Jera

The rune’s name in Proto-Germanic is reconstructed as *jēra (also written *jēran), a word for “year”, and more exactly the good season of the year and the harvest it brings. No early inscription spells the name out, so it is a reconstruction, but the later names agree: Old English gēar, Old Norse ár, and the Gothic letter name, given as gaar in the Salzburg Codex 140. The English word “year” comes from the same root. In the Elder Futhark the rune is twelfth in the row and stands for the sound j, as the y in “yes”.

The earliest datable runic inscription known, on a comb from the Vimose bog on Funen in Denmark, from about 160, reads harja and already contains this rune. Its shape is unusual: it is the only Elder Futhark rune whose strokes do not join into one connected figure, and its early forms vary more than any other. Where the shape came from is uncertain; a Latin G and a variant of the k-rune have both been suggested. Its open early form was only properly understood after the Kylver Stone, with a complete rune row, was found on Gotland in 1903. Before that, scholars had read the rune on the golden horn of Gallehus (early fifth century) as a form of Ingwaz; the maker’s name on the horn is now read holtijaz.

In Scandinavia the initial j of the name was lost, so *jāra became ár, and the rune took tenth place in the Younger Futhark with the new sound a (written A to keep it apart from the old a-rune); its shape became a single stave crossed by one slanting stroke. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it continued as gēr, still with the j sound, though English inscriptions usually wrote that sound with the g-rune instead.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row (as an article in 1906 and a book in 1908), he based it on the 16 runes of the Younger Futhark with two added. His tenth rune, Ar, matches the Younger Futhark ár in name and place. List said the runes were revealed to him in 1902 while he was blind after eye surgery; the system is his own, not an old tradition. The völkisch movement took up his ideas, and under Heinrich Himmler runic signs loosely based on such systems were used by the SS until 1945. After the war Karl Spiesberger reworked the Armanen system without its racism. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

Modern rune divination for a general public grew from Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition dated 1982 or 1983 in different listings), sold with a set of the 24 runes and a blank stone. Jera is among them, though Blum set the runes in his own order, not the old one, and the meanings he gave are his own.