Lögr

Logr's two stanzas both take water as their subject but each draws on a landscape distinctive to its own poem's likely place of composition: the Norwegian poem reads water as a waterfall spilling from a mountainside, an image fitting Norway's own famously steep, fjord cut terrain, and pairs this with a second, seemingly unconnected line about gold ornaments, a juxtaposition of wild water and wrought treasure without a stated logical link between the two, comparable to Ass's own unexplained transition between images elsewhere in the Norwegian poem.

The Icelandic poem instead reads water through an eddying stream and a broad geyser, a term whose very origin traces to Iceland's own distinctive geothermal landscape, before closing with an image of the ground or land of fish, a kenning for the sea or a fish rich body of water fitting Iceland's heavily fishing dependent economy. This landscape specific divergence, Norwegian mountains against Icelandic geothermal terrain, is among the clearest cases in either poem of the surrounding physical environment of each poem's likely composition shaping the specific imagery chosen for an otherwise shared rune subject, a pattern Dickins' 1915 edition notes as broadly consistent across several of the stanzas describing landscape or weather.

Logr is the fifteenth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Laguz, the Elder Futhark's own twenty first rune, its core meaning of water or the sea carried forward with the same reasonable stability the Old English Lagu shows relative to the same Elder Futhark ancestor, water proving across every runic tradition surveyed here to be one of the more consistently read natural elements in the whole runic vocabulary.

Barnes' handbook notes Logr's sound value l as another of the row's stable liquid consonants, matching the same phonetic durability already noted for Naudr's n and Madr's m, sounds that resisted the kind of merger and reassignment affecting several of the row's stop consonants such as Kaun's k or Tyr's t. Logr's position fifteenth of sixteen places it second from the row's very end, following Madr and preceding only Yr before the sixteen rune sequence, and this survey's account of the Younger Futhark, closes. Barnes notes that water imagery generally, across Laguz, Lagu and Logr alike, shows some of the clearest evidence in the whole comparative runic record for how a shared elemental subject could still be filtered through a specific composing culture's own most familiar landscape, mountain, fen or geothermal field depending on where the surviving text was actually written down.