Ur's stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describes the aurochs as proud and possessed of great horns, a very fierce beast that fights with those horns, a well known stalker of the moorland and a creature of real courage, one of the few stanzas in the whole poem describing an animal still within living Anglo-Saxon experience rather than a purely symbolic image, since the aurochs, though it would eventually be hunted to extinction across Europe, remained a genuinely dangerous wild animal known at least by reputation to the poem's original audience.
The stanza's admiring tone, courage and ferocity read as qualities worth naming rather than only dangers to avoid, fits a wider pattern across the rune poem in which the harder, wilder images carry a note of respect alongside caution, comparable to how Thorn, the stanza immediately following, treats the thorn's sharpness as a genuine hazard without reading the plant itself as malevolent. Halsall's critical edition notes that Ur's reading as the aurochs, rather than some other sense the bare word ur might carry, is well supported by the stanza's own descriptive content, which leaves comparatively little ambiguity about what animal is meant compared to some of the poem's more obscure later stanzas.