Is and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Isa

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.