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The Old English rune poem, dated to the 8th or 9th century, has stanzas on 29 Anglo-Saxon runes. It stands alongside younger rune poems from Scandinavia, which record the names of the 16 Younger Futhark runes. The poem is a product of the period of declining vitality of the runic script in Anglo-Saxon England after the Christianization of the 7th century. A large body of scholarship has been devoted to the poem, mostly dedicated to its importance for runology but to a lesser extent also to the cultural lore embodied in its stanzas.〔Jones (1967:vi)〕 The sole manuscript recording the poem, Cotton Otho B.x, was destroyed in the Cotton Fire of 1731, and all editions of the poems are based on a facsimile published by George Hickes in 1705. ==History of preservation== The poem as recorded was likely composed in the 8th or 9th century.〔Van Kirk Dobbie (1965:XLIX).〕 It was preserved in the 10th-century manuscript Cotton Otho B.x, fol. 165a – 165b, housed at the Cotton library in London. The first mention of the manuscript is in the 1621 catalogue of the Cottonian collection (Harley 6018, fol. 162v), as "A Saxon book of divers saints lives and the Alphabett of the old Danish letter amonghs Mr. Gocelins." From this it is inferred that the manuscript had formerly belonged to John Joscelyn (1526-1603). In 1731, the manuscript was lost with numerous other manuscripts in the fire at the Cotton library.〔Van Kirk Dobbie (1965:XLVI).〕 However, the poem had been copied by Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726), and published by George Hickes in his 1705 ''Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus''. This copy has formed the basis of all later editions of the poems.〔 The rune poem was presumably recorded on a single sheet of parchment which had not originally been part of the manuscript, and was possibly bound with a manuscript of Aelfric's ''Lives of Saints'' by Joscelyn. Consequently, the surviving fragments of the manuscript are of no use in determining the hand or the date of the destroyed folio of the poem. Based on a number of late West Saxon forms in the text, it can be assumed that the manuscript of the rune poem dated to the 10th or 11th century, based on earlier copies by Anglian or Kentish scribes. Although the original dialect and date of the poem cannot be determined with certainty, it was most likely a West Saxon composition predating the 10th century.〔Jones (1967:14-15)〕 George Hickes' record of the poem may deviate from the original manuscript. Hickes recorded the poem in prose, divided the prose into 29 stanzas, and placed a copper plate engraved with runic characters on the left margin so that each rune stands immediately in front of the stanza where it belongs. For five of the runes (''wen'', ''hægl'', ''nyd'', ''eoh'', and ''ing'') Hickes gives variant forms, and two more runes are given at the foot of the column: ''cweorð'' and an unnamed rune (''calc''), which are not handled in the poem itself. A second copper plate appears across the foot of the page and contains two more runes: ''stan'' and ''gar''. This apparatus is not likely to have been present in the original text of the Cotton manuscript.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Old English rune poem」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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