Isaz
The Broad Bridge
Dickins's 1915 edition places the broad bridge and blind traveller in the Norwegian poem, not the Old English ice stanza: these images belong to different witnesses.
Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.), Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (Cambridge, 1915), The Anglo-Saxon Is, Norwegian Iss and Icelandic Iss stanzas; Anglo-Saxon Beorc stanza.
The ice rune ᛁ, drawn as a single vertical stroke.
More context
The Old English ice stanza combines coldness and dangerous slipperiness with brilliance like glass and gems. It calls ice a beautiful floor made by frost. The Norwegian poem calls it a broad bridge and adds that a blind man needs leading. The Icelandic poem instead gives bark of rivers, roof of the wave and destruction of the doomed. These are distinct poetic images in Dickins's 1915 edition. Ice is not the English poem's only admired sight: its tree stanza also praises splendid branches and a glorious crown.
Light
The Old English stanza admires ice’s glass-like brilliance; the Norwegian poem presents it as a bridge.
Shadow
The English ice is immeasurably slippery; the Norwegian bridge requires a blind traveller to be led.