Uruz
The Elder Futhark rune for the “u” sound. Its name is reconstructed as *ūruz, the aurochs, a wild ox; the Icelandic rune poem instead calls it a shower of rain.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *ūruR, Old Norse úrr, “aurochs, wild ox”. The Old English rune poem describes the animal: the aurochs “is proud and has great horns”, a savage beast that roams the moors. The later Scandinavian poems read the same name as other words. For the Norwegian poem úr is dross from bad iron, and for the Icelandic poem it is a shower, “lamentation of the clouds and ruin of the hay-harvest”.
Origin and history
The aurochs was the great wild ox of European forests. Bruce Dickins, editing the rune poem in 1915, notes that the English poet can hardly have seen one alive: it survived longest in Poland, “where the last was killed in 1627”. Its horns were prized as drinking vessels in medieval Europe.
Aurochs, dross or rain
Three poems give three meanings to one name. The Old English poem has the beast; the Norwegian poem has “dross”, the slag of bad iron; the Icelandic poem has a shower. The Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionary glosses úr as “a kind of ox, a bison” and also the name of the U-rune, so the English reading agrees with the reconstructed name.
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. 4; Norwegian poem 2; Icelandic poem 2; notes
- úr (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 “úr”
Last reviewed September 25, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research