Translator's Introduction to The Old English Rune Poem — Web Exclusive
By John Estes
This translation of the Rune Poem (about a quarter of which appears here) was motivated, as most are, by a sense that existing versions were not adequately reproducing or interpreting the text in some essential way. I found them either too literal to offer the pleasures of poetry or too contemporary to convey the verbal density and dexterity of the Old English. Beyond that, there is an historical inheritance from earlier Germanic and Scandinavian versions that even to an Anglo-Saxon must have made it sound at least slightly foreign.
Because this poem was composed during the Anglo-Saxon transition from orality to literacy, I've tried to activate here what I see in the original: a drama where the poet, with some ironic distance, is aiding readers to navigate this noetic strait within the form of the abcedarium and the trope of the futhorc, runes. My guiding conjecture is that the poet had a sense, however nascent, of the changes this technology promised to an oral culture ill—equipped for it beyond the fatalistic brace of catastrophe. In most of the Rune Poem, the poet deals with matters squarely external—celebrating collective life, scenes of the natural world, suggesting readers recall and take comfort in the orders of family and town against the threat of elements and enemies. But a few of the runes focus upon individual finitude and are painfully cognizant of our individual separateness and the loneliness, despite whatever eternal hope, of death.
The Rune Poem, like other wisdom literatures, seeks to provide strategies, even exercise, in understanding and addressing the demands of life and assumes—an assumption of literate cultures—that the world can in some way be read and known. In this confluence of familiarity and strangeness lies its georgic practicality, and my primary effort has been to charge the Rune Poem–too often treated as historical artifact—with the kind of vitality it would have possessed to tenth—century auditors and readers, restoring to (or preserving in) the English playful ambiguities present in the extant original. I have sought, with hopes not to strain the modern ear, to conjure a bit of the old geglengan and wel geworht, the ornamented and well—wrought qualities Bede identified as the style and aura of Old English poetry.
John Estes directs the Creative Writing Program at Malone University in Canton, OH. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri, where he concentrated in poetics and environmental literature. His poems have appeared in Tin House, New Orleans Review, Southern Review, Iron Horse, and AGNI. His first book, Kingdom Come, was published in 2011 by C&R Press, and he is the author of two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön and Swerve, which was selected by C.K. Williams for a National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America.