Ior
The twenty-eighth futhorc rune, transliterated io. The poem calls it a river-fish that feeds on land (eel, newt and beaver have all been proposed), and no inscription uses it at all.
At a glance
- Rune
- ᛡU+16E1
- Unicode name
- RUNIC LETTER IOR
- Alphabet
- Anglo-Saxon Futhorc
- In use
- c. AD 400 – 1100 (Early medieval England and Frisia)
- Position
- 28
- Transliteration
- io
- Sound value
- /io/
- Name
- ior: unclear: some amphibious creature; eel, newt and beaver have all been suggestedContested
Names
How the rune is called in each tradition, and how securely each name is recorded.
| Form | Language | Meaning | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| ior | Old English | unclear: some amphibious creature; eel, newt and beaver have all been suggestedAlso written iar, which is the form the Old English Rune Poem stanza uses and the one editions of the poem normally print. The two are the same name; this site files the entry under ior, following the manuscript futhorc rows. | Contested |
An asterisk marks a reconstructed form: a word linguists have worked backwards to, not one that appears in any surviving source.
Etymology
The stanza describes a river-fish that nevertheless takes its food on land, living happily in a fair dwelling surrounded by water. That fits several animals and settles on none. Like peorð, it is a case where the poem preserves the name without preserving the meaning.
Sound value
A diphthong, of limited practical use. This is one of Page's pseudo-runes: a character of the manuscript rows that turns up in no surviving inscription.
Historical use
Not rare so much as absent: ior has a rune-poem stanza and a place in the manuscript rows, and no securely identified occurrence in any inscription. Page groups it with cweorð and stan as a pseudo-rune, a character that exists on parchment and nowhere else. Epigraphically the shapes involved are read as variants of ger instead.
Rune-poem evidence
The medieval verse that records this rune's name. Original text plus our own translation.
Iar byþ eafix and ðeah a bruceþ fodres on foldan, hafaþ fægerne eard wætre beworpen, ðær he wynnum leofaþ.Iar is a river-fish, and yet it always takes its food on land; it has a fair dwelling surrounded by water, where it lives in delight.(our translation)
Usually taken to be an eel, a newt or a beaver. Nobody knows.
Attested in
Objects and monuments where this rune can actually be seen.
- Manuscript futhorc rowsEngland · 9th–11th century
Rows of the alphabet copied into manuscripts, where the later English runes are far better attested than in carved inscriptions.
Signatures follow the Scandinavian Runic-text Database so you can look each inscription up directly. Each name links to the object's own entry.
Modern meaning
Why this entry has none.
None is given here. Modern rune divination is built almost entirely on the Elder Futhark, and no established modern tradition reads the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc separately. Inventing a reading for Ior to fill the space would be exactly the kind of fabrication this site exists to flag, so the field is left empty rather than filled. How modern rune meanings were arrived at is a separate discussion.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this rune that circulate widely and do not hold up.
The Thames scramasax is regularly described as defective for carrying 28 runes where the rune poem has 29, the missing one being this rune. That gets the burden backwards. Ior is the pseudo-rune here, and a row of the runes people actually cut has no obvious reason to include it: the 28-rune futhorc is a recognised stage of the alphabet, not a short version of the poem's.
Sources for this entry
Full references are on the sources page. If you think something here is wrong, our corrections policy explains how to say so.