Ior, the Poem's Second Great Uncertainty

Ior's stanza describes a river fish that nonetheless always feeds on land, possessed of a fair dwelling place surrounded by water where it lives in happiness, a genuinely puzzling combination, an animal of the water that feeds on land, that has never been resolved with full confidence, making Ior alongside Peorth one of the two clearest cases in the whole poem where this entry must state honestly that the precise creature intended is not settled rather than offer a confident identification the sources do not support.

Proposed readings have included an eel, whose habit of leaving water to travel overland in wet conditions is genuinely attested and would fit the stanza's odd combination reasonably well, and a beaver, whose riverside den and partly terrestrial habits offer another plausible match, though R. I. Page's survey treats neither identification as conclusively established from the stanza's brief and somewhat riddling description alone. Halsall's critical edition situates Ior among a small group of Old English rune poem stanzas, Peorth chief among them, whose content reads almost as a riddle in the wider Old English riddling tradition well attested in the Exeter Book, a genre that deliberately obscured its subject for the audience to guess rather than aiming at Ur's or Beorc's straightforward, unambiguous description.