Younger Futhark Runes
Ár
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Origin 1200 to 1300
Rune 10 of the sixteen-rune Younger Futhark, the reduced row used across Viking-age Scandinavia and on the great majority of surviving runestones; sound value a. Both poems read this rune as plenty or a good year; the Norwegian poem names the legendary king Frodi as an example of generosity in a golden age, while the Icelandic poem reads plenty through good summer and a fully ripened, thriving field.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1200 to 1300 2Tradition: Norwegian Rune Poem Origin Period1400 to 1500 2Tradition: Icelandic Rune Poem Origin Period700 to 1200 CE 1Tradition: Younger Futhark inscriptions in Scandinavia Place of OriginScandinavia, where the reduced sixteen-rune row replaced the Elder Futhark through the eighth century and became the script of the Viking age 1 Place of OriginThe two poems that give the runes their names are Norwegian and Icelandic, so the names come from the western Norse area rather than from Sweden and Denmark, where most surviving runestones stand 3 Origin of the NameOld Norse ar, a year, and specifically a good year or a plentiful harvest. It is cognate with the Old English ger, and both poems read it as plenty rather than as the passage of time. 2 Attributions
Associated Sound Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThis sixteen-rune row, and not the Elder Futhark, is the base from which Guido von List built the eighteen-character Armanen set in 1902, claiming it from the eighteen spells of the Havamal. The Armanen characters and their readings were taken up in Nazi Germany and remain in far-right use. They are a modern construction and no Armanen reading is attested for this rune. 4 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourcePlenty or a good year; the Norwegian poem names legendary King Frodi as an example of generosity 2 Learn More
Ar Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems
Ar's two stanzas agree closely on subject, plenty or a good year, matching the Old English Ger stanza's own harvest reading, but the Norwegian poem develops the theme through legend rather than observation, naming Frodi, a legendary Danish king associated in Old Norse tradition with an era of such abundance and peace that gold rings were said to lie unguarded on the roads, as an example of the generosity plenty makes possible, an allusion the stanza offers as plainly as the Reid stanza's reference to Reginn, assuming an audience that already knew the Frodi story without needing it explained.
The Icelandic poem instead stays with direct agricultural observation, reading plenty through a good summer and a field grown thick and thriving, an image grounded in the visible, tangible experience of a successful harvest rather than in inherited legend, a contrast in method, mythic exemplar against direct natural description, that recurs across several of the pairs this survey has already noted, Reid included. Dickins' 1915 edition treats the Frodi reference as one of the more securely identified legendary allusions in either poem, the king and his golden age being independently well attested in other Old Norse sources including the Prose Edda, unlike some of the more obscure or unglossed images either poem offers elsewhere.
Ar and the Sixteen-Rune Reduction
Ar is the tenth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Jera, the Elder Futhark's own twelfth rune, its core meaning of a good year or harvest carried forward closely from its Elder Futhark ancestor even as its sound value shifted to represent the vowel a in the Younger Futhark's economical system, one of the row's clearer cases of a rune's symbolic meaning surviving a reduction more completely than its precise phonetic value did.
Barnes' handbook notes that Ar's letterform in the Younger Futhark, a simplified form compared to the Elder Futhark's own more elaborate Jera sign, reflects a broader tendency across the sixteen rune reduction toward visually simpler, faster to carve shapes, consistent with runestones and everyday inscriptions across Viking age Scandinavia generally favouring economy of both sign inventory and individual letterform over the Elder Futhark's own somewhat more varied and elaborate shapes. Ar's position tenth of sixteen places it just past Isa in the row's fixed order, continuing the same general sequence both the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark share for their opening ten to twelve signs before greater divergence sets in toward each row's close.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attested In
Contained In
One of the sixteen characters of the Younger Futhark.
Derived From
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