ABSTRACT
Typically contained in a formula of donation, dedication, consecration, or supplication, runic signatures were variously applied to such movables as arms, jewels, coins, and drinking horns—as well as to more stationary objects like baptismal fonts, bell towers, and funerary monuments. The individual rune signs did, of course, each have their fixed meaning and happily the substantives indicated by each of the twenty-nine Old English runic characters are glossed for us in the Anglo-Saxon “Runic Poem”. In Juliana, the opening of the runic signature section is conventional, even obvious, in the way it relates the signed conclusion to the body of the poem. Cynewulf’s distinct art of creating signature sections from the materials of the preceding poem is equally apparent in the conclusion to Elene where verbal surfaces and deeper imaginative structures of narrative and signature thread over and under one another like the warp and woof of Eastern weaving.
