May 21, 2010 - Ior

Ior

Ior is the dipthong “io”

Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem (from ragweedforge.com)

Ior is a river fish and yet it always feeds on land;
it has a fair abode encompassed by water, where it lives in happiness
As I was journaling and contemplating the rune this morning, and thinking about some of the meanings of this rune, I kept coming back to the last line of the rune poem, “Where it lives in happiness” and this had me thinking. This is one of the few runes that mentions happiness in the whole of the rune poem. While part of the nature of Ior is that it embodies both a boundary, but also the union of those things which are kept opposite. As the poem describes, “Ior is a river-fish, and yet it always feeds on land” there is the implication that things of the river, stay there, but yet this creature lives in the both the river, and can move onto land. A clear demarcation, but yet Ior is able to cross both. Yet, in the ability to able to encompass seemingly contradictory states of being, It has it’s home “where it lives in Happiness”. It came to me that Ior is one of the gamarunar (Joy Runes) and thus can be used to bring about joy into a place where it is used. For that, it can also indicate joy and happiness where it appears in a reading, but in a different way then the other gamarunar. In this case, I think the happiness comes from a sense of identity, the establishing of personal boundaries that help us to maneuver through life, and when we say “yes” to a request or when we say “no.”