CHAPTER XV

Runes.  An early love-poem

I said I would tell you a little about runes, which I have had more than once occasion to mention.  The runes were the alphabet used by the Teutonic tribes, to which the English belonged.  This alphabet is very old, and it is not certain where it originally came from.  The word “rune” means secret or mystery.  To “round” in a person’s ear means to whisper, so that what is said is a “secret” or a “mystery.”  The word comes from “rune.”  When we use the word to “write” we think of setting down words on paper with a pen or a pencil.  But the old meaning of “write” is to incise, or to cut, or engrave.  Probably the runes were at first cut in wood.  A wooden tablet was called “boc,” from beechwood being used for it.  When we talk of a book we are away from the first idea of a book a good distance.  Runes were also carved, or incised, in metal and in bone.  They were associated, not only with secrecy or mystery, but with magic, and were supposed to possess power for good or evil.  People thought that “runes could raise the dead from their graves; they could preserve life or take it, they could heal the sick or bring on lingering disease; they could call forth the soft rain or the violent hailstorm; they could break chains and shackles, or bind more closely than bonds or fetters; they could make the warrior invincible and cause his sword to inflict none but mortal wounds; they could produce frenzy and madness, or defend from the deceit of a false friend.”

There is a story in an old Norse book telling that Odin, the Scandinavian god, learned them and used them.  St Bede tells in his “Church History” a story which proves that the belief in the magic power of runes lingered on in England after Christianity had become the professed religion of the people.  It takes a good while to lose superstition that has been with people for a long, long time.  Because Christianity condemns anything like magic, the use of the runes, associated with it, gradually went out.  The Irish missionaries in the North of England taught the people there a beautiful kind of handwriting from which the English handwriting of later times was formed.  The “Lindisfarne Gospels” are written in the earlier Irish rounded characters.  In a copy of St Bede’s “Church History” written after A.D. 730, a more pointed hand is used.  If we want to write fast, we do not write so round as when we write slowly.  Afterwards, in the tenth century, the English began to use the French style of writing.

The runes were sometimes used as ordinary letters, without any thought of the old connection with magic.  So the great Christian poet, Cynewulf, wrote his name in runes, which is how we know him to be the author of some of the poems we have been considering.

The portions of the “Dream of the Holy Rood” which are on the Ruthwell Cross (see Chapter IV) are carved in runes.  There is a small sword in the British Museum with runes on it, which was found in the Thames.