Name and sound values
Ýr is a historically transmitted name of the rune and denotes yew or yew bow. In the Younger Futhark the sign could cover the sound values /ʀ/y/.
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 focus on the bow. Shape, sound history, and relation to Elder Algiz are complex and cannot be reduced to “protection”.
Modern interpretation
Present-day practice may use Ýr as a symbolic field for “yew or yew bow”. 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
Ýr er vetrgrønstr viða; vænt er, er brennr, at sviða.Yew is the most winter-green of woods; when it burns, it is apt to scorch.
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
Ýr er bendr bogi ok brotgjarnt járn ok fífu fárbauti.Yew is a bent bow, brittle iron, and the Fárbauti of the arrow.
The Ýr stanza, especially its final kenning, is textually and semantically difficult. Linking it to Algiz follows its position in the younger rune row and does not claim identity of name.