Áss

Ass offers the clearest and most consequential case anywhere in the Younger Futhark of the Norwegian and Icelandic poems reading a single rune's subject as two essentially unrelated things: the Norwegian poem treats ass as a river mouth or estuary, a plain geographic feature read as the way most journeys take, while the Icelandic poem instead reads the same rune as a god directly, generally identified by scholars as Odin specifically given the surrounding language's references to Asgard and Valhalla, a reading that keeps the Elder Futhark's own Ansuz far more explicitly than the Norwegian poem's geographic sense does. This divergence mirrors, in a more extreme form, the same kind of drift seen in Ur between dross and drizzle, and gives ass a genuinely unsettled attestation, this entry states both readings rather than picking one, since nothing in the surviving evidence establishes that either poem preserves an older or more authoritative tradition than the other.

Dickins' 1915 edition treats the Icelandic poem's explicitly mythological reading as of particular interest to runologists precisely because it is one of the few places in either poem where a Younger Futhark rune is tied this directly to a named figure from Norse mythology, comparable in kind, though centuries later and independently composed, to the Old English Tir stanza's own preservation of the god Tiw's name.

Ass is the fourth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Ansuz, the Elder Futhark's own fourth rune and, like its Old English descendant Os discussed elsewhere in this survey of the runic traditions, a sign whose Elder Futhark original most likely named a god directly. Where the Old English tradition set the divine name aside in favour of the homophone mouth, the Icelandic Rune Poem instead keeps the divine reading alive, one of the clearer pieces of evidence that the Younger Futhark tradition, composed in a still substantially pre-Christian or only recently Christianised Icelandic milieu relative to the much earlier Christian setting of the Old English poem, retained more comfort naming pagan gods directly in its rune commentary.

Barnes' handbook notes that ass carries the sound value a in the Younger Futhark's economical sixteen sign system, one of several vowel readings the row had to stretch to cover, and the rune's letterform, a simple upright stroke with a single side branch, is essentially continuous across the long branch and short twig variant traditions discussed in this survey's account of Fe. Barnes treats ass as a useful caution against assuming any single Younger Futhark rune carried one settled meaning throughout its whole working life, since a sign this central to the row's opening sequence still shows real, unresolved variation between its two closest surviving witnesses.