Tir and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Tiwaz

Tir is the seventeenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name a direct continuation of Tiwaz, itself the clearest case in the whole row of a rune name preserving an independently attested god's own name intact, Tiw in the Old English tradition and Tyr in Old Norse, an identity the wider Germanic textual and linguistic record confirms well beyond the runic evidence alone, most visibly in the weekday name Tuesday, Tiw's day.

R. I. Page's survey treats Tiwaz and its Old English descendant as together offering the single strongest piece of evidence anywhere in the runic corpus that a rune name could preserve a genuine theonym across centuries and across the split between runic traditions, in clear contrast to Os's own more oblique and Peorth's wholly obscure relationship to whatever original sense their names carried. Tiw's association with law, justice and the binding of oaths in the wider Germanic mythological record, most famously in the story of the god sacrificing his hand to bind the wolf Fenrir, gives Tir's reading of steadfastness and faith kept a mythological depth the surviving Old English stanza itself does not spell out but which the rune's attested divine name makes available to a fuller reading.