Laguz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “l” sound. Its name, *laguz, meant water or the sea.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *laguR, Old Norse logr, “water”. The Old English poem, under the name lagu, writes of the sea from a sailor’s fear: it “seems interminable to men” if they venture on a rolling ship. The Norwegian poem takes it as a waterfall, “a River which falls from a mountain-side”, and the Icelandic poem as an “eddying stream and broad geysir and land of the fish”.
Origin and history
The Bosworth–Toller dictionary records lagu as “the name of the Rune ᛚ”. Bruce Dickins notes the same meaning, sea, in the passages where the poet Cynewulf worked runes into his verse.
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. 63; Norwegian poem 15; Icelandic poem 15
- lagu (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 “lagu”
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research