Ehwaz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “e” sound. Its name, *ehwaz, meant horse.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon reconstructs the name as *ehwaR; the Old Norse is jór, “horse”. The Old English rune poem, where the name is eh, describes the war-horse as “a joy to princes in the presence of warriors, a steed in the pride of its hoofs”, and “ever a source of comfort to the restless”.
Origin and history
The rune dropped out of the Scandinavian alphabet. Bruce Dickins notes that in Scandinavian the word became jór “and the letter disappeared, E being represented by I”; later still a dotted I was brought in to tell e from i. In England it kept its place, and the Bosworth–Toller dictionary glosses the name as “a war-horse”. Dickins compares the name with Gothic aihwatundi and Latin equus.
The horse in the riding stanza
The Old Norse word for horse, jór, turns up in the Icelandic rune poem inside another rune's stanza. The poem describes reið, riding, as “joy of the horseman and speedy journey and toil of the steed”, and the steed there is jór. In the Old English poem the horse is a prince's mount, “when rich men on horseback bandy words about it”. Bosworth–Toller adds that the rune could be written for the word itself: it “stands for the letter e, but for eh a war-horse”.
Write in runes
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See also
Uruz, Thurisaz, Ansuz, Raido, Kaunan, Gebo.
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. 55 and note
- eh (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 “eh”
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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