The Rune Poem and the Anglo-Saxon Ecosemiosphere: Identifying the Eolh-Secg in Man and Plant

Ecocritical theory can help us better understand the relationship between the Anglo-Saxons and their environment, in particular that between Old English texts and the material world of Anglo-Saxon England, especially since Gillian Rudd demonstrated the applicability of ecocritical analysis for non-environmentally focused texts.¹ In the present essay an ecocritical reading of the six plant stanzas (thorn, yew, birch, oak, ash, and eolh-secg)² found in the Old English Rune Poem, supported by archaeological evidence, will reveal the interconnectivity of plant and human. The identification of the eolh-secg with the utilitarian marsh plant "Great Fen Sedge" demonstrates the significant value that ecocritical readings add to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon literature and the cultural framework underpinning it.

The material world of the Anglo-Saxons was inextricably interwoven with their cultural world. Even if the geographical landscape of England has changed significantly since the Middle Ages—a result of drainage and infilling of wetlands, loss of forested areas, enclosure of once-common grazing lands, and more widespread human settlement—any mediated material evidence about the past landscape can potentially provide insight to help us better understand this human-environmental interaction. Donna Haraway has coined the term "natureculture," a coconstitutive reality of material and semiotic interplay that juxtaposes the two as inseparable.³ Recognizing the "agentic entanglement," as Serenella Iovina and Serpil Opperman term it, between nature and culture has the potential to change the way we read these texts created in a cultural and material world radically different from our modern experience.⁴ The ecological dependence of early medieval English society meant that management of material resources (e.g., domestic swine pannage) was a central part of culture, manifested variously in manuscript illumination and textual sources, from calendars to the Domesday Book.⁵ Interpretation of literary texts must also recognize their ecological dependency within the context of material-semiotic interaction. According to Hubert Zapf, the construction of literary imagery draws upon material conditions in "a self-reflexive staging and aesthetic transformation of those processes of emergence and creativity that characterize the sphere of material nature itself."⁶ In short, physical metaphors become cultural metaphors.

Any attempt to understand "nature" in an Anglo-Saxon text must also take into consideration both the physical reality of the ecological world in which it was created as well as the cultural and spiritual context shaping it. Matt Low reminds us that "the authors of these earliest of English texts lived, wrote, and interacted daily, just as we do today, with a concrete, physical environment, and that fact alone should be argument enough for more rigorous attention to the place of the natural world within these writings."⁷ This material semiotic interaction creates what Alfred Kentigern Siewers calls an "ecosemiosphere." An ecosemiosphere represents "an ecological bubble of meaning" that situates "nature as a meld of physical and cultural communication, which can be considered spiritual as well as material."⁸ Texts are human, cultural creations shaped by the physical materiality of the ecological world within a sphere of meaning exchange. Or, as Iovino and Opperman describe the material semiotic interchange:

The emerging dynamics of matter and meaning, body and identity, being and knowing, nature and culture, bios and society are therefore to be examined and thought not in isolation from each other, but through one another, matter being an ongoing process of embodiment that involves and mutually determines cognitions, social constructions, scientific practices, and ethical attitudes.⁹

Conceptualizing early medieval England as an ecosemiosphere enables us to avoid an artificial nature-culture divide and to read Old English texts as part of an interdependent ecological and cultural system.

The Old English Rune Poem, comprised of ninety-four lines in twentynine stanzas that identify and describe the Anglo-Saxon futhorc,¹⁰ lends itself to environmental criticism because the names of the runes draw on aspects of daily life in Germanic society. Each stanza is marked by a rune that functions as the subject of the main clause, with between two and five lines describing each rune.¹¹ Each line...