Page:Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples.djvu/29

THE ANGLO-SAXON RUNIC POEM

F. (wealth) is a comfort to all men; yet must every man bestow it freely, if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.

U. (the aurochs) is proud and has great horns; it is a very savage beast and fights with its horns; a great ranger of the moors, it is a creature of mettle.

Þ. (the thorn) is exceedingly sharp, an evil thing for any knight to touch, uncommonly severe on all who sit among them.

O. (?) is the source of all language, a pillar of wisdom and a comfort to wise men, a blessing and a joy to every knight.

Hence oferhyrned, "with great horns," ofer being intensive as in vv. 29, 71, oferceald, oferleof.

þorn, so in all AS. Runic alphabets and in most of the OHG. derivatives (cf. v. Grienberger, Ark. f. n. F. xv. p. 1 ff.). þ was adopted into the AS. book-hand and persisted throughout the ME. period, the last trace of it surviving in the archaistic ye (for the).

The Scandinavian alphabets, however, have þurs (cf. AS. þyrs, a giant), and the Salzburg Codex Gothic thyth, which have no connection with each other or with AS. þorn.

Os (Salzb. AS. os) < *ansuz, a god (cf. Jordanes, c. xiii., Gothi…proceres suos, quorum quasi fortuna vincebant, non puros homines, ted Ansis, id est semideos, vocaverunt, and the ON. óss), the name of A in the original alphabet. Cf. A(n)suᵹisalas of the Kragehul lance-shaft. But original a seldom remained in AS., and the character became the English Runic letter for æ (æsc). Accordingly a ligature of A and N was invented to express the ō, which arose from -an- followed by þ or s. Later, when the name of the original letter had become æðel, os was used for o in all cases, whatever might have been their origin.

Os is a common element in AS. personal names, e.g. Oswald, Oswine, etc.; cf. A(n)suᵹisalas above, and its Gen. pl. esa used in the charm wið færstice (G.-W. i. 318)

gif hit wære esa gescot oððe hit wære ylfa gescot
oððe hit wære hægtessan gescot, nu ic willan þin helpan.

Its precise meaning here is perhaps open to question, though the collocation æsir ok alfar is common in ON. mythological poetry.
In the Icelandic poem óss, which likewise represents original *ansuz, = Othin, and it is just possible that this stanza refers to some such episode as that described in Gylfaginning, c. ix.; þá er þeir gengu með sævartröndu Borssynír (Óðinn, Vili and Vé), fundu þeir tré tvau ok tóku upp tréin ok sko͏̱puðu af men; gaf inn fyrsti ond ok líf, annarr vit ok hrœring. III ásjónu, mál ok heyrn ok sjón. But it is not very likely that the origin of human speech would be attributed to a heathen divinity, and on the whole it is preferable to assume that the subject of the stanza is the Latin os, mouth, which would be equally appropriate.