Reið

Reid's two surviving stanzas agree on riding as the rune's subject while drawing on entirely different registers to develop it: the Norwegian poem states plainly that riding is said to be hardest on the horses themselves, and then, in the same stanza's second half, names Reginn, the legendary smith of the Volsung cycle credited in Old Norse tradition with forging the sword Gram for Sigurd, an allusion the poem offers without further explanation, assuming its audience already knew the story well enough to supply the connection between horse riding and a mythic weapon smith the stanza itself never quite states.

The Icelandic poem takes a gentler, more domestic approach, reading riding as joy to the one seated and a swift journey, while still acknowledging the toil it demands of the horse carrying that rider, a paired image of ease and labour reminiscent of the Old English Rad stanza's own contrast between riding imagined from indoors and riding actually endured on the road. Dickins' 1915 edition treats the Norwegian stanza's reference to Reginn as one of the clearer points of contact between the rune poems and the wider corpus of Old Norse heroic legend, a genuinely mythological allusion embedded in what otherwise reads as a fairly practical, everyday stanza about horses and travel.

Reid is the fifth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Raidho, the Elder Futhark's own fifth rune, its name, sound value r and core association with riding and travel carried forward across the reduction with unusual stability, one of several runes in the row's opening third whose Elder Futhark meaning survived largely intact even as the Younger Futhark trimmed the wider row from twenty four signs to sixteen. Barnes' handbook notes that the fixed order of the sixteen runes, Fe, Ur, Thurs, Ass, Reid and onward, was preserved closely enough across the reduction that a reader already familiar with the Elder Futhark's own opening sequence would recognise the Younger Futhark's first five signs immediately, even though nine of the older row's twenty four runes had by this point been dropped or merged into their surviving neighbours entirely.

Reid's letterform, a vertical stroke with a diagonal branch, shows only modest variation between the long branch and short twig traditions, one of the row's more consistently carved signs across the surviving corpus of Younger Futhark runestone inscriptions from across Scandinavia. Barnes notes Reid's continued clarity across the reduction as typical of the row's opening runes generally, which show markedly less reinterpretation than the signs positioned further along the sixteen rune sequence, where Kaun, Ass and Yr all show considerable drift from their Elder Futhark originals.