Yr is the sixteenth and final rune of the Younger Futhark, descending from Algiz, the Elder Futhark's own fifteenth rune, a genuinely striking case of reinterpretation: where Algiz and its Old English descendant Eolh, discussed elsewhere in this survey, name a hazardous marsh plant, the Younger Futhark's Yr instead reads as yew or the bow made from it, a shift runologists connect to the rune's distinctive letterform, an inverted Y shape whose Younger Futhark orientation was read afresh as suggestive of a different object entirely once the older plant association had faded from active use.
Barnes' handbook treats Yr's sound value, transliterated R and distinct from the row's other r sound carried by Reid, as one of the clearer surviving traces of a phonetic distinction, between two different r like sounds in Old Norse, that the Younger Futhark's sixteen sign economy otherwise mostly collapsed elsewhere in the row, Yr keeping a dedicated sign for this particular sound even as Kaun, Tyr and Bjarkan absorbed pairs of related consonants into single signs. Yr's closing position ends this survey's account of all sixteen Younger Futhark runes at the point the reduced row itself ends. This closes the sixteen rune Younger Futhark exactly where it began with Fe, on a sign whose reading, like several of the row's others, cannot be pinned to one single, settled sense across its whole documented history, a fitting final note for a tradition this survey has repeatedly found more genuinely varied than any confident modern summary usually admits.