Ur, Where the Two Poems Genuinely Disagree

Ur is the clearest case among the sixteen Younger Futhark runes where the Norwegian and Icelandic poems do not simply develop a shared theme differently but read the rune's actual subject as two different things entirely: the Norwegian poem treats ur as dross or slag, the waste material left over from smelting poor quality iron, while the Icelandic poem instead reads the same rune as drizzle or light rain, a genuinely separate natural phenomenon with no obvious conceptual link to the Norwegian reading beyond the two sharing a name and a sound. This divergence is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over, since it shows that even among the two closest surviving witnesses to the Younger Futhark's own meaning, composed only a few centuries apart within the same broad Old Norse literary culture, no single fixed reading for every rune had been preserved by the time either poem was written down, the tradition already carrying more than one live interpretation for at least this sign. Dickins' 1915 edition presents both readings side by side without attempting to resolve them into one, the correct scholarly posture given that nothing in the surviving evidence establishes which, if either, represents an older or more original sense of the rune.