Ass, the Sharpest Divide Between the Two Poems

Ass offers the clearest and most consequential case anywhere in the Younger Futhark of the Norwegian and Icelandic poems reading a single rune's subject as two essentially unrelated things: the Norwegian poem treats ass as a river mouth or estuary, a plain geographic feature read as the way most journeys take, while the Icelandic poem instead reads the same rune as a god directly, generally identified by scholars as Odin specifically given the surrounding language's references to Asgard and Valhalla, a reading that keeps the Elder Futhark's own Ansuz far more explicitly than the Norwegian poem's geographic sense does. This divergence mirrors, in a more extreme form, the same kind of drift seen in Ur between dross and drizzle, and gives ass a genuinely unsettled attestation, this entry states both readings rather than picking one, since nothing in the surviving evidence establishes that either poem preserves an older or more authoritative tradition than the other.

Dickins' 1915 edition treats the Icelandic poem's explicitly mythological reading as of particular interest to runologists precisely because it is one of the few places in either poem where a Younger Futhark rune is tied this directly to a named figure from Norse mythology, comparable in kind, though centuries later and independently composed, to the Old English Tir stanza's own preservation of the god Tiw's name.