Ehwaz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “e” sound. Its name, *ehwaz, meant horse.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *ehwaR, Old Norse 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”. In England it kept its place, and the Bosworth–Toller dictionary glosses the name as “a war-horse”.
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
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”
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research