Tir

Tir's stanza names a guiding star that keeps faith well with princes, ever on its steady course above the mists of night and never failing, a stanza whose central image, a fixed point of reliable light in a dark and uncertain sky, gives Tir one of the poem's clearest single readings of steadfastness and reliability, values the stanza attributes to the star through its unbroken constancy of course rather than through any story told about it.

Runologists have proposed the star in question is either the pole star specifically, whose fixed position relative to the turning night sky matches the stanza's description unusually well, or Mars, given the rune's independently attested identity with the god Tiw and the later, medieval association of that god with the planet in the naming of the days of the week and, in some traditions, the planets themselves, though the stanza's own text does not name which reading the poet intended. Halsall's critical edition treats the pole star reading as somewhat better supported by the stanza's specific language of a star that never fails or sets, a description matching the pole star's genuinely fixed position far more precisely than any planet's own visible motion through the sky across a year.

Tir is the seventeenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name a direct continuation of Tiwaz, itself the clearest case in the whole row of a rune name preserving an independently attested god's own name intact, Tiw in the Old English tradition and Tyr in Old Norse, an identity the wider Germanic textual and linguistic record confirms well beyond the runic evidence alone, most visibly in the weekday name Tuesday, Tiw's day.

R. I. Page's survey treats Tiwaz and its Old English descendant as together offering the single strongest piece of evidence anywhere in the runic corpus that a rune name could preserve a genuine theonym across centuries and across the split between runic traditions, in clear contrast to Os's own more oblique and Peorth's wholly obscure relationship to whatever original sense their names carried. Tiw's association with law, justice and the binding of oaths in the wider Germanic mythological record, most famously in the story of the god sacrificing his hand to bind the wolf Fenrir, gives Tir's reading of steadfastness and faith kept a mythological depth the surviving Old English stanza itself does not spell out but which the rune's attested divine name makes available to a fuller reading.