Isaz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “i” sound, a single upright stroke. Its name, *īsaz, meant ice.
Meaning
The reconstructed name is *īsaR, Old Norse íss, “ice”, according to Store norske leksikon. The Old English poem describes ice as “very cold and immeasurably slippery”, glistening “as clear as glass”, a floor “wrought by the frost, fair to look upon”. The Norwegian poem calls ice “the broad bridge”; the Icelandic poem, the “bark of rivers and roof of the wave and destruction of the doomed”.
Origin and history
The Bosworth–Toller dictionary records ís as “the name of the Rune ᛁ = i”. The name outlived the older alphabet. Both Scandinavian rune poems keep íss, and in their 16-rune Younger Futhark, Store norske leksikon notes, the i-rune also wrote e and j. When dotted runes were added from the eleventh century, Bruce Dickins records, they got no names of their own: the e-rune was simply “dotted íss”.
The broad bridge
The Norwegian poem pairs two loosely joined sayings, as each of its couplets does: “Ice we call the broad bridge; the blind man must be led.” An Old English text quoted in the Bosworth–Toller dictionary has the same picture: “the ice formed a bridge over the streams”. In one Icelandic manuscript of the rune poem every stanza ends with a Latin equivalent of the rune name, and íss is glossed glacies, ice.
Isruna, a runic cipher
A manuscript at St Gall, Codex Sangallensis 270, sets out runic ciphers named Isruna and Lagoruna, alongside Hahalruna and Stofruna. Reading them, Dickins explains, “demands a knowledge of the exact position of each letter in the alphabet”. He suggests they may be the work of Hrabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda from 822 to 856, who is known to have been interested in runes.
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 runesJeraThe Elder Futhark rune for the “j” sound. Its name, *jāra, meant the year, and above all a good year’s harvest.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsCǎo 艸The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
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. 29; Norwegian poem 9; Icelandic poem 9
- ís (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 “ís”
- Futhark (Store norske leksikon), Store norske leksikon
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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