Tir in the Old English Rune Poem

Tir's stanza names a guiding star that keeps faith well with princes, ever on its steady course above the mists of night and never failing, a stanza whose central image, a fixed point of reliable light in a dark and uncertain sky, gives Tir one of the poem's clearest single readings of steadfastness and reliability, values the stanza attributes to the star through its unbroken constancy of course rather than through any story told about it.

Runologists have proposed the star in question is either the pole star specifically, whose fixed position relative to the turning night sky matches the stanza's description unusually well, or Mars, given the rune's independently attested identity with the god Tiw and the later, medieval association of that god with the planet in the naming of the days of the week and, in some traditions, the planets themselves, though the stanza's own text does not name which reading the poet intended. Halsall's critical edition treats the pole star reading as somewhat better supported by the stanza's specific language of a star that never fails or sets, a description matching the pole star's genuinely fixed position far more precisely than any planet's own visible motion through the sky across a year.