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Tyr Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

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Tyr Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Tyr is, alongside Ass in its Icelandic reading, one of the clearest cases in the Younger Futhark of a rune keeping its Elder Futhark divine name fully intact into both surviving medieval poems: both the Norwegian and Icelandic texts name the god Tyr directly and both call him one handed, a description that only makes sense against the wider Norse mythological account, told fully in the Prose Edda, of Tyr placing his hand in the wolf Fenrir's mouth as a pledge of good faith while the other gods bound the wolf with the enchanted fetter Gleipnir, a pledge Tyr honoured even knowing it would cost him the hand, which the wolf duly bit off once the binding held.

The Norwegian poem, having named this one handedness, turns immediately to an apparently unrelated line about a smith who must often blow the forge, a juxtaposition Dickins' 1915 edition does not fully explain, possibly linking Tyr's missing hand to the physical labour of smithing by contrast or association rather than by any stated logical connection. The Icelandic poem instead stays within the mythological register throughout, calling Tyr leavings of the wolf, a direct and somewhat grim restatement of the same story, and prince of temples, an epithet suggesting cultic worship of the god that other, less literary sources corroborate only partially.

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