Ear

Ear's stanza closes the entire Old English Rune Poem on its darkest and most direct note: the grave is horrible to every warrior, when the corpse quickly begins to cool and is laid in the bosom of the dark earth, its prosperity declining and its happiness passing away, a closing image of mortality stated with even less consolation than Mann's own earlier acknowledgement of death, no explicit Christian framing softening the physical, bodily fact the stanza names. This unflinching close gives the whole twenty nine stanza sequence a genuine arc, Feoh's opening blessing of wealth freely given answered at the very end by the one gift no one escapes, the grave that receives every man regardless of the fortune, courage or generosity the poem's other stanzas have praised along the way.

Halsall's critical edition treats Ear's placement as the poem's deliberate final word, whether by the original compiler's own design or by the accumulated tradition that fixed the row's order before the poem was composed, and reads the pairing of Mann and Ear as together bracketing the poem's later stanzas with two direct confrontations of death, framing the more varied material, trees, animals, weather and craft, that runs between them.

Ear is the fifth and last of the Anglo-Frisian runes added to the futhorc with no Elder Futhark cognate, its sound value ea representing a diphthong that, together with Ior's io immediately before it, completes the set of specifically Old English vowel sounds the row's inherited twenty four signs had no way to mark, closing the futhorc at twenty nine runes in the classic form the surviving rune poem records, though some later Anglo-Saxon inscriptions and manuscript rune rows show further extensions beyond even this count, additions this entry does not cover since they fall outside the twenty nine the poem itself attests and outside the futhorc as this atlas records it.

R. I. Page's survey treats the futhorc's growth from twenty four to twenty nine runes as a clear, datable process of linguistic adaptation distinct from anything comparable in the Scandinavian runic tradition, which moved in the opposite direction entirely, reducing the Elder Futhark's twenty four signs to the Younger Futhark's sixteen even as Old English speakers were expanding their own row to represent finer phonetic distinctions their language had developed. Ear's closing position, both of the row and of the poem, gives this final rune a genuine structural as well as thematic finality within the whole Old English Rune Poem.