Laguz
The Sea Without End
The Old English sea stanza survives through Hickes’s 1705 printing; its manuscript was destroyed in the Cotton library fire of 1731.
Anonymous rune poems; Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.), Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge, 1915), Introduction, p. 6; Anglo-Saxon poem, Lagu stanza, pp. 18–19; Norwegian poem, Lögr stanza, pp. 26–27; Icelandic poem, Lögr stanza, pp. 32–33.
The l-rune ᛚ, called lagu in Old English and lögr in the Scandinavian rune poems.
More context
The Old English l-rune stanza imagines the sea from an unstable ship. Waves terrify the voyagers, and the sea-steed will not obey its bridle. Dickins’s 1915 translation preserves that equestrian metaphor for the vessel. The Norwegian poem instead describes a waterfall descending from a mountainside. The Icelandic calls water an eddying stream, a broad geyser and the land of fish. These are distinct poetic settings. The Old English witness reaches readers through Hickes’s 1705 printing, made before the manuscript was destroyed by fire in 1731.
Light
The Norwegian stanza pictures a mountain waterfall; the Icelandic names water as the land of fish.
Shadow
The Old English voyagers fear the waves and cannot make their sea-steed obey its bridle.