Runic Wisdom

 This web site records progress in massive project centered around the study of ancient rune poems as wisdom poetry, especially the Old English Rune Poem. The project to study the Old English Rune Poem necessarily depends on other information, including early medieval English Catholicism and its roots and background, the Old English language, feudal socioeconomics, wisdom poetry, theologies, and so on. Consequently, the project has become large and complex

This site is maintained by Gary Stanfield. You can contact him at “grystf@hotmail.com”. This page was last updated on 29 October 2023.

The Stanzas of the OERP

The Stanzas of the Old English Rune Poem, analyzes each stanza individually and includes appendices on several related topics. It is part of a planned two-volume work called The OERP Book. The second volume, Background for Stanzas of the OERP, will analyze the structure of the poem as a whole, the society in which it originated, its genre, and some historical events.

The first edition was published in the late Twentieth Century, in volumes 7 through 11 of a periodical called The Rune. The first edition consisted of one volume, and it was written for an audience of intelligent Pagans and neoPagans.

The second edition is written for those who would teach Teutonic Reconstruction religion, for professional philologists, and for others (Christian and Polytheist) who are interested in a detailed and in-depth analysis of the structure and meanings of the poem. For the first volume, practically all comments that related one stanza to another have been omitted, and the analysis is more technical than in the first edition.

A copy of the second edition's first volume is available here: Stanzas of the OERP.

A copy of the list of references (bibliography), which was omitted from the first volume in 2012, is available here: List of References.

Stanzas of the Old English Rune Poem by Gary Stanfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I allow distribution of the book whole and without editing at no charge. I also allow (and encourage) use of the translations in Appendix G without editing and with attribution. If you want to correct errors in edition or translating stanzas or make new translations of the stanzas influenced by my work, take credit for your creation, but I would appreciate the compliment of being acknowledged. Publication of any of this work in translation into another modern language, and other uses not covered by the “fair use” doctrine require permission.

Formats of Electronic Books

I learned skills in making electronic books after I wrote the second edition of Stanzas, so the 2012 has some technical flaws. I learned from critical reactions to the second edition of Stanzas and from my own experiences with writing and reading electronic books.

It is best to make three editions of an electronic book: display-friendly, printer-friendly, and mobile-phone friendly. That is because different end users have different preferences and needs for how they will read and store the book. Some prefer to read and store the book on a computer, some want to read on a tablet or cell phone, and some want hard copy and are willing to print out all or part of the book. Following is the doctrine I developed in 2019.

The display-friendly format has light print on dark background, so the display is not glaring into your face and the pages look attractive. Page size is 6” by 9”, which is standard for print books and gives legibility on a display of at least 6” diagonal measurement.

The printer-friendly format has black print on white background on an 8” by 11.5” page to avoid wasting ink on color and economize on the amount of paper used. Since the US letter size format will also print on A4, I used the US letter size page.

The e-pub format does not handle tables well, although it can handle pictures. Eventually, I will probably also make kindle editions.

In all these electronic-book formats, you need a way to cite locations without referring to page numbers, for pagination differs between the display-friendly and printer-friendly formats, and it is absent from the epub format. Currently, I use 5 layers of headings with numbers and letters you can use to cite a location in the text. I do not think this is the best way, but it corresponds to the way I write notes and drafts. It also corresponds to the military staff writing and government reports such as the

An alternative is to use three layers of headings and numbered paragraphs, which makes a less cumbersome way of citing a location without using pagination. This is roughly similar to how people cite locations in the Christian Bible (book, chapter/psalm, and verse) or various Greek classics without referring to page numbers, because different hard copy editions and translations have different pagination.

In addition, in March 2019 I finally quit including substantive footnotes, endnotes, or sidebars. Such annotation disrupts the flow of reading and makes it difficult to follow an argument. This was a reversion to advice I got while a graduate student and the inconvenience of trying to read heavily annotated works such as Marcel Mauss’ The Gift. Sometimes, it is necessary to add an appendix to cover a relatively minor issue that requires detailed and extensive handling, in order to keep the flow of the main analysis clear, but appendices can have the same disruptive effect as large, substantive footnotes or endnotes.

 Oerp_HickesThesaurus.pdf

This page last edited 2023-November-29