Every modern text of the Old English Rune Poem descends from a single printed source rather than from the manuscript itself, because the manuscript no longer exists. The poem survived into the early modern period in one copy, bound into the Cotton library's manuscript Otho B.x, and the antiquarian George Hickes printed a transcription of it in 1705, in his Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus, a survey of Old Germanic languages. In 1731, a fire at Ashburnham House, where the Cotton collection was then housed, destroyed or badly damaged a substantial part of the library, and Otho B.x was among the losses. Hickes's transcription is therefore not simply the earliest surviving edition; for this poem, it is the only surviving witness at all, and any error, misreading or normalization Hickes introduced in 1705 is now permanently unrecoverable against the lost original.
The poem's content shows its own layered history. Its final stanza, on Ear, the grave, closes on an image of a corpse decaying while joys pass away, phrasing scholars read as reflecting Christian sensibility rather than the poem's otherwise more matter-of-fact, catalog-like tone for earlier letters. That suggests a text with roots in an earlier, non-Christian runic tradition, reworked or extended by a scribe writing after England's conversion, rather than a poem composed whole in either period. Its precise date of composition, somewhere in the centuries before the destroyed manuscript was copied, remains an estimate rather than a documented fact.