Thurs Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Thurs is one of the runes where the Norwegian and Icelandic poems agree closely on subject even while developing it in their own separate idioms: both read the rune as the giant, a being of torment and misfortune rather than a neutral or admired figure, the Norwegian poem naming the giant as a cause of anguish to women and a source of the kind of misfortune that leaves few men cheerful, and the Icelandic poem developing the same essential reading further, calling the giant torturer of women and a dweller among the cliffs, imagery that fits the giants' place in the wider Old Norse mythological record as beings belonging to wild, uncultivated land outside the settled human and divine order the gods of Asgard maintain. This continuity of reading across two poems separated by roughly two centuries suggests thurs carried an unusually stable, negative association throughout the Younger Futhark's working life, in contrast to a rune such as Ur, where the two witnesses genuinely part ways.

Dickins' 1915 edition notes that thurs's reading here is broadly consistent with its Elder Futhark cognate Thurisaz and, further, with the Old English Thorn stanza's own move from giant to a merely sharp plant, three related traditions all keeping some trace of hazard attached to the same rune shape even as the specific danger named shifts between them.