Love Rune is the most important religious lyric in Jesus 29. In verbal precision, sacred numerology, refined spiritual longing, and shimmering aesthetic beauty, it is no less than a miniature precursor to Pearl, the masterpiece of fourteenth-century religious English poetry. Love Rune does not suffer at all in being compared to such a great work, for it too is a rarefied vernacular expression of desire for and emulation of the Divine Ideal. Among the Jesus lyrics, Love Rune has been called the “gem of the collection,” belonging to “a completely different class” of poetic art (Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry, p. 97). As in Pearl, a profound religious motive is adorned in courtly terms, with images of jewels to reflect the poet’s precious style. An artful “rune” enclosing a secret treasure, Love Rune replicates in crafted words the high art of a goldsmith-jeweler, as if it is consciously designed to become a beautiful and delicate luxury object for a wealthy patron, or a perfect artifact in reflection and worship of the Creator.

Aimed putatively at a sole female reader, Love Rune succeeds an important earlier strain of West Midland devotional texts: Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine-group, and associated works that extol virginity and bodily integrity, such as Sawles Warde and Holy Maidenhood (all conveniently gathered and translated by Savage and Watson in Anchoritic Spirituality). In surveying this powerful tradition and distinguishing the early Middle English corpus from later modes, Hahn notes how Love Rune “presents an exceptionally compacted and intense realization of this nexus of religion, writing, selfhood, popular song and gender” (“Early Middle English,” p. 79). The thirteenth-century author Thomas of Hales, identified in the incipit as a Franciscan friar, is known elsewhere as the author of a Latin prose life of Mary, the Vita sancte Marie (Horrall, ed., The Lyf of Oure Lady), and an Anglo-Norman sermon (Legge, ed., “The Anglo-Norman Sermon”). His acquaintance with fellow Franciscan Adam Marsh is documented, ca. 1252–1256, and Marsh himself was a close friend of Robert Grosseteste (b. 1175–d. 1253), head of the Franciscan school at Oxford. Other life-records show that Thomas served for a time (ca. 1246–1252) as spiritual advisor to Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence (Howell, Eleanor of Provence, pp. 92–94). No further works by Thomas are known to have survived, but if Thomas composed more English poems, a likely site for them to be still preserved is the verse sequence of MS Jesus 29. Among the more probable candidates are Song of the Annunciation (art. 20) and A Homily on Sooth Love (art. 26). Beyond these, a rare word links Love Rune with On Serving Christ (art. 18; see note to line 70). For a brief survey of the scant facts of Thomas’s life and writings, and more speculation on Thomas’s English oeuvre, see the Introduction to this volume (pp. 13–16).

The 105 long lines of Love Rune are the result of careful numerical structuring — 100 lines in 25 stanzas, plus a 5-line epilogue. Or, perhaps, it is meant to be charted by its prominent diptych structure: 50 + 50 + 5. Organization based on the number five represents the sacred wounds suffered by Christ at the Crucifixion, and correspondingly the points on the Cross (four endpoints, one centerpoint). The central line of Love Rune proper (line 50) invokes the directional sign of the Cross, by which the poet summons the Deity to mystically sanctify his perfectly-shaped 100-line runic mystery-poem. Line 50 marks the beginning-point of rhetorical crossover, where the argument pivots from moral warning against taking a mortal lover, to fervent persuasion that the maiden assent to the amorous blandishments of the Divine Lover. To make the case for Christ the Lover-Knight, Thomas adopts a long-standing devotional convention — common among monastic writers — of describing the soul’s union with Christ in unguardedly erotic language. Rather than be surprised at such language, within the context of Christian mysticism “we should be scandalized not so much by the presence of such erotic elements as by their absence” (McGinn, “The Language of Love in Christian and Jewish Mysticism,” p. 205).

Love Rune’s manner of inscription in Jesus 29 seems to show off its design by halves, and could therefore be a vestige of its original layout (Fein, “Roll or Codex?”). The rune’s middle lines 50–51 appear at the foot of a verso and top of a recto. Given Love Rune’s precise structural symmetry, this instance of graphic symmetry could be more than coincidence, especially since it required the scribe to reduce his normal number of lines per page. A shift from false worldly pursuit to true spiritual love takes place where the book gutter — a tangible, visible dividing line — must be crossed. Moreover, just when the poet begins to introduce Christ as Lover at the foot of a verso, he offers a compliment to King Henry III’s Christian humility at the top of the facing recto, just where such praise would catch the eye of a royal patron.

Thomas of Hales’s service to Queen Eleanor as spiritual advisor adds support to an impression that Love Rune was originally composed to directly please King Henry (who reigned 1216–1272) and his queen. Its fictive pose, however, is that it is addressed to a “maid of Christ” (a nun or a novitiate) to counsel her in an affair of the heart. Nonetheless, mention of the ruling monarch means that Love Rune belongs with other poems in Jesus 29 that hint of political realities and viewpoints shared by the poets, collectors, and/or readers of this verse. That outlook ferociously defends Holy Church as God’s presence on earth, sees England and its native saints (especially Thomas Becket) as proof of a national calling, and honors the English monarch yet worships Christ as the one true King. In Love Rune, Henry III’s highest sovereign act is his meek bowing before God.

All seven previous editors of Love Rune — in chronological order, Morris (1872), Brown (1932), Dickins-Wilson (1951), Kaiser (1958), Dunn-Byrnes (1990), Fein-MLSL (1998), and Treharne (2010) — erroneously present the poem in stanzas of eight short lines because its long lines rhyme internally. But an analysis of the poet’s numerology and the scribe’s standard practice (writing this stanza type in four lines not eight) show how, in understanding the verse historically, we need to trust the scribal evidence in favor of a 100-line diptych structure. Moreover, in terms of the Jesus 29 setting, Thomas’s septenary line, aaaa7, with internal rhymes represents a style found elsewhere: Five Joys of Our Lady Saint Mary, Fire and Ice, A Homily on Sooth Love (arts. 11, 21, 26), and Will and Wit (art. 9; surviving only in Cotton) (see Fein, “Designing English,” pp. 57–58).

[Fols. 187r–188v. NIMEV 66. DIMEV 104. Quire: 4. Meter: 105 septenary lines with strong caesuras and internal rhymes, in twenty-five 4-line stanzas rhyming aaaa7 (or (ab)(ab)(ab)(ab)7), and a final stanza of five lines. Layout: Long lines with medial and end punctuation. A colored initial opens each 4-line stanza. The item begins with a Latin incipit in red written on two lines. Editions: Morris, pp. 93–99; Brown, pp. 68–74, 198–99; Dickins-Wilson, pp. 103–09, 216–20; Kaiser, pp. 219–21; Dunn-Byrnes, pp. 156–62; Fein-MLSL, pp. 11–56; Treharne, pp. 437–43. Other MSS: None. Extract: Sisam and Sisam, eds., The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, p. 13. Translations: Weston, trans., The Chief Middle English Poets, pp. 343–45; Stone, trans., Medieval English Verse, pp. 51–56.]