Flodu in the franks casket’s whale poem: A fluvial meaning with regional implications (original) (raw)

Alcuin (ca. 735-804) frames his famous York Poem with references to the Roman-built seaport at York. 1 To reach that port, lying some fifty miles inland from the sea, ships traveled from the Humber Estuary up the river Ouse. The channeling effect of this complex waterway affects the height and speed of the tides as they flow inland and then out again, and a miscalculation about the rapid outflow of the tide in such a river channel as the Ouse could result in the stranding of a ship, or, as this essay suggests, in the imagined stranding of a whale, as on the rune-carved Franks Casket. The problematic runic letter representing-u at the end of the word flodu in the poem on the front of the casket is a long-standing crux that may be solved by attention to fluvial dynamics such as that of the river Ouse. The Franks Casket is a small Anglo-Saxon box made in the early-to-mid eighth century from the bone of a whale. On it are densely carved illustrations of six stories with associated inscriptions written mainly in runes in the Northumbrian dialect. 2 The runic inscriptions on the front and right side are in alliterative verse, small poems respectively two and three lines long; the rest are in prose, with some labels within the picture panels. In the two-line poem on the front, the subject of this article, the box tells a tale about its own construction. The poem begins at top left of that panel and circles around the panel to the right, framing it. The first line of the poem, alliterating on f, crosses along the top of the panel and ends on the right