ᛄ ger (gear)

Line of descent

History

The twelfth rune of the elder row, *jēra "year, harvest", stood for j. Its name survived in Old English as ger, later gear, the ancestor of modern year. The rune poem uses it in the older sense of the warm season and its produce: "Harvest is men's hope, when God lets the earth give bright fruits".

As a letter, the rune lost most of its work in English. At the start of words, j fell together with the palatal g of words like geard "yard", and Dickins observed that inscriptions almost always write that sound with gyfu. The rune shows up in two shapes. The form Unicode calls GER (ᛄ) appears in the manuscript lists and, according to Wikipedia's survey of the English corpus, only once on an object (the Brandon pin). The other form, which Unicode encodes as ior (ᛡ), is the one carvers actually used. It writes the initial palatal g of gislheard on the Dover stone and gilsuiþ on Thornhill III. The same shape occurs in 7th–9th-century Scandinavian inscriptions as a form of the j/a rune, as Dickins pointed out. In the Seax of Beagnoth's row the twelfth rune is cut in yet another variant.

R. I. Page concluded that epigraphically both shapes are variants of one rune, ger, and that the separate rune ior of the manuscripts is a learned creation.

In the rune poems

Original text from the public-domain editions named on each poem's page; translations are our own.

Where it is found

• Seax of Beagnoth, position 12 (variant shape)
• Dover stone: gislheard, initial palatal g written with the ᛡ form
• Thornhill III stone (Yorkshire): gilsuiþ, same use

On inscriptions described on this site

Sources

• Dickins (1915), pp. 16–17, note to v. 32, and pp. 22–23, note to v. 87.
• Wikipedia, 'Anglo-Saxon runes' (citing Page 1999, pp. 45–47), checked 2026-10.