Yr, the Tree in One Poem and the Bow in the Other

Yr closes the Younger Futhark's sixteen runes with a divergence between the Norwegian and Icelandic poems comparable in kind to Ur's dross against drizzle or Ass's estuary against god, though here the two readings are at least visibly related rather than wholly separate: the Norwegian poem stays with the living tree, calling yew the greenest of trees in winter, an evergreen's endurance through the cold season the stanza's central image, and adds that the wood is wont to crackle when it burns, a plain, observed detail of yew as firewood.

The Icelandic poem instead reads the same rune name as the finished weapon rather than the tree it is cut from, a bent bow, brittle iron, an unusual pairing of wood and metal in a single image, and a giant's missile weapon, kenning language for an arrow or the bow that looses it, a shift from Eoh and Yr's own separate treatment as tree and bow respectively in the Old English tradition discussed elsewhere in this survey, here compressed into a single Younger Futhark rune carrying both senses depending on which poem a reader consults. Dickins' 1915 edition notes this tree to weapon shift as one of the more coherent divergences in either poem, the two readings connected by the same underlying material even where the finished stanza's central image differs.