellmut Wilhelm says in his lecture on the origins of the Chinese I Ching, 'This system was created by men of ancient times, whom the questioner revered as custodians of a wisdom full of awareness of the connection between what is decreed and what happens. It was from them that he drew his information. This means that the oracle was not born overnight, but must have been preceded by a coherent idea of the cosmos, a definite system of the images of life, that is, a picture of the world" (Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 9). Though far less complex, the Rune Poem in its aspect as a manual of rhabdomancy may also be said to represent a litue cosmos. 21. C. G. Jung, foreword to Richard Wilhelm's translation of The I Ching, or Book of Changes. Bollingen Series XIX, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. xxxiii. 22. In such a context the philosopher of religion Schleiermacher associated the divination of prophecy with the knowledge of 'miracle' in the religious sense of a 'sign, ' and Fries saw it as a sensitivity to the 'objective teleology' of the world. This association is discussed bv Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 146-147.