The God Whose Name Is a Word

Norse tradition gives him less narrative than almost any other major figure and more linguistic weight than most. The name Tyr goes back to a Germanic word that is itself the old Indo-European word for god or sky — the root behind Zeus and the Latin deus. English still carries it in Tuesday. The two Scandinavian rune poems name the t-rune for him and call him one-handed. The Old English stanza is a different thing: it describes Tir as a sure sign holding its course over the mists of night, and whether that rune-name is this god's is a philological question. Scholars have long argued he was once far more central, displaced by Odin before the poems were written down.