The sources
Four texts stand behind every meaning on this site. Here is each one: what it is, when it was written, and where it survives.
| Witness | When | Where it survives | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abecedarium Nordmannicum | 9th century | Codex Sangallensis 878, fol. 321. The manuscript survives. | The earliest sixteen-letter row. Not about meanings at all. |
| The Old English Rune Poem | 9th century or earlier, manuscript lost 1731 | Cotton MS Otho B.x burned. Only the printed page of 1705 remains. | Twenty-nine stanzas, and the only source for eight of the runes. |
| The Norwegian Rune Poem | 13th century, manuscript lost 1728 | Worm's print of 1636 and two seventeenth-century copies. | Sixteen rhyming couplets. The rhyme chooses the second line. |
| The Icelandic Rune Poem | 15th century | Four manuscripts in the Arnamagnaean Library, Copenhagen. | Sixteen stanzas, three kennings each, and a Latin glossary running through them. |
Two of them burned
Neither of the two oldest rune poems survives. Both manuscripts burned, three years apart, in the 1720s and 1730s. What we read is what two antiquaries had already copied out by hand, one of them nearly a century earlier. Every meaning on this site passes through their handwriting.