The Old Norwegian Rune Poem (Patreon)

The rune poems are short medieval poems apparently designed to aid in remembering the runic alphabet. Three of them have survived to us today: the Old English Rune Poem (for Anglo-Frisian Futhorc) and the Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic Rune Poems (for Younger Futhark). The rune poems are the most important source for the names of the runes, not just in Younger Futhark and Anglo-Frisian Futhorc but also for Elder Futhark, since the names of the Elder Futhark runes are reconstructed from the names found in the later rune poems (there is nowhere in Elder Futhark that the names of the runes are given, though I talked about their reconstructed names in this video: https://youtu.be/sGGzrsmLwYk?list=PLATNGYBQ-TjrI_zstt5w13eB4IFIcuX_W ).

I'm planning on making a video about the rune poems in the near future, and they're also something I usually discuss in my mythology classes. I couldn't find translations of them that I liked, so I decided to make my own translation of my favorite one, the Old Norwegian Rune Poem. I wrote it out by hand (with the Old Norse text), and I thought that might be something that would interest my Patreon supporters.

As usual with Old Norse texts, we have to make decisions about how to represent the language. My spelling of the Old Norse in the poem is probably different than what you'll find online since I've more or less standardized it as "classical" Old Norse (as I usually spell it, i.e. similar to Old Norwegian or Icelandic in the 1200s). The (imperfectly preserved) original Old Norse text is known only from a copy made by Ole Worm in his 1636 book 'Danica Litteratura Antiquissima.'

I've also experimentally tried to keep some alliteration in my English translation this time. I'm usually leery of doing so because I think it can lead the translator to make choices that imperfectly represent the original meaning, but in this case it wasn't very difficult to find an alliterating pair of words to use in the translation for each line.