Wunjo
The Elder Futhark rune for the “w” sound. Its name, *wunju, meant joy.
Meaning
Store norske leksikon gives the reconstructed name *wunju, “joy, delight”, and records no Old Norse name for it. The Old English rune poem calls it wynn and describes bliss: it belongs to the man “who knows not suffering, sorrow nor anxiety, and has prosperity and happiness and a good enough house”.
Origin and history
In England the rune became an ordinary letter. Bruce Dickins notes that “from the Runic alphabet wyn, like porn, was adopted into AS. script”: scribes wrote the w sound with it in Old English manuscripts, as they wrote th with thorn. The Bosworth–Toller dictionary records wyn as “the name of the w-rune”.
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. 22 and note
- wyn (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 “wyn”
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research