Runes and Roman Letters in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts

Victoria Symons

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110491920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents the first comprehensive study of Anglo-Saxon manuscript texts containing runic letters. To date there has been no comprehensive study of these works in a single volume, although the need for such an examination has long been recognized. This is in spite of a growing academic interest in the mise-en-page of early medieval manuscripts. The texts discussed in this study include Old English riddles and elegies, the Cynewulfian poems, charms, Solomon and Saturn I, and the Old English Rune Poem. The focus of the discussion is on the literary analysis of these texts in their palaeographic and runological contexts. Anglo-Saxon authors and scribes did not, of course, operate within a vacuum, and so these primary texts are considered alongside relevant epigraphic inscriptions, physical objects, and historical documents. Victoria Symons argues that all of these runic works are in various ways thematically focused on acts of writing, visual communication, and the nature of the written word. The conclusion that emerges over the course of the book is that, when encountered in the context of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, runic letters consistently represent the written word in a way that Roman letters do not.

1Runes in Old English Manuscripts: The Exeter Book Manuscript as a Case Study

This opening chapter consolidates the different uses to which runes could be put in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the practical and thematic considerations influencing their incorporation into the manuscript page, and the various contexts in which they are found. Exeter Cathedral Library 3501, familiarly known as the Exeter Book, provides an ideal case study for such a survey. Runes are used in this manuscript in several different contexts: as marginalia, abbreviations, and textual elements within certain poems. Each of these uses is discussed in turn, alongside broader patterns of runic writing that operate across the manuscript as a whole. From this study emerge a number of informative insights into the use of runes in the scriptoria and monastic centres of later Anglo-Saxon England, both within and around a manuscript’s primary texts. The scribe’s treatment of runic letters and the implications of these letters for the manuscript’s readership are two key aspects of this discussion. The overview presented in this chapter establishes a backdrop to the analysis of the manuscript’s runic poems in Chapters Two and Three. The implications of its conclusions reach beyond the Exeter Book, however, and will inform approaches to the technique of runic scriptmixing throughout the rest of this book.

1.1Runes in the Exeter Book

Old English runes appear sporadically in many of the manuscripts written in Anglo-Saxon England, as well as some of those written on the Continent by Anglo-Saxon scholars.70 In some cases, the entire fuþorc or runic alphabet is written out, often with further apparatus such as rune names or roman transliterations, and usually in the context of exotic or cryptic alphabets.71 The predominance of these examples is illustrated by the fact that René Derolez’s Runica Manuscripta devotes the first four of its five chapters to fuþorcs, runic alphabets and letter lists. All other uses of runes in manuscripts – as marginalia, abbreviations and elements of texts – are summed up in his final chapter. This is not to say, however, that other uses of runes in manuscripts are unproductive to study, or that they can provide no information about contemporary runes and runic practices. The use of runes for marginal notations, abbreviations and textual elements demonstrates how the script could be employed in practical or functional ways in the scriptoria of later Anglo-Saxon England. In these instances runes are not esoteric or exotic, written for preservation or education, but are practical tools that, much like the epigraphic runes of previous generations, formed part of the writer’s repertoire in the production of written texts.

Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501 is a manuscript of the later tenth century which, alongside the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII), Junius Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian MS Junius 11) and Nowell Codex (London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv), constitutes one of the four main poetic codices that survive from Anglo-Saxon England.72 Of these four, the Exeter Book represents the ‘largest and most varied collection’ of extant Old English poetry.73 It contains poems ranging from a single line to several hundred, covering a multitude of topics and genres including religious poems, riddles, elegies, and wisdom poems, all written in a single hand dated to the 960s or 970s.74 It also features ‘some of the most striking examples of English manuscript runes’.75 The Exeter Book is confidently identified as the manuscript described in Bishop Leofric’s donation list as i mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoðwisan geworht ‘a large English book about various things made in verse’.76

It has been suggested that the manuscript may have been written in Exeter itself, although this claim has been called into question.77 Nevertheless, there is evidence that the scribes of Exeter’s scriptorium were familiar with the use of runic letters in manuscripts. Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 41 is an eleventh-century manuscript that, like the Exeter Book, was gifted to Exeter’s Cathedral Library by Bishop Leofric.78 The main text of the manuscript is a copy of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, written in two hands, with a large number of additional texts subsequently added to the margins. Included amongst these marginalia is a version of Solomon and Saturn I that uses ᛗ m to abbreviate the last syllable in the name Solomon (as in mon ‘man’). The manuscript’s margins also, like the Exeter Book, feature a number of individual runic notations.79 Although there is no evidence for the epigraphic use of runes at any point in Exeter’s Anglo-Saxon history, the runic material in these manuscripts allowed Page to conclude that ‘in late Anglo-Saxon Exeter … it seems that runes were known as an alternative script’.80

Runic letters, when written in ink on the manuscript page, often differ markedly in appearance from their roman counterparts.81 They are usually somewhat larger, or heavier, than the surrounding text, so that they appear to have been formed with more deliberation. The generally accepted explanation for this difference is that the runic script was not developed to be written with a pen but rather to be carved with a knife on a hard surface.82 For this reason, runic letters are not formed with curved lines, such as those used in the roman letters a, b, c and so on, because they would be difficult to execute in carvings. In the same vein, all of the strokes used in runic letters are either vertical or diagonal, and never horizontal. This is perhaps to ensure legibility when the letters were carved on wooden surfaces, where horizontal strokes would be difficult to distinguish from the horizontal grain of the wood.83 These practical considerations explain the fundamental differences in appearance between runic and roman script. This does not mean, however, that runic letters could not have been adapted for writing with a pen on a manuscript page. The letters ᚦ and ᚹ, for example, were both incorporated into the roman alphabet by Anglo-Saxon scribes in order to represent sound values – ‘th’ and ‘w’ respectively – for which the roman alphabet had no corresponding grapheme.84 In the course of this incorporation, both letters assumed a distinctly ‘romanised’ appearance; they are formed to the same dimensions as roman letters, and in both cases the short branches of the letters, initially formed of two diagonal lines, developed into a single curved stroke. In this way, when written as part of the roman alphabet within the main body of text on the manuscript page, these letters are rendered visually congruous with the surrounding script.

Of course, both letters are also used in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, including the Exeter Book, as part of the runic, as well as roman, writing system, and when written as runes their appearance is very different. When writing ᚹ as a rune, the scribe of the Exeter Book consistently starts somewhat higher on the line, substantially reduces the length of the descender, adds serifs to the descender, and retains some of the letter’s angular form by making the short branches slightly squarer than in the roman equivalent. The distinction can be seen most clearly on f. 105r where, four lines from the bottom of the page, runic ᚹ (the fourth letter in the sequence ‘agew’) directly precedes its roman equivalent in the first letter of widlast. Another good example is on f. 76r, where the second rune in the sequence ᛖᚹᚢ (‘ewu’) can be compared to its roman equivalent in the word wille of the line below. This suggests that the visual contrast between the two scripts was purposely preserved by those who incorporated runes into their compositions, and by the scribes who copied them. The evidence of ᚦ and ᚹ shows that it was a simple enough process to adapt the forms of at least some runic letters in such a way as to make them visually congruous with the roman script, if a scribe thought it appropriate to do so. That this is not done for any of the embedded textual runes discussed in this book implies that the visual distinction between runic and roman letters was an important aspect of their continued use.

As discussed above, the main text of the Exeter Book is written in a single hand, dated to the later-tenth century. The scribe’s writing is remarkably uniform, and the manuscript as a whole is clearly written and neatly executed.85 The ways in which the scribe handles runic letters when he encounters them, then, is quite telling. Derolez describes the form of the Exeter Book runes as ‘decadent’ in comparison to those in other manuscripts; the textual runes are neither neatly nor consistently made, suggesting a scribe unfamiliar or unpractised with the writing of runic script.86 Significant variations between letter forms are visible even on a single page of the manuscript as in, for example, the four groups of runes on f. 105r (Riddle 19), in which the first ᚩ o is conspicuously larger than the two that follow. Even a comparison between the corresponding letters of the manuscript’s two Cynewulfian signatures shows a large amount of variation. The letter ᚣ y on f. 19v (Christ II) is tall, and has a diagonal long branch formed with a single pen-stroke. The equivalent letter on f. 76r (Juliana) is written considerably smaller and squatter, with a broken long branch and a distinctly angular appearance. There is a similar degree of variation between the two ᛚ l runes on the same folios. Examples from elsewhere in the manuscript include ᛠ ea which, on f. 123v (HM), has a central vertical stave intersecting a broken cross-stroke, whereas the same letter only a few pages later, on f. 125r (Riddle 64), has a straight cross-stroke not intersected by the central stave.

This level of variation both within and between texts is perhaps suggestive of a scribe relying heavily on different exemplars for guidance in forming these runic letters, which in turn implies that either the Exeter Book or the manuscript from which it was copied drew on several different sources, written in different hands, for its compilation.87 Further, the variations between runic letters in the Exeter Book also suggest that the scribe himself was l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• 0 Introduction
• 1 Runes in Old English Manuscripts: The Exeter Book Manuscript as a Case Study
• 2 Reading and Writing in the Runic Riddles and The Husband’s Message
• 3 Cynewulf’s Signatures and the Materiality of the Letter
• 4 The Power of the Letter in Runic Charms and Solomon and Saturn I
• 5 Rune Lists and Alphabet Poems: Studying the Letter in Later Anglo-Saxon England
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Endnotes