Ear, the Fifth and Final Anglo-Frisian Addition

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.