Isa
ice•stillness•pause
In the poems the rune is called: is (Old English) ís (Norwegian) íss (Icelandic) sound «i» ᛁ
Isa comes when everything stops, and that is not a mistake.
The meaning
Isa is ice: a single unbroken line, the whole rune in one still stroke. It is the frozen river, movement held rather than ended. It marks delays, feelings gone cold, plans locked in place with no way to push them. But ice is clear, and stillness lets you finally see what motion kept blurred. Not everything that stops is broken. Some things freeze so that you can stand on them and cross. Isa asks you to stop fighting the pause and use it.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed readings are a modern practice. As this site draws it, the rune is the same in both positions, so a reversed one does not exist for it.
For you
What becomes visible when you finally stand still?
The poems
Is byþ oferceald, ungemetum slidor,
glisnaþ glæshluttur gimmum gelicust,
flor forste geworuht, fæger ansyne.
Ice is too cold and slippery past all measure.
It glitters clear as glass, most like a jewel.
It is a floor the frost made, and lovely to look at.
why the poem never names it
The poem never names the rune. Each stanza is a riddle whose answer is the name, and the name printed above it in every edition was put there by a later hand.
Ís kǫllum brú bræiða;
blindan þarf at læiða.
We call ice the wide bridge.
The blind need someone to lead them.
on the rhyme
The Norwegian poem is written in rhyming couplets. The second line rhymes with the first, and often that is the strongest thing connecting them. Dickins calls each couplet two semi-detached statements of a gnomic character.
Íss er árbörkr
ok unnar þak
ok feigra manna fár.
gloss glacies jöfurr
Ice: bark of the river,
roof of the wave,
and the ruin of men already doomed.
on the last two words
Each Icelandic stanza ends with two words the poem does not need. One is a Latin equivalent of the rune name, the other an Old Norse word for king beginning with the same letter. The manuscript is running a glossary and an alphabetical king-list through the poem at the same time.
where these texts come from
The earliest surviving list of this row was written in the ninth century, and it says nothing about what any rune means. Abecedarium Nordmannicum, 9th century.
Text after Dickins 1915. Checked against Halsall 1981. Translated here from the originals.
Where it comes from
The old poems call ice a broad bridge and a roof over the wave: beautiful, treacherous, and crossed anyway by people who had no other road. In the oldest telling of how the world began, everything started where ice met fire. The cold and the heat touched in the void, and from that meeting the first life dripped free. Even absolute stillness, the North believed, is half of how things are made. Nothing is only frozen forever. Isa is the pause between, not the end.
The three poems agree on the object and split on the feeling. England looks at it and sees glass, gems, a floor, fæger ansyne, fair to look upon. Norway walks on it. The warning beside it has nothing obvious to do with ice, until you notice what it says: the bridge is only safe if someone is leading you. Iceland says it kills.
Feigr does not mean unlucky. It means already marked for death, past saving. The Icelandic stanza is not saying that ice is dangerous. It is saying that ice is where the fated ones end, and the country that lives under it is the one that says so.
Norwegian and Icelandic share an image the English poem does not have. Both see ice as a covering, a bridge over the water, the bark on the river, the roof of the wave. Something laid on top of something moving.