Rune Poems Awaken!

The Rune Poems: A Reawakened Tradition. P.D. Brown and Michael Moynihan, editors. (North Augusta: Arcana Europa, 2022).

The Rune Poems by P.D. Brown and Michael Moynihan is surely the most complete collection of rune poems ever published. Over the past decade, Arcana Europa has been publishing and reissuing many important books about heathenry and runes. They may be best known as the publishers of the book-format journal TYR: Myth—Culture—Tradition. As arguably the foremost publisher of such volumes, Arcana Europa has made many difficult-to-find books readily available in new well-crafted and well-edited editions. In the case of The Rune Poems, I suspect that the present title stands in as replacement for hard-to-find Stephen Flowers volume, The Rune Poems, vol. I: Introduction, Texts, Translation and Glossary originally published by Runa-Raven in 2002.

In the present volume, Michael Moynihan (best known for his award-winning nonfiction book, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and his role as lead singer in the neo-folk band Blood Axis) and P.D. Brown, English author, poet, and producer of CDs of traditional story telling, serve as editors, commentators, and translators of the traditional rune poems. The Rune Poems provides an academic-style account of the various manuscripts and codex's in which the rune poems are located. This level of detail and analysis is certainly not the place for beginners to launch their rune studies. For those more advanced students however, the accounts are invaluable. Each poem, the Old English Rune Poem, the Abecedarium Nordmannicum, the Old Norwegian Rune Rhyme, the Old Icelandic Rune Poem, and the Early Modern Swedish Rune Poem (EMSRP) is presented both in its original language and in new translation. Having these poems in a single volume is of tremendous value to runologists and rune practitioners. Prior to the publication of The Rune Poems, the best go-to volumes were Edred Thorsson’s The Nine Doors of Midgard, which is less complete (omitting the EMSRP), Flowers’s volume mentioned above, and Stephen Pollington’s Rudiments of Runelore. The latter volume remains highly useful, while omitting the EMSRP, it includes Old English runic verses that are not presented in Moynihan’s and Brown’s collection.

While there is little doubt that interpretation of the poems is subjective and open to conjecture, some readers may be dismayed that such analysis has been confined to the endnotes of each chapter. Those who are new to the runes would have been better served by having a more cohesive explanation of each poem as a whole. It is also worth noting that The Rune Poems does not present or make mention of Rúnatáls-þáttr-Óðins “Odin’s Rune Song” from the Hávamál. While this poem is now considered controversial or apparently, as the present volume infers, not a rune poem at all, one must realize that present-day interest in the esoteric and magical interpretation and practice of runes begins with “Odin’s Rune Song.” 

The second part of the book focuses, as the subtitle suggests, on “The Reawakened Tradition.” As such, no less than fifteen accomplished poets present twenty modern-day rune poems. This collection of poems were written over the past four decades by members of The Rune-Gild, an international initiatory organization tasked with developing Rune Masters who could carry such knowledge forward to new generations. Presenting the work of the members of The Rune-Gild in this beautiful new edition is certainly groundbreaking. While Arcana Europa has performed a tremendous service over the years by reissuing important and hard-to-find volumes, this new volume carries most readers forward to uncharted waters making this, perhaps, their most important volume to date.

In my estimation, The Rune Poems is not for beginners. For that, there are several better choices including Thorsson’s, Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic. For the intermediate or advanced student or master of the runes, this volume is certainly an essential addition to your rune library. As I explore the depths and beauty of The Rune Poems, I already dream of future volumes that would present further works by Rune-Gild members. Such volumes would, like the present title, not only present the reawakened tradition of its members but also serve as a clarion call to others to begin their own creative work with the runes. May this volume be the first of many calls to such an awakening!