Logr and the Sixteen-Rune Reduction

Logr is the fifteenth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Laguz, the Elder Futhark's own twenty first rune, its core meaning of water or the sea carried forward with the same reasonable stability the Old English Lagu shows relative to the same Elder Futhark ancestor, water proving across every runic tradition surveyed here to be one of the more consistently read natural elements in the whole runic vocabulary.

Barnes' handbook notes Logr's sound value l as another of the row's stable liquid consonants, matching the same phonetic durability already noted for Naudr's n and Madr's m, sounds that resisted the kind of merger and reassignment affecting several of the row's stop consonants such as Kaun's k or Tyr's t. Logr's position fifteenth of sixteen places it second from the row's very end, following Madr and preceding only Yr before the sixteen rune sequence, and this survey's account of the Younger Futhark, closes. Barnes notes that water imagery generally, across Laguz, Lagu and Logr alike, shows some of the clearest evidence in the whole comparative runic record for how a shared elemental subject could still be filtered through a specific composing culture's own most familiar landscape, mountain, fen or geothermal field depending on where the surviving text was actually written down.