Name and sound values
Ár is a historically transmitted name of the rune and denotes good year and yield. In the Younger Futhark the sign could cover the sound values /a/æ/.
Reducing the row from 24 to 16 signs meant that one rune wrote several different sounds. The correct reading therefore depends on vocabulary, grammar, and inscriptional context.
Historical use
Younger runes primarily served writing: on memorial stones, everyday objects, ownership marks, and short messages. Magical inscriptions exist, but they do not turn every rune into an independent magical sign.
The Norse rune poems
The Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems do comment on the sixteen Younger Futhark runes. They survive, however, only through medieval manuscripts and may transmit divergent imagery.
Ár means not merely calendar time but a good season and its yield. Guaranteed personal success does not follow from it.
Modern interpretation
Present-day practice may use Ár as a symbolic field for “good year and yield”. Such reflection is modern; the rune poems offer images and mnemonics, not a complete surviving system for drawing individual oracle stones.
Rune poems in the original
Old Norwegian
Norwegian Rune Poem
Ár er gumna góðe; get ek at ǫrr var Fróðe.A good year is a benefit to people; I know that Fróði was generous.
A sense-based working translation. The second line is often an independent gnomic statement; a direct semantic link to the rune must not be assumed.
Old Icelandic
Icelandic Rune Poem
Ár er gumna góði ok gott sumar ok algróinn akr.A good year is a boon to people, a good summer, and a fully ripened field.
Ár here means the fruitful year or harvest; its alignment with older Jēra is historical and comparative.