Ior

Ior's stanza describes a river fish that nonetheless always feeds on land, possessed of a fair dwelling place surrounded by water where it lives in happiness, a genuinely puzzling combination, an animal of the water that feeds on land, that has never been resolved with full confidence, making Ior alongside Peorth one of the two clearest cases in the whole poem where this entry must state honestly that the precise creature intended is not settled rather than offer a confident identification the sources do not support.

Proposed readings have included an eel, whose habit of leaving water to travel overland in wet conditions is genuinely attested and would fit the stanza's odd combination reasonably well, and a beaver, whose riverside den and partly terrestrial habits offer another plausible match, though R. I. Page's survey treats neither identification as conclusively established from the stanza's brief and somewhat riddling description alone. Halsall's critical edition situates Ior among a small group of Old English rune poem stanzas, Peorth chief among them, whose content reads almost as a riddle in the wider Old English riddling tradition well attested in the Exeter Book, a genre that deliberately obscured its subject for the audience to guess rather than aiming at Ur's or Beorc's straightforward, unambiguous description.

Ior is the fourth of the five Anglo-Frisian runes added to the futhorc with no Elder Futhark cognate, its sound value io representing a diphthong the inherited twenty four rune row had no dedicated sign for, one of the rarer and more specialised sounds among the additions this final group of five runes was built to cover.

R. I. Page's account notes that runes this late in the row's development and this specialised in the sound they represent are correspondingly rare in the actual surviving epigraphic record, Ior among the least frequently attested Futhorc runes on real inscriptions compared to the much more commonly carved early runes such as Feoh or Ur, a scarcity in the physical evidence that compounds the stanza's own obscurity and leaves runologists with unusually little independent material to test any proposed reading of the creature it describes against. Ior's position as the twenty eighth rune places it second from the row's very end, immediately before Ear closes the whole twenty nine rune sequence the surviving Old English Rune Poem records. Page notes that Ior's rarity on surviving inscriptions leaves runologists with little beyond the stanza itself and general comparative reasoning to test any proposed sound value or meaning against, making it, alongside Peorth, one of the two Futhorc runes this account can least confidently pin down.