Casket

The Franks Casket is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon treasure chest in the British Museum, decorated with runes, some Latin text and images from various traditions. Each rune has a pictorial value: for example, in the runic ᚠᛁᛋᚳ(`fisc’), f signifies `wealth’, i `ice’, s `sun’ and c `torch’, yielding a sequence of four images. I determined the sequence of images given by the runes and then used these images to write the poems, which aim to capture something of the layered histories of the place where I live: the river Teign and its surrounding area. —Andy Brown