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. The name stayed in the 16-rune Younger Futhark: a ninth-century St Gall manuscript, the Abecedarium Nordmannicum, which Dickins calls the earliest example of that alphabet, names it “Lago the leohto”.
Sea, waterfall, lake
The three poems put the water in different places. The Norwegian poem's waterfall is followed by a second, separate saying, “but ornaments are of gold”; Dickins notes that this is the one couplet in the poem not joined by end-rhyme. In one Icelandic manuscript the stanza ends with the Latin lacus, lake. Translators also read the Old English line differently. Dickins has the sea seem “interminable to men”; the Bosworth–Toller dictionary gives the same line as “water to men wearisome seemeth, if they must venture on vessel unsteady”.
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 runesIngwazThe Elder Futhark rune for the “ng” sound. It is named for Ing, a god or hero whom the English rune poem places among the East Danes.
- 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. 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”
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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