Hagalaz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “h” sound. Its name, *hagalaz, meant hail, and all three rune poems describe it as a grain of ice falling from the sky.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *hagalaR, Old Norse hagall, “hail”. This is the one rune on which the three poems agree closely. The Old English poem calls hail “the whitest of grain”, whirled from the vault of heaven until “it melts into water”; the Norwegian poem calls it “the coldest of grain”; the Icelandic poem, “cold grain and shower of sleet and sickness of serpents”.
Origin and history
The Bosworth–Toller dictionary gives the Old English name as hægl, and Bruce Dickins compares the rune poem’s phrase with the Old English poem The Seafarer, which also calls hail the coldest of grains. The Norwegian poem pairs its line on hail with one on Christ, who “created the world of old”: the rune poems were written down in Christian times.
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. 25; Norwegian poem 7 and note; Icelandic poem 7
- hægel (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 “hægel”
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research