Algiz
A rune of the Elder Futhark for a “z” sound that later became a kind of r. Its reconstructed name, *algiz, means elk; the English rune poem calls it a sedge.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *algiR, Old Norse elgr, “elk”, and says the rune “probably expressed a voiced s sound that in Norse developed further into a type of r”. The Old English poem’s eolh-secg is a plant that grows in marshes and “makes a ghastly wound, covering with blood every warrior who touches it”.
Origin and history
Bruce Dickins called the English letter “a fossil found only in Runic alphabets”: the sound had gone from English, and the rune survived only in the rune rows. Its shape lived on in the north. Dickins notes that in Scandinavian inscriptions from the sixth century on it is turned upside down, and in that form it is the yew-rune ýr of the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems.
Elk or sedge
The reconstructed Elder Futhark name follows the Norse word for elk. The English poem has a sedge, which Dickins identifies only as “some rush, species unknown”; the Bosworth–Toller dictionary glosses eolhx as “some kind of sedge” and notes that the word occurs as the name of a rune.
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.See also
Eihwaz, Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kaunan.
Sources
- Runer (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon, Runenavn (table of rune names)
- Runic and heroic poems of the old Teutonic peoples, Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.), 1915, Cambridge University Press (Internet Archive), Anglo-Saxon poem v. 41 and note; note to Norwegian poem 16
- eolhx (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 “eolhx”
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research