Ing

Ing's stanza is unique in the whole Old English Rune Poem for being built entirely as narrative rather than description: Ing was first seen by men among the East Danes, until, followed by his own chariot, he departed eastward over the waves, and so, the stanza closes, men called after him, naming something, left unspecified in the surviving text, for the departed figure. No other stanza in the poem tells a story with this shape, a figure arriving, being witnessed, and departing again, and the East Danes named here connect the stanza to a specific, if only loosely locatable, Scandinavian setting rather than to the general, placeless imagery most of the other stanzas offer.

Halsall's critical edition treats Ing as very likely referring to a legendary or divine culture hero rather than a natural phenomenon, connecting the name to Yngvi, an alternate name associated with the god Freyr in later Norse sources, and to the Ingaevones, a name Tacitus records in the first century CE for a grouping of Germanic peoples along the North Sea coast, though the precise relationship between the rune poem's brief narrative and this wider, scattered evidence remains genuinely uncertain rather than fully reconstructed.

Ing is the twenty second of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name a direct continuation of Ingwaz, and the connection between this rune and the god later called Yngvi Freyr in Norse sources is one of the more substantial pieces of comparative evidence linking the runic and the broader Germanic mythological record, since the god's own alternate name, Yngvi, preserves the same root the rune itself carries, an unusually well corroborated case compared to Peorth's or Eolh's far more uncertain identifications.

R. I. Page's survey treats Ing as good evidence that at least some Elder Futhark rune names carried genuine mythological content the Anglo-Saxon tradition still understood and could build narrative around centuries later, even as most of the row's other divine associations, Tiwaz aside, had by the time of the surviving poem either faded or, as with Os, been quietly set aside. Ingwaz's letterform, a diamond or lozenge shape distinct from most of the row's other signs, is sometimes read as a stylised seed or fertility symbol consistent with Freyr's own broader association with agricultural abundance, though such shape based readings again remain suggestive rather than confirmed.