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”. The Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems, written for the 16-rune Younger Futhark, have no stanza for it.
Wynn in Old English poems
The poem itself spells the name wenne, which Dickins explains as a Kentish form of wyn. Poets also wrote the rune in place of the word. Dickins finds that wyn “suits admirably” in the runic passages of Cynewulf, in Crist and Elene, and finds the rune standing for the word elsewhere, as in Elene, line 1089: on wuldres W.
Modern rune meanings
The meanings in the rune poems are the medieval ones. Lex, the Danish national encyclopedia, dates the popularity of runes for fortune-telling to the 1980s, with tiles laid in patterns, cast from a bag or used for meditation; the meanings that practice gives wunjo are modern, not the poems'.
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 runesHagalazThe Elder Futhark rune for the “h” sound. Its name, *hagalaz, meant hail, and all three rune poems describe it as a grain of ice falling from the sky.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsJīn 金The character for ‘gold’ and for metals in general, and radical 167 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of metals 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. 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”
- Runer (Lex), Lex, Danmarks Nationalleksikon, Runemagi
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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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