Ac's stanza reads the oak as fattening the flesh of pigs for the children of men, its acorns a genuine and well attested part of Anglo-Saxon pannage, the practice of turning swine into woodland to feed on fallen mast, and then turns to a second, quite different use of the same tree: the oak often crosses the gannet's bath, a kenning for the sea, where the ocean itself proves whether the oak keeps faith in honourable fashion, a reference to oak built ships and their timber's trustworthiness under the sea's own testing. This double reading, one tree serving both a settled, agricultural economy and a seafaring, adventurous one, gives Ac a genuinely comprehensive picture of the oak's importance across Anglo-Saxon material life, comparable in its practical grounding to Feoh's wealth or Rad's riding rather than to the poem's more purely symbolic images.
Ac opens the futhorc's five purely Anglo-Frisian additions, runes with no Elder Futhark cognate at all, added to the row specifically to represent Old English sounds the inherited twenty four signs had no letter for, and Halsall's critical edition notes that these five later stanzas show no obvious falling off in poetic quality or craft compared to the twenty four inherited stanzas before them, whatever their later date of composition relative to the row's older core.