Yr in the Old English Rune Poem

Yr's stanza reads the bow as a joy and honour to every prince and warrior, an object that looks well on a horse and serves as trustworthy equipment for a journey, a reading focused entirely on the weapon's dignity and dependability rather than on combat itself, closer in spirit to Eh's own admiring picture of the horse as a mark of noble bearing than to any stanza dwelling on violence or war directly.

The word yr in Old English names the bow made specifically from yew wood, connecting this rune thematically, though not by any shared Elder Futhark ancestry, to Eoh's earlier stanza on the yew tree's toughness, the finished weapon and the living tree it was cut from appearing as two separate runes in the row despite their obvious material connection. Halsall's critical edition notes that this pairing of horse and bow together in a single stanza reflects the genuinely close association between mounted status and hunting or martial equipment in Anglo-Saxon aristocratic life, a combination of skills and possessions that together marked a man's standing rather than either alone. Halsall notes the stanza names no specific battle or contest, keeping the bow's dignity general rather than tied to any one occasion, a treatment consistent with how Eh's own horse stanza also favours a general mark of standing over any single narrated event.