Ísa

Isa's two stanzas both take ice as their subject but read its danger quite differently in degree: the Norwegian poem calls ice the broad bridge, a genuinely useful image of frozen water making a crossing possible that open water would otherwise prevent, and adds only the gentler caution that the blind must be led across it, hazard present but manageable with care.

The Icelandic poem reads considerably harder, naming ice the bark of rivers and the roof of the wave, vivid images consistent with the Norwegian poem's own bridge like reading, but then closes with destruction of doomed men, a stark, fatalistic line with no equivalent softening in the Norwegian text, ice here read as an active danger to those already marked for death rather than a hazard the merely careless might avoid. This shift from a cautiously useful bridge to an instrument of a doomed man's destruction gives Isa one of the more pronounced differences in tone, rather than in subject, between the two poems, both agreeing on what ice is while disagreeing sharply on how dangerous it should be read as being. Dickins' 1915 edition notes this kind of shift in emotional register, shared subject read at different intensities, as at least as common between the two poems as an outright disagreement on subject such as Ur or Ass show.

Isa is the ninth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Isa, the Elder Futhark's own eleventh rune, its name and sound value i carried forward essentially unchanged across the reduction, one of the row's simpler and more stable continuities, the physical phenomenon of ice requiring no reinterpretation to remain intelligible across any of the three surviving runic traditions this survey has covered.

Barnes' handbook notes Isa's single vertical stroke letterform as identical, or very nearly so, across the Elder Futhark, the futhorc and the Younger Futhark alike, one of very few Younger Futhark signs that required no adaptation at all from its Elder Futhark ancestor's shape to remain legible within the newer, more economical sixteen sign system. Isa's position ninth of sixteen places it just past the reduced row's midpoint, following the same general sequence of runes, Fe through Naudr, that both the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark share in their opening stretch before the two rows diverge more noticeably in their remaining signs. Barnes notes that Isa's consistent reading across every runic tradition surveyed here makes it one of the more reliable anchors for comparative runology generally, a fixed point against which the more drifting readings of runes such as Ur or Ass can be measured and described.