Ur (rune)
Ur is the recorded name for the rune in both Old English and Old Norse, found as the second rune in all futharks, i.e. the Germanic Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Frisian Futhark and the Norse Younger Futhark, with continued use in the later medieval runes, early modern runes and Dalecarlian runes.
It corresponds to the letter u in the Latin alphabet, but also carries other sound values, especially in Younger Futhark, where its sound values correspond to the vowels:,, and etc., and the consonants: and etc., in the Latin alphabet.
Character
The character ᚢ may have been derived from the Old Italic scripts, as such features various characters corresponding to elder runes, including both upside and downside characters for Upsilon :,, specifically the East Rhaetic alphabet from the Magrè-region of north-east Italy, which primarily used the downside Old Italic Upsilon.The character was later reused as the 16th letter in the Gothic alphabet, the corresponding name being urus.
Proto-Germanic name
The rune is recorded in all three rune poems, and it is called Ur in all, however with different meanings in each.Because of this, it is difficult to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic name for the Elder Futhark rune. It may have been *ūruz "aurochs", based on the Old English rune poem, the oldest recorded of the three, supported by the corresponding Gothic name uraz, recorded by Alcuin of York in the 8th century, or *ūrą "water", based on the Icelandic rune poems, with both Proto-Germanic words, however, possibly stemming from the same root.
The aurochs name is preferred by authors of modern runic divination systems, but both seem possible, compared to the names of the other runes: "water" would be comparable to "hail" and "lake", and "aurochs" to "horse" or "elk". The Gothic alphabet seems to support "aurochs" as the prior name, though: as the name of the letter ? u is urus.
Anglo-Saxon name
In the Old English rune poem, recorded in the 8th or 9th century, the rune is named Ūr, Old English for “aurochs”, stemming from a Proto-Germanic word: *ūruz.;Old English rune poem
Old Norse name
The Old Norse name is variously recorded as Ur, meaning some type of cold damp and windy precipitation weather, but the definition warries slightly between the Nordic languages.In Old Icelandic, the word úr is recorded as meaning "drizzle", "light rain" and thereof, in the sense of "cold and damp weather". In Old and Contemporary Swedish, the word essentially means "blustery and profuse snowfall, sleet or rain" etc, if not outright "bad weather". The Gotlandic variation starur specifically refers to the last snowfall of the season. In Danish and Norwegian, the word is said to mean "northern rainclouds", or just "rainclouds", but also "cold, biting draft" and thereof etc.
There is also a variant, ýr, in all Nordic languages, meaning "drizzle" in Old Icelandic, including "fine dense snowfall" and "snowstorm" in Norwegian and Swedish. A derivative, yra, a verb, also exist, meaning "to drizzle" and thereof in Old Icelandic, and "swirl, whirl, drift", in the sense of snow, sand, dust affected by the wind, in Swedish, etc.
Úr is related to, "wave, sea", potentially also "urine". It stems from a Proto-Germanic word: *ūrą, possibly begun by a w-, as found in related words and historical variants of úr, as Proto-Germanic words starting with a w, followed by o or u, generally lost the w-sound when evolving from Proto-Norse into Old Norse.
Norwegian rune poem
The Norwegian rune poem is the earliest recorded Norse rune poem, recorded in the 13th century. It records the name as úr, but with a unique sense not recorded elsewhere, with the Old Norwegian meaning of "dross, slag". This sense is obscure, but may be an Iron Age technical term derived from the word for water.Icelandic rune poems
In the Icelandic rune poems, recorded in the 16th century, the rune is named úr, describing some type of cold damp and windy precipitation weather.There are several Icelandic manuscripts with rune poems, all varying to some degree. The oldest manustript, catalogued as AM 687 d 4°, is from around 1500. The second oldest, catalogued as AM 461 12° , is from around 1550. These have been noted to be hard to read, thus the transliterations might be incorrect.
AM 687 d 4°
AM687d, written around 1500, has lost a lot of readability due to the pergament being folded and damaged over the years, but copies have been made since the 18th century. The original scribe used diacritic abbreviation symbols to save space, which are hard to make out at a first glance. These symbols are based on period Arabic numerals, but are hard to identify, yet appear to be the following, or thereof: -r⁰, -ar¹, -ur², -er³, -re⁴/-ræ⁴, -ra⁵. The poem ends with a Latin phrase of unknown meaning.Below, an attempt at recreating the original text with available Unicode-characters is shown, as to convey how hard the original text is to read. Letter sequences that cannot now be identified are inserted, for convenience of reading, within square brackets, on the evidence either of the available space or of related texts.
AM 461 12°
AM461 is slightly younger than AM687d, written around 1550, and less complete, lacking ᛦ for example. It has been noted by American Old Norse scholar Jackson Crawford to be very difficult to make out.Swedish rune poem
The Swedish rune poem was recorded by Johannes Bureus in the later 1500s from a runic staff thought to be from the same period. He published these in 1599 on a giant runic bronze tablet, called Runakenslanes läraspån, or .The Swedish rune poem have more in common with the Icelandic rune poem than the Norwegian one, but are much shorter.
Variants
(Ȳr) – Anglo-Frisian Futhorc
The Anglo-Frisian Futhark has a modified Ūr, fitted with a detached vertical line in the cavity, which was given the sound value. It was named Ȳr and corresponded to the letter y in the Latin alphabet.Its position in the Anglo-Frisian rune-row differs between sources and was probably never standardised, but today it is generally placed at position 27.
(stung Úr) – Norse Younger Futhark
In the 11th century, a new writing rule was introduced to the Younger Futhark, in the form of stung runes, in which stings, i.e. dots, could be added to a rune to indicate a secondary sound value,a so called diacritic.The stung Úr primarily carried the sound value in East Norse and corresponds to the letter y in the Latin alphabet. Secondarily, it can also carry the sound value and seldom even, the latter of which was also carried by the stung Fé . In period West Norse, the sound value /y/ was instead commonly carried by the rune Yr, as its previous sound value,, had evolved into the common /r/ and was thus an obsolete doublet of the rune Reið. In the following medieval runic alphabet, the sound value was covered by its own rune, a reversed Óss . A double-stung Ur also existed for the sound value /å/, also seldom used for /v/.
Stung runes were originally not seen as separate runes from their base form, they are just runes with added diacritics, adn thus were not listed in the Younger Futhark-order. In the later medieval runic alphabet, which followed the Latin alphabetical order of ABCD etc, they instead have the position of their corresponding Latin character.