Ass and the Sixteen-Rune Reduction

Ass is the fourth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Ansuz, the Elder Futhark's own fourth rune and, like its Old English descendant Os discussed elsewhere in this survey of the runic traditions, a sign whose Elder Futhark original most likely named a god directly. Where the Old English tradition set the divine name aside in favour of the homophone mouth, the Icelandic Rune Poem instead keeps the divine reading alive, one of the clearer pieces of evidence that the Younger Futhark tradition, composed in a still substantially pre-Christian or only recently Christianised Icelandic milieu relative to the much earlier Christian setting of the Old English poem, retained more comfort naming pagan gods directly in its rune commentary.

Barnes' handbook notes that ass carries the sound value a in the Younger Futhark's economical sixteen sign system, one of several vowel readings the row had to stretch to cover, and the rune's letterform, a simple upright stroke with a single side branch, is essentially continuous across the long branch and short twig variant traditions discussed in this survey's account of Fe. Barnes treats ass as a useful caution against assuming any single Younger Futhark rune carried one settled meaning throughout its whole working life, since a sign this central to the row's opening sequence still shows real, unresolved variation between its two closest surviving witnesses.