Othala rune motif representing historical Germanic runic writing

Rune Meanings: A Historical Guide to the Elder Futhark

September 27, 2026 AURYN Editorial

Runes were letters before they were anything else. Each rune also had a name that was an ordinary word, such as "cattle", "hail" or "sun", and that name is where a rune's meaning begins. This guide sets out all twenty-four runes of the Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet, with the names scholars reconstruct for them, and explains where later meanings come from.

What are runes?

Runes are the letters used by Germanic-speaking peoples before, and for centuries alongside, the Latin alphabet. There are three main systems:

the Elder Futhark of twenty-four runes, in use from around the second century AD;
the Younger Futhark of sixteen runes, the alphabet of Viking-Age Scandinavia;
the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, which expanded the older row to around thirty runes to suit Old English.

"Futhark" simply spells out the first six letters of the row: f, u, þ, a, r, k.

The twenty-four runes of the Elder Futhark

An asterisk marks a reconstructed form: no name list survives from the period in which the Elder Futhark was written, so each name is rebuilt from later evidence. Where the meaning is disputed, the table says so. The order of the final two runes also varies between early inscriptions.

| Rune | Sound | Reconstructed name | Meaning of the name | |---|---|---|---| | ᚠ | f | *fehu | cattle, wealth | | ᚢ | u | *ūruz | aurochs (disputed) | | ᚦ | þ (th) | *þurisaz | giant | | ᚨ | a | *ansuz | a god | | ᚱ | r | *raidō | riding, journey | | ᚲ | k | *kaunan or *kenaz | ulcer or torch (disputed) | | ᚷ | g | *gebō | gift | | ᚹ | w | *wunjō | joy | | ᚺ | h | *hagalaz | hail | | ᚾ | n | *naudiz | need | | ᛁ | i | *īsaz | ice | | ᛃ | j | *jēran | year, good harvest | | ᛇ | ï | *īwaz | yew | | ᛈ | p | *perþō | unknown | | ᛉ | z | *algiz | uncertain (elk?) | | ᛊ | s | *sōwilō | sun | | ᛏ | t | *tīwaz | the god Tiwaz (Norse Týr) | | ᛒ | b | *berkanan | birch | | ᛖ | e | *ehwaz | horse | | ᛗ | m | *mannaz | man, human being | | ᛚ | l | *laguz | water, lake (disputed) | | ᛜ | ŋ (ng) | *ingwaz | the god Ing | | ᛞ | d | *dagaz | day | | ᛟ | o | *ōþalan | inherited land |

Where the meanings come from

Most rune names are reconstructed from three medieval poems that give a short verse for each rune:

the Old English Rune Poem, known only from an early eighteenth-century printed copy, because its manuscript was destroyed in the Cotton Library fire of 1731;
the Norwegian Rune Poem, printed by Ole Worm in 1636 from a thirteenth-century manuscript later lost in the Copenhagen fire of 1728;
the Icelandic Rune Poem, whose oldest manuscript dates from around 1500.

These are Christian-era poems that play with the rune names, often wittily. They tell us what the names meant to medieval poets. They are not a key to prehistoric belief, and they are not fortune-telling texts. Where a poem survives for a rune, our individual rune stories quote or paraphrase it.

Runes, magic and divination

A few early inscriptions carry formula words whose purpose seems ritual rather than practical, so runes were not only a workaday script. But most surviving runic writing is ordinary: names, memorials, ownership marks, messages. Rune-casting, in which each rune is read as a fixed message about a person's future, is essentially a twentieth-century practice. It is a genuine modern tradition, and it deserves to be described as one rather than projected back onto the Viking Age.

Not every Norse symbol is a rune

The Valknut and Gungnir are often filed alongside runes, but neither is one. The Valknut is a modern name for an archaeological motif of three interlaced triangles; Gungnir is Odin's spear in Old Norse myth. Context matters in another way too: some runes, Othala above all, were appropriated by Nazi Germany and are still misused by extremists, while remaining in wide non-extremist use.