Ansuz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “a” sound. Its name, *ansuz, meant one of the gods, the æsir; the Icelandic rune poem makes it Odin himself.
Meaning
The reconstructed name is *ansuR, Old Norse áss, “god”, according to Store norske leksikon. The Icelandic rune poem describes the god as “aged Gautr and prince of Asgard and lord of Valhalla”, names of Odin. The Old English poem calls the rune os and says it “is the source of all language, a pillar of wisdom and a comfort to wise men”. The Norwegian poem takes óss as a different word, an estuary: “Estuary is the way of most journeys”.
Origin and history
Bruce Dickins, in his 1915 edition, derives the English os from *ansuz, “a god”, and notes the same element in English names such as Oswald. He doubts that an English Christian poet would make a heathen god the origin of human speech, and reads the stanza’s os as the Latin word for mouth. The Bosworth–Toller dictionary is also cautious: whether ós in the sense of god occurs as an independent word “is doubtful”.
A god, a mouth or a river mouth
The three rune poems read the name three ways: the Icelandic poem as the god Odin, the Norwegian poem as an estuary, and the Old English poem as the source of speech, which Dickins takes as Latin os, mouth.
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 runesRaidoThe Elder Futhark rune for the “r” sound. Its name, *raidu, meant riding or a journey on horseback.
- The same shape in Historical flagsBennington flagA flag of thirteen stripes, white at the top and bottom, with “76” under an arch of stars in the blue canton, long said to have flown at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. The Bennington Museum, which owns it, dates it to between 1812 and 1830, because it is made entirely of cotton.
See also
Uruz, Thurisaz, Kaunan, Gebo, Wunjo, Hagalaz.
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. 10 and notes; Norwegian poem 4; Icelandic poem 4
- ós (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 “ós”
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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