Os

Os's stanza reads the mouth as the source of all language, a pillar of wisdom and a comfort to wise men, and a blessing and a joy to every warrior, a stanza that treats speech itself, rather than any object or animal, as the rune's subject, one of the more abstract images in the whole poem's sequence of concrete, physical things.

The reading of Os as mouth is itself a piece of Anglo-Saxon reinterpretation worth noting: the Elder Futhark's cognate rune, Ansuz, names a god, most likely Odin specifically in the continental and Scandinavian tradition, while the Old English poem's Os stanza describes the mouth rather than any deity, a shift scholars generally read as the Christian compiler of the surviving poem quietly setting aside a pagan divine name in favour of a homophonous but religiously neutral reading, os in Old English meaning mouth as well as carrying an older, otherwise obsolete sense close to the Norse ass, god. Halsall's critical edition treats this as one of the clearest examples in the poem of the kind of careful reworking a Christian scribe transmitting pre-Christian material might apply, keeping the rune's name and general association with speech, wisdom and oracular power intact while removing its most directly pagan content.

Os is the fourth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, where its cognate Ansuz names a god directly, generally read by runologists as Odin given the god's strong association elsewhere with eloquence, wisdom and oracular speech, qualities the Old English Os stanza preserves in its own reading of the mouth as a source of wisdom even after the specific divine name has been set aside. This makes Os one of the clearer cases where the underlying association, speech, wisdom, oracular or divine power channelled through the mouth, survives a change in the rune's literal referent, god becoming mouth, a pattern distinct from Thorn's shift, where troll became thorn plant with a shared sense of hazard rather than of eloquence carried across.

R. I. Page's survey treats the Os stanza as good evidence that whoever compiled the surviving Old English Rune Poem worked from inherited material whose pagan content required active, careful handling rather than wholesale invention, since a scribe starting from nothing would have had no particular reason to settle on mouth rather than any other available sense of the word os. Halsall's edition notes that a scribe working from inherited material had every reason to prefer a religiously neutral homophone over a name that still openly identified a pagan god, a small, careful choice rather than a careless one.