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The runes were the alphabet used by the Teutonic tribes, to which the English belonged. This alphabet is very old, and it is not certain where it originally came from. The word "rune" means secret or mystery. To "round" in a person's ear means to whisper, so that what is said is a "secret" or a "mystery." The word comes from "rune."
Olaf, they told me yonder how you had matched yourself against the god, with his priests for judges, and smitten him, and I thought this the greatest deed that ever I have known. I used to think you something of a weakling, Olaf, not in your body but in your mind, one lost in music and in runes, who feared to put things to the touch of war; but you have shown me otherwise.
Then to Regin in his smithy he came. To that cunning man Sigurd said: "Tell me all thou dost know of Fafnir the Dragon." Regin began to talk, but his speech was old and strange and filled with runes. When he had spoken it all Sigurd said, "All thou hast told me thou wilt have to say over again in a speech that is known to men of our day." Then said Regin: "Of a hoard I spoke.
However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north its rays were lost. The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set the gods in twilight. It stirred the scalds to runes but not to inspiration. There is none in the Eddas. Nor was there any in the Nibelungen, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the flaming scores of Wagner.
By degrees the misery left my head, but the desolation of the heart yet remains." "Be of good cheer," said I; "through the instrumentality of this affliction you have learnt Chinese, and, in so doing, learnt to practise the duties of hospitality. Who but a man who could read Runes on a teapot, would have received an unfortunate wayfarer as you have received me?"
But as the second son, Harold, had grown from childhood into youth, Hilda had singled him out with a preference even more marked than that she had bestowed upon Sweyn. The stars and the runes assured her of his future greatness, and the qualities and talents of the young Earl had, at the very onset of his career, confirmed the accuracy of their predictions.
Can the tree say to the wind, 'Rest thou on my boughs, or Man to Belief, 'Fold thy wings on my heart'? Go where thy soul can find comfort, for thy life hath passed from its use on earth. And when I would read thy fate, the runes are as blanks, and the wave sleeps unstirred on the fountain. Go where the Fylgia , whom Alfader gives to each at his birth, leads thee.
And then, when we were inside, and the courtmen had gone clattering down the street homewards, Biorn took the great door bar from its old place and ran it into the sockets in the doorposts, as I had done so many times; and the runes that my father had cut on it when he made the house were still plain to be seen on it, with the notches I had made with the first knife that I ever had.
On the southeast and south-west sides are figures taken chiefly from the Bible, with Latin inscriptions instead of runes. In the middle compartment of each of these sides is the figure of our Lord with a cruciform halo. On the south-west side of the Cross He is represented as treading on the heads of two swine, His right arm upraised in blessing, a scroll being in His left hand.
Though he is the only one of our early poets who signed his works, the name was never plainly written, but woven into the verses in the form of secret runes, suggesting a modern charade, but more difficult of interpretation until one has found the key to the poet's signature. WORKS OF CYNEWULF. The only signed poems of Cynewulf are The Christ, Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, and Elene.
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