Jera
The Elder Futhark rune for the “j” sound. Its name, *jāra, meant the year, and above all a good year’s harvest.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *jāra, Old Norse ár, “year”. The Old English poem, where the name is ger, describes the harvest season: a joy to men when God “suffers the earth to bring forth shining fruits for rich and poor alike”. In the Norwegian and Icelandic poems ár is plenty: “a boon to men”, “good summer and thriving crops”.
Origin and history
The Danish national encyclopedia, Lex, uses this rune as its example of a “concept rune”, a rune written to stand for its own name: “j for *jāra ‘år, godt år’”, year, good year. Bruce Dickins explains the English sense: gear first meant the warm part of the year, and in Scandinavian the word came to denote “the products of the summer”, hence plenty.
Write in runes
stringmash.comRune translatorTurn English into Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark or Anglo-Saxon runes, with a chart of all 24 Elder Futhark runes.Read next
- Next in Elder Futhark runesEihwazA rune of the Elder Futhark named for the yew tree. Its sound in the oldest inscriptions is uncertain, perhaps a vowel between e and i.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsCǎo 艸The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
See also
Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kaunan, Gebo.
Sources
- Runer (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon, Runenavn (table of rune names)
- Runer (Lex), Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon, Runenavne
- Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples, Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.), 1915, Cambridge University Press (Internet Archive), Anglo-Saxon poem v. 32 and note; Norwegian poem 10; Icelandic poem 10
- gér (Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary), Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898), online edition, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, entry “gér”
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 26, 2026. How we research
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