Eihwaz
A rune of the Elder Futhark named for the yew tree. Its sound in the oldest inscriptions is uncertain, perhaps a vowel between e and i.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *īwaR, Old Norse ýr, “yew”, and says the rune was “a vowel sound that perhaps resembled e or i”. The Old English poem, where the name is eoh, describes the tree: “a tree with rough bark, hard and fast in the earth, supported by its roots, a guardian of flame and a joy upon an estate”.
Origin and history
The rune is rare. Store norske leksikon notes that it and ᛈ are unusual in inscriptions outside complete futhark rows. Bruce Dickins, in 1915, called its value in the original alphabet “quite unknown”. In the later Norse poems the yew belongs to a different rune: the Norwegian poem’s “Yew is the greenest of trees in winter” is the stanza for ýr, whose shape, Dickins notes, descends from Algiz.
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
Algiz, 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. 35 and note; Norwegian poem 16
- eóh (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 “eóh”
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research