Old English rune poem

The poem is a product of the period of declining vitality of the runic script in Anglo-Saxon England after the Christianization of the 7th century.

A large body of scholarship has been devoted to the poem, mostly dedicated to its importance for runology but to a lesser extent also to the cultural lore embodied in its stanzas.

[3] However, the poem had been copied by Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726), and published by George Hickes in his 1705 Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus.

Although the original dialect and date of the poem cannot be determined with certainty, it was most likely a West Saxon composition predating the 10th century.

[5] Jones (1967:8) argues that the additions attributed by Wrenn and Hempl to Hickes were in fact those of Wanley, who originally transcribed the text and presumably arranged it into stanzas.

The sixteen rune names which the poem shares with the Younger Futhark alphabet are as follows: ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨᚬ ᚱ ᚳᚴ ᚻᚼ ᚾ ᛁ ᛄᛅ ᛋ ᛏ ᛒ ᛗᛘ ᛚ ᛉᛦ Of these sixteen Old English names, ten are exact cognates of the Scandinavian tradition (Feoh, Rad, Hægl, Nyd, Is, Ger, Sigel, Beorc, Mann, Lagu).

The poem does not describe a mouth anatomically but the "source of language" and "pillar of wisdom", harking back to the original meaning of ōs "(the) god, Woden/Odin".

The Tir rune appears to have adopted the Scandinavian form (Týr, the Anglo-Saxon cognate being Tiƿ).

[citation needed] Bruce Dickens proposed that Tir is a misreading for Tiw (Tiƿ) the Teutonic substitute for the Roman Mars.