The Tyr Naming, the Exception Among the Three

Unlike Freyr's Aett and Heimdall's Aett, whose god based names cannot be traced to the primary medieval sources and appear to be later additions from twentieth century and more recent rune practice, Tyr's Aett rests on a genuinely different footing: its opening rune, Tiwaz, is itself the runic spelling of the god's own name, Tiw in the Old English tradition and Tyr in Old Norse, an identity the runic evidence and the wider Germanic textual record, including the weekday name Tuesday, Tiw's day, both preserve independently of one another. This makes the naming of the third aett after Tyr a considerably more defensible reading than the namings applied to the first two groups, since here the connection runs directly through the rune's own name rather than through a later interpretive choice pairing an unrelated god with a group of runes that does not name him. It does not follow, however, that the medieval sources themselves speak of a group called Tyr's Aett as such; the sources attest the rune Tiwaz and its identity with the god, and separately attest the row's division into three groups of eight, but the specific act of naming the third group for its opening rune's own god remains, like the other two namings, a modern convenience built on genuinely old material rather than a naming inherited whole from the medieval record.