Younger Futhark Runes
Ýr
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Origin 1200 to 1300
Rune 16 of the sixteen-rune Younger Futhark, the reduced row used across Viking-age Scandinavia and on the great majority of surviving runestones; sound value R. The Norwegian poem calls yew the greenest tree in winter and notes it crackles when it burns; the Icelandic poem instead reads the rune as the bow itself, a bent bow, brittle iron and a giant's missile weapon, a shift from the living tree to the weapon made from it.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1200 to 1300 2Tradition: Norwegian Rune Poem Origin Period1400 to 1500 2Tradition: Icelandic Rune Poem Origin Period700 to 1200 CE 1Tradition: Younger Futhark inscriptions in Scandinavia Place of OriginScandinavia, where the reduced sixteen-rune row replaced the Elder Futhark through the eighth century and became the script of the Viking age 1 Place of OriginThe two poems that give the runes their names are Norwegian and Icelandic, so the names come from the western Norse area rather than from Sweden and Denmark, where most surviving runestones stand 3 Origin of the NameOld Norse yr, the yew, and also a bow of yew wood. The Norwegian poem reads the tree and the Icelandic poem reads the weapon. The sound the rune carries, conventionally written with a capital R, had merged with ordinary r by the end of the Viking age, which is why the rune stands last in the row instead of among the other consonants. 2 Attributions
Associated Sound Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting SourceDickins's Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 1915) glosses Yr, the sixteenth and final rune of the Younger Futhark, from both surviving poems: the Norwegian poem praises the yew as the tree greenest in winter and notes it crackles when burned, while the Icelandic poem reads the same rune not as the living tree but as the weapon made from it, a bent bow of brittle iron, shifting the image from wood to war. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThis sixteen-rune row, and not the Elder Futhark, is the base from which Guido von List built the eighteen-character Armanen set in 1902, claiming it from the eighteen spells of the Havamal. The Armanen characters and their readings were taken up in Nazi Germany and remain in far-right use. They are a modern construction and no Armanen reading is attested for this rune. 4 Learn More
Yr, the Tree in One Poem and the Bow in the Other
Yr closes the Younger Futhark's sixteen runes with a divergence between the Norwegian and Icelandic poems comparable in kind to Ur's dross against drizzle or Ass's estuary against god, though here the two readings are at least visibly related rather than wholly separate: the Norwegian poem stays with the living tree, calling yew the greenest of trees in winter, an evergreen's endurance through the cold season the stanza's central image, and adds that the wood is wont to crackle when it burns, a plain, observed detail of yew as firewood.
The Icelandic poem instead reads the same rune name as the finished weapon rather than the tree it is cut from, a bent bow, brittle iron, an unusual pairing of wood and metal in a single image, and a giant's missile weapon, kenning language for an arrow or the bow that looses it, a shift from Eoh and Yr's own separate treatment as tree and bow respectively in the Old English tradition discussed elsewhere in this survey, here compressed into a single Younger Futhark rune carrying both senses depending on which poem a reader consults. Dickins' 1915 edition notes this tree to weapon shift as one of the more coherent divergences in either poem, the two readings connected by the same underlying material even where the finished stanza's central image differs.
Yr and the Sixteen-Rune Reduction
Yr is the sixteenth and final rune of the Younger Futhark, descending from Algiz, the Elder Futhark's own fifteenth rune, a genuinely striking case of reinterpretation: where Algiz and its Old English descendant Eolh, discussed elsewhere in this survey, name a hazardous marsh plant, the Younger Futhark's Yr instead reads as yew or the bow made from it, a shift runologists connect to the rune's distinctive letterform, an inverted Y shape whose Younger Futhark orientation was read afresh as suggestive of a different object entirely once the older plant association had faded from active use.
Barnes' handbook treats Yr's sound value, transliterated R and distinct from the row's other r sound carried by Reid, as one of the clearer surviving traces of a phonetic distinction, between two different r like sounds in Old Norse, that the Younger Futhark's sixteen sign economy otherwise mostly collapsed elsewhere in the row, Yr keeping a dedicated sign for this particular sound even as Kaun, Tyr and Bjarkan absorbed pairs of related consonants into single signs. Yr's closing position ends this survey's account of all sixteen Younger Futhark runes at the point the reduced row itself ends. This closes the sixteen rune Younger Futhark exactly where it began with Fe, on a sign whose reading, like several of the row's others, cannot be pinned to one single, settled sense across its whole documented history, a fitting final note for a tradition this survey has repeatedly found more genuinely varied than any confident modern summary usually admits.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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One of the sixteen characters of the Younger Futhark.
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