The Abecedarium Nordmannicum is a presentation of the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark as a short poem, in the 9th-century Codex Sangallensis 878. The Younger Futhark are given after the Hebrew alphabet on the preceding page, and the Anglo-Saxon futhorc on the same page. The text of the rune poem was unfortunately destroyed in the 19th century by chemicals intended for its preservation. It survives in an 1828 drawing by Wilhelm Grimm. Under a heading ABECEDARIUM NORD, the manuscript presents the Younger Futhark in three lines. Linguistically, the text is a mixture of Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German. It is probably based on a Danish original, maybe imported from Haithabu to Lower Germany, and adapted to the idiom of its recipients. The background of the Carolingian notation of Norse runes is that of intensified contacts between the Frankish Empire and Denmark which necessitated interpreters for economic and political exchanges. The following is a transcription of Grimm's drawing : The Abecedarium Nordmanicum is on the same page as the Abecedarium Anguliscum. There are interlineal glosses for some of the runes specific to the Younger Futhark, giving their Anglo-Saxon phonetic equivalents: hagal is glossed with haegl, ar with ac, man with man, and yr with yr. The content of the poem are the names of the runes, connected by a few additional alliterating words as mnemonical aids. For the r, m and l runes, the Anglo-Saxon names are given rather than the Scandinavian ones, as rat, man and lagu for reidh, madr and logr, respectively. The Anglo-Saxon runes written underneath the feuforman of the first line. It is not clear whether they should be considered part of the poem's text. There are slight differences as to how the poem has been read. Gallée reads the text as follows: The imo in the first line is the reading of von Arx ; it is also read as hiemo or heno or keno. The name tiu is an emendation for a gap in the text. Dickins gave the following : The text is interpreted as a simple mnemonic list of rune names, translating to something like: The text does not appear to associate any meaning with the letter names, merely describing their sequence in the futhark row. A possible exception to this is lagu which is glossed as "the bright".
