Name and sound values
Íss is a historically transmitted name of the rune and denotes ice. In the Younger Futhark the sign could cover the sound values /i/e/j/.
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.
The poems work with slipperiness, cold, and a gleaming surface. Modern psychological terms are possible metaphors, not old definitions.
Modern interpretation
Present-day practice may use Íss as a symbolic field for “ice”. 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
Ís kǫllum brú bræiða; blindan þarf at læiða.We call ice the broad bridge; the blind person needs guidance.
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
Íss er árbörkr ok unnar þak ok feigra manna fár.Ice is the bark of rivers, the roof of the wave, and a peril for doomed people.
“Bark” and “roof” describe the solid surface of frozen water; the final phrase stresses its mortal danger.