Maðr

Madr's two stanzas both take humankind as their subject and both frame the reading through humility rather than pride: the Norwegian poem calls man an augmentation of the dust, an image of mortal, earthy origin recalling the same acceptance of physical limitation the Old English Mann stanza builds toward through its account of death, though here stated as man's basic nature from the outset rather than as an ending reached only at the stanza's close. The Norwegian stanza then turns abruptly to a second, seemingly unconnected image, the great span of a hawk's talon, a juxtaposition Dickins' 1915 edition does not resolve with confidence, possibly contrasting human smallness against a bird of prey's formidable reach.

The Icelandic poem instead builds a warmer, more social picture: man is delight of man, a plain statement of human companionship's value, augmentation of the earth, echoing the Norwegian poem's own dust image in gentler terms, and adorner of ships, a specifically maritime image fitting Iceland's own settlement history and seafaring economy, humankind read here through what it builds and beautifies rather than only through its humble origin. Dickins' 1915 edition treats both stanzas as belonging to the poems' more reflective register, closer to the Old English Mann and Ear in tone than to the more purely descriptive stanzas Isa or Bjarkan offer, humankind's nature named directly rather than illustrated through a single vivid image alone.

Madr is the fourteenth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Mannaz, the Elder Futhark's own twentieth rune, its core meaning of humankind carried forward closely across all three runic traditions this survey has covered, one of the more stable and universal concepts in the whole runic vocabulary, requiring no reinterpretation to remain meaningful from the Elder Futhark's earliest attestations through to the Younger Futhark's own medieval commentary centuries later.

Barnes' handbook notes Madr's sound value m as another of the row's phonetically stable consonants, unchanged in essential value across every runic tradition surveyed here, and its letterform, a simple angled or X like stroke depending on the specific long branch or short twig variant used, shows the same kind of minor regional variation already noted for Reid and other Younger Futhark signs without any change to the rune's core sound or meaning. Madr's position fourteenth of sixteen places it within the row's final stretch, following Bjarkan and preceding only Lögr and Yr before the sequence closes.

Barnes notes that Mannaz's continuity across the Elder Futhark, the futhorc and the Younger Futhark alike mirrors Isa's and Sol's own stability, humankind and the natural world both proving more durable subjects across the runic traditions' many centuries than the more abstract or narrowly cultural concepts several other runes carry.