Tiwaz
justice•courage•sacrifice
In the poems the rune is called: tir (Old English) týr (Norwegian, Icelandic) sound «t» ᛏ
Tiwaz comes when you have to do the right thing, even at a cost to yourself.
The meaning
Tiwaz is the warrior’s rune, an arrow pointed straight up, named for Tyr, the god of law and the fair fight. It is courage in a true cause: choosing by principle rather than convenience, and winning through discipline rather than luck. It is the harder strength that keeps its word when keeping it costs something. Tiwaz asks where your integrity is being tested. Can you pay the price of the right choice up front, before anyone claps, before you even know it will work?
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed
Reversed, Tiwaz is courage wavering or justice bent out of shape. Energy poured into the wrong battle, a principle quietly traded for a faster result, a fight picked to feel strong rather than to be right. The strength has not left you. Its aim has slipped. Sometimes it means you are fighting when you should yield, sometimes yielding when you should stand. Ask what is actually just here, not what lets you win, and point yourself back at that.
Reversed readings are a modern practice.
For you
What would the just choice cost you — and is it worth it?
The poems
Tir biþ tacna sum, healdeð trywa wel
wiþ æþelingas; a biþ on færylde
ofer nihta genipu, næfre swiceþ.
Tir is one of the signs. It keeps its word
to princes. It is always travelling
over the mist of nights, and it never deceives you.
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.
Týr er æinendr ása;
opt værðr smiðr blása.
Tyr is the one-handed god.
The smith often has to blow.
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.
Týr er einhendr áss
ok ulfs leifar
ok hofa hilmir.
gloss Mars tiggi
Tyr: the one-handed god,
what the wolf left,
and lord of the temples.
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
When the gods needed to bind the wolf Fenrir, whose growing meant the end of the world, the beast set one condition. It would allow the chain if one of them laid a hand between its jaws as a pledge of good faith. They all hesitated. Only Tyr stepped forward and gave his hand. The chain held. The hand was lost. And the North kept that story as its very definition of honour: not the one who wins, but the one who pays what he promised so that the promise stands. Tiwaz is the rune of the hand freely given.
Both Norse poems name the god and both point at the same missing hand. The English poem describes a star. Dickins has no doubt the original name was Tiw, from *Tiwaz, and that Tir is a misreading. The word glosses Latin Mars in eighth-century English word-lists. Most of the Germanic peoples used it to translate Martis in the name of the third day of the week.
And the Latin word the Icelandic manuscript writes beside its own stanza is Mars. Two witnesses three centuries and half a continent apart, and the same equation.
Ulfs leifar, the leavings of the wolf. Both Norse poems assume you know the story. Tyr put his right hand in Fenrir's mouth as a pledge while the gods bound him, and lost it when the binding held. Neither poem explains. That is what a stanza written for people who already know looks like.