Thurisaz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “th” sound (þ). Its Norse name, þurs, means a giant; the English called it thorn.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *þurisaR, Old Norse þurs, “giant, troll”. The Norwegian rune poem says that a giant “causes anguish to women”, and the Icelandic poem calls it the “torture of women and cliff-dweller and husband of a giantess”. The Old English poem uses a different word altogether, thorn, which it describes as “exceedingly sharp, an evil thing for any knight to touch”.
Origin and history
The English name outlived the rune. The Bosworth–Toller dictionary records that “the name of the letter þ was þorn”, and Bruce Dickins notes that the letter “was adopted into the AS. book-hand” and lasted through the Middle English period. Dickins also points out that the Scandinavian alphabets have þurs, cognate with the Old English þyrs, a giant, so the English thorn is a different name, not a translation.
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
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. 7 and note; Norwegian poem 3; Icelandic poem 3
- þorn (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 “þorn”
Last reviewed September 25, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research