The sources
Abecedarium Nordmannicum
Feu forman,
Ûr after,
Thuris thritten stabu,
Os ist himo oboro,
Rat endost ritan
Chaon thanne cliuôt.
Hagal, Naut habet
Is, Ar endi Sol,
Tíu, Brica endi Man midi
Lago the leohto,
Yr al bihabet.
Feu first,
Ûr after,
Thuris the third stave,
Os stands above it,
Rat written at the end,
Chaon then cleaves to them.
Hagal and Naut hold
Is, Ar and Sol,
Tíu, Brica and Man in the middle,
Lago the bright,
Yr closes them all.
This translation is not solid, and it is the only one on this site we cannot defend word by word. The text is short, partly abbreviated, and mixes Old High German with Old Saxon, and several lines have no agreed reading. Rat endost ritan and Chaon thanne cliuôt in particular.
Dickins italicises the letters he supplies where the manuscript abbreviates. We print them plain.
Dickins 1915, p. 34 (Codex Sangallensis 878, fol. 321)
This is the oldest of the four and the only one that is not about meanings. Every other source here tells you what a rune is: wealth, hail, a giant, the sun. This one tells you only where each letter stands in the row. It is a memory aid for an alphabet, in verse, because that is how a list was memorised in the ninth century.
The oldest surviving text about the runes does not say what a single one of them means. It says what order they go in. The row came first, and the meanings are commentary added later. That is not an argument anyone has to win. It falls out of the dates: this is ninth century, the Old English poem is tenth, the Norwegian thirteenth, the Icelandic fifteenth.
It is also the earliest example of the sixteen-letter alphabet of the Viking Age. Every rune on this site that has no Norse stanza is missing one because of the change this page is the first written evidence of, six hundred years before the Icelandic poem was copied.
The folio carries three alphabets at once. The Scandinavian runes are written in a continental Germanic dialect inside a Latin manuscript, and a second hand has added Anglo-Saxon letter forms in the margin: an English H with two crossbars above Hagal, an English A above Ar, an English M above Man, a variant English Y above Yr, and the word WRÊA in English runes under the first line. Nothing else in this material shows the transmission that directly.