ur (rune)

File:Oldest runestone 20 (Ur).jpg (25 BC–250 AD).]]

The character ᚢ may have been derived from the Old Italic scripts, as such features various characters corresponding to elder runes, including both upside and downside characters for Upsilon (/u, y/): File:Alfabeto camuno-uw1.svg, File:Alfabeto camuno-uw.svg, specifically the East Rhaetic alphabet from the Magrè-region of north-east Italy, which primarily used the downside Old Italic Upsilon.

The character was later reused as the 16th letter in the Gothic alphabet (𐌿), the corresponding name being urus.

The rune is recorded in all three rune poems (Old English, Norwegian, Icelandic), and it is called Ur in all, however with different meanings in each.

Because of this, it is difficult to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic name for the Elder Futhark rune. It may have been *ūruz "aurochs" (see also Bull worship), based on the Old English rune poem, the oldest recorded of the three, supported by the corresponding Gothic name uraz, recorded by Alcuin of York in the 8th century, or *ūrą "water", based on the Icelandic rune poems (and to some extent the Norwegian rune poem), with both Proto-Germanic words, however, possibly stemming from the same root.

The aurochs name is preferred by authors of modern runic divination systems, but both seem possible, compared to the names of the other runes: "water" would be comparable to "hail" and "lake", and "aurochs" to "horse" or "elk" (although the latter name is itself uncertain). The Gothic alphabet seems to support "aurochs" as the prior name, though: as the name of the letter 𐌿 u is urus.

In the Old English rune poem, recorded in the 8th or 9th century, the rune is named Ūr, Old English for “aurochs” (compare with {{langx|non|úrr}}), stemming from a Proto-Germanic word: *ūruz.

;Old English rune poem

The Old Norse name is variously recorded as Ur, meaning some type of cold damp and windy precipitation weather, but the definition warries slightly between the Nordic languages.

In Old Icelandic, the word úr is recorded as meaning "drizzle", "light rain" and thereof, in the sense of "cold and damp weather". In Old and Contemporary Swedish, the word (ur) essentially means "blustery and profuse snowfall, sleet or rain" etc, if not outright "bad weather". The Gotlandic variation starur ("starling-ur") specifically refers to the last snowfall of the season.{{cite web |title=Kråkmånad |url=https://www.isof.se/dialekter/pa-gang/dialektbloggen/inlagg/2009-03-01-krakmanad |website=isof.se |publisher=Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore (ISOF) |access-date=2025-02-17}} In Danish and Norwegian, the word (ur) is said to mean "northern rainclouds", or just "rainclouds", but also "cold, biting draft" and thereof etc.

There is also a variant, ýr (yr), in all Nordic languages, meaning "drizzle" in Old Icelandic, including "fine dense snowfall" and "snowstorm" in Norwegian and Swedish. A derivative, yra, a verb, also exist, meaning "to drizzle" and thereof in Old Icelandic, and "swirl, whirl, drift", in the sense of snow, sand, dust affected by the wind, in Swedish, etc.

Úr is related to {{langx|ang|ēar}}, "wave, sea", potentially also "urine". It stems from a Proto-Germanic word: *ūrą, possibly begun by a w-, as found in related words ({{langx|sv|var}}, "pus", Old English: wær, "sea") and historical variants of úr (Old Swedish: vur), as Proto-Germanic words starting with a w, followed by o or u, generally lost the w-sound when evolving from Proto-Norse into Old Norse (compare {{langx|gem-x-proto|wulfaz}}, "wolf", {{langx|non|ulfr}}).

The Norwegian rune poem is the earliest recorded Norse rune poem, recorded in the 13th century. It records the name as úr, but with a unique sense not recorded elsewhere, with the Old Norwegian meaning of "dross, slag". This sense is obscure, but may be an Iron Age technical term derived from the word for water (compare the Kalevala, where iron is compared to milk).

In the Icelandic rune poems, recorded in the 16th century, the rune is named úr, describing some type of cold damp and windy precipitation weather.

There are several Icelandic manuscripts with rune poems, all varying to some degree. The oldest manustript, catalogued as AM 687 d 4°, is from around 1500. The second oldest, catalogued as AM 461 12° , is from around 1550. These have been noted to be hard to read, thus the transliterations might be incorrect.

AM687d, written around 1500, has lost a lot of readability due to the pergament being folded and damaged over the years, but copies have been made since the 18th century.{{cite web |last1=Page |first1=R. I. |title=The Icelandic Rune-Poem.pdf |url=http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/The%20Icelandic%20Rune-Poem.pdf |website=vsnrweb-publications.org.uk |access-date=2024-01-02}} The original scribe used diacritic abbreviation symbols to save space,{{cite web |title=The Chameleon Quality of Scribal Conventions |url=https://voynichportal.com/tag/latin-scribal-abbreviations/ |website=voynichportal.com |access-date=2024-01-02}} which are hard to make out at a first glance.{{cite web |title=AM 687 d |url=https://myndir.handrit.is/file/Handrit.is/AM%20687%20d%204to/1/SECONDARY_DISPLAY |website=myndir.handrit.is |access-date=2024-01-02}} These symbols are based on period Arabic numerals, but are hard to identify, yet appear to be the following, or thereof: -r⁰, -ar¹, -ur², -er³, -re⁴/-ræ⁴, -ra⁵. The poem ends with a Latin phrase of unknown meaning.

Below, an attempt at recreating the original text with available Unicode-characters is shown, as to convey how hard the original text is to read. Letter sequences that cannot now be identified are inserted, for convenience of reading, within square brackets [ ], on the evidence either of the available space or of related texts.

AM461 is slightly younger than AM687d, written around 1550, and less complete, lacking ᛦ [Ýr] for example. It has been noted by American Old Norse scholar Jackson Crawford to be very difficult to make out.

The Swedish rune poem was recorded by Johannes Bureus (1568–1652) in the later 1500s from a runic staff thought to be from the same period. He published these in 1599 on a giant runic bronze tablet, called Runakenslanes läraspån (roughly "the teaching of runic feeling"), or {{langx|la|Elementa Runica}} ({{lit|Runic Elements}}).{{cite web |last1=Bureus |first1=Johannes |title=Runakenslanes läraspån |url=https://www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/imageViewer.jsf?dsId=ATTACHMENT-0001&pid=alvin-record:96478 |website=alvin-portal.org |access-date=2025-06-30}}

The Swedish rune poem have more in common with the Icelandic rune poem than the Norwegian one, but are much shorter.

The Anglo-Frisian Futhark has a modified Ūr {{runic|ᚢ}}, fitted with a detached vertical line in the cavity {{runic|ᚣ}}, which was given the sound value {{IPAblink|y|audio=yes}}. It was named Ȳr and corresponded to the letter y in the Latin alphabet.

Its position in the Anglo-Frisian rune-row differs between sources and was probably never standardised, but today it is generally placed at position 27.

File:Dubbelstungen ur.png

In the 11th century, a new writing rule was introduced to the Younger Futhark, in the form of stung runes (also called dotted runes), in which stings, i.e. dots, could be added to a rune to indicate a secondary sound value,a so called diacritic.

The stung Úr {{runic|ᚤ}} primarily carried the sound value {{IPAblink|y|audio=yes}} in East Norse (Swedish/Danish) and corresponds to the letter y in the Latin alphabet (unicode name: Runic Letter Y). Secondarily, it can also carry the sound value {{IPAblink|œ|audio=yes}} and seldom even {{IPAblink|v|audio=yes}}, the latter of which was also carried by the stung Fé {{runic|ᚡ}} (unicode name: Runic Letter V). In period West Norse (Norwegian/Icelandic), the sound value /y/ was instead commonly carried by the rune Yr {{runic|ᛦ}}, as its previous sound value, {{IPAblink|ʀ|audio=yes}}, had evolved into the common /r/ and was thus an obsolete doublet of the rune Reið {{runic|ᚱ}}. In the following medieval runic alphabet, the sound value {{IPAblink|œ|audio=yes}} was covered by its own rune, a reversed Óss {{runic|ᚯ}} (unicode: Runic Letter Oe). A double-stung Ur also existed for the sound value /å/, also seldom used for /v/.

Stung runes were originally not seen as separate runes from their base form, they are just runes with added diacritics, adn thus were not listed in the Younger Futhark-order. In the later medieval runic alphabet, which followed the Latin alphabetical order of ABCD etc, they instead have the position of their corresponding Latin character.

{{notelist}}

{{Reflist|refs=

{{cite web |last1=Crawford |first1=Jackson |title=The Icelandic Rune Poem |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-rK0DG8-IA |website=youtube.com |access-date=2024-07-18}}

Original poems and translation from the [http://www.ragweedforge.com/poems.html Rune Poem Page] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/19990501094729/http://www.ragweedforge.com/poems.html |date=1999-05-01 }}.

Page, R.I. (2005). Runes, page 15. The British Museum Press {{ISBN|0-7141-8065-3}}

{{cite book |last1=Cleasby |first1=Richard |author2=Gudbrand Vigfusson |last3=Dasent |first3=George Webbe |title=An Icelandic-English dictionary, based on the ms. collections of the late Richard Cleasby. Enl. and completed by Gudbrand Vigfússon. With an introd. and life of Richard Cleasby by George Webbe Dasent |date=1874 |page=669 |url=https://archive.org/details/icelandicenglish00cleauoft/page/668/mode/2up |access-date=2024-07-18}}

{{cite book |last1=Cleasby |first1=Richard |author2=Gudbrand Vigfusson |title=A concise dictionary of old Icelandic |date=1910 |page=460 |url=https://archive.org/details/concisedictionar001857/page/460/mode/2up |access-date=2024-07-18}}

{{cite book |last1=Cleasby |first1=Richard |author2=Gudbrand Vigfusson |last3=Dasent |first3=George Webbe |title=An Icelandic-English dictionary, based on the ms. collections of the late Richard Cleasby. Enl. and completed by Gudbrand Vigfússon. With an introd. and life of Richard Cleasby by George Webbe Dasent |date=1874 |page=669 |url=https://archive.org/details/icelandicenglish00cleauoft/page/728/mode/2up |access-date=2024-07-18}}

{{cite book |last1=Cleasby |first1=Richard |author2=Gudbrand Vigfusson |title=A concise dictionary of old Icelandic |date=1910 |page=460 |url=https://archive.org/details/concisedictionar001857/page/506/mode/2up |access-date=2024-07-18}}

{{cite web |url=https://ordbokene.no/nob/bm,nn/ur |title=ur |website=Bokmålsordboka {{!}} Nynorskordboka}}

{{cite web |url=https://ordbokene.no/nob/bm,nn/yr |title=ur |website=Bokmålsordboka {{!}} Nynorskordboka}}

{{cite web |title=ur subst.1 |url=https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=U_0733-0034.s4Fn&pz=3 |website=saob.se |publisher=Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) |access-date=2024-07-02 |language=sv |date=2012}}

{{cite web |title=ur subst.2 |url=https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=U_0733-0035.Z39k |website=saob.se |publisher=Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) |access-date=2024-07-02 |language=sv |date=2012}}

{{cite web |title=yr subst. |url=https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=Y_0001-0109.qf0f&pz=3 |website=saob.se |publisher=Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) |access-date=2024-07-18 |language=sv |date=2021}}

{{cite web |title=yra v.1 |url=https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=Y_0001-0115.BvY0 |website=saob.se |publisher=Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) |access-date=2024-07-18 |language=sv |date=2021}}

{{cite web |title=Ulv och varg |url=http://www.ordbruket.com/webcross/artiklar/varg.htm |website=ordbruket.com |access-date=2024-07-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090927115606/http://www.ordbruket.com/webcross/artiklar/varg.htm |archive-date=2009-09-27 |language=sv}}

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{{Runes}}

Category:Runes

Category:Aurochs