Is in the Old English Rune Poem

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.