Týr

Tyr is, alongside Ass in its Icelandic reading, one of the clearest cases in the Younger Futhark of a rune keeping its Elder Futhark divine name fully intact into both surviving medieval poems: both the Norwegian and Icelandic texts name the god Tyr directly and both call him one handed, a description that only makes sense against the wider Norse mythological account, told fully in the Prose Edda, of Tyr placing his hand in the wolf Fenrir's mouth as a pledge of good faith while the other gods bound the wolf with the enchanted fetter Gleipnir, a pledge Tyr honoured even knowing it would cost him the hand, which the wolf duly bit off once the binding held.

The Norwegian poem, having named this one handedness, turns immediately to an apparently unrelated line about a smith who must often blow the forge, a juxtaposition Dickins' 1915 edition does not fully explain, possibly linking Tyr's missing hand to the physical labour of smithing by contrast or association rather than by any stated logical connection. The Icelandic poem instead stays within the mythological register throughout, calling Tyr leavings of the wolf, a direct and somewhat grim restatement of the same story, and prince of temples, an epithet suggesting cultic worship of the god that other, less literary sources corroborate only partially.

Tyr is the twelfth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Tiwaz, the Elder Futhark's own seventeenth rune, and shares with the Old English Tir, discussed at length elsewhere in this survey, the distinction of preserving an independently attested Germanic god's own name across every runic tradition this survey covers, Elder Futhark, futhorc and Younger Futhark alike, the clearest single thread of continuity running through all three systems. Barnes' handbook treats Tiwaz and its descendants as the strongest evidence available that at least some runic names carried genuine, stable mythological content across centuries and across the splits between traditions, in contrast to the considerable drift visible in runes such as Ur or Kaun.

Tyr's sound value t in the Younger Futhark absorbed, as with several of the row's other consonants, both the voiced d and unvoiced t sounds of spoken Old Norse, one rune covering a phonetic pair the language itself still distinguished, the same kind of deliberate economy Kaun's own account of the reduction described for the k and g sounds. Barnes treats Tyr's stability across every runic tradition as good evidence that at least a handful of divine names were considered too significant, or too well known, for any tradition's users to reinterpret or quietly set aside the way Ansuz's own name was handled in the Old English futhorc.