Is

Is's stanza calls ice very cold and immeasurably slippery, glistening as clear as glass and most like to precious gems in its appearance, a floor wrought by the frost yet genuinely fair to look upon, a stanza that holds real hazard, the slipperiness the poem names directly, together with real beauty in the same handful of lines rather than resolving the image toward either danger or admiration alone. This dual reading places Is closer in spirit to Ur's admiring but wary treatment of the aurochs than to Haegl's more straightforwardly destructive hail, ice treated as a genuinely double natured phenomenon, dangerous underfoot and beautiful to the eye at once, without the poem taking a side between the two readings.

Halsall's critical edition notes the stanza's comparison of ice to gemstones as one of the more vivid images in the whole poem, a piece of genuine descriptive craft rather than only inherited formula, and modern translators have generally preserved this comparison as one of the more memorable single lines the surviving text offers. The stanza's brevity, like Thorn's, has been read by some scholars as suggesting the compiler had a comparatively simple, physical phenomenon to describe here with less inherited symbolic weight attached than runes such as Os or Ing carry.

Is is the eleventh of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and reading a direct, essentially unchanged continuation of Isa, whose own name likewise means ice, one of the clearest and simplest continuities in the whole row, a natural phenomenon common to the whole Germanic speaking world and requiring no reinterpretation to carry across from one runic tradition to the other. The rune's letterform, a single vertical stroke in both the Elder Futhark and the futhorc, is itself sometimes read as visually suggestive of an icicle or a frozen, motionless line, though R. I. Page's survey treats such shape based readings with appropriate caution, since a single vertical stroke is also simply one of the most economical marks available to a carver and its simplicity need not have been chosen for pictorial reasons at all.

Is sits at the row's structural midpoint in a loose sense, the eleventh of twenty four runes shared between the two traditions, roughly halfway through the section both the Elder Futhark and the futhorc hold in common before the futhorc's five later, purely Anglo-Frisian additions. Page treats such pictorial readings of a rune's shape as worth recording but never as settled fact, since a carver's choice of a simple, easily cut stroke may owe as much to practical convenience on stone or wood as to any deliberate resemblance to the thing named.