Name and sound values
Maðr is a historically transmitted name of the rune and denotes human being. In the Younger Futhark the sign could cover the sound values /m/.
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 stanzas stress mortality, earth, and social dependence. The modern autonomous “self” only partly matches their emphasis.
Modern interpretation
Present-day practice may use Maðr as a symbolic field for “human being”. 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
Maðr er moldar auki; mikil er græip á hauki.Humanity is the increase of earth; great is the hawk’s grip.
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
Maðr er manns gaman ok moldar auki ok skipa skreytir.Man is the delight of man, an increase of the dust, and the adorner of ships.
“Increase of the dust” points to mortality and burial; “adorner of ships” to people as their crews.