Algiz

“Algiz” is a name modern scholars give this rune; no early source records what its first users called it. The only old name comes from the Old English rune poem, which calls the English form eolh-secg, usually read since Wilhelm Grimm (1821) as “elk-sedge”. Many scholars doubt that “elk” was the original meaning. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic forms *algiz or *alhiz have been explained as “protection, defence”, but this is a proposal, not a settled fact, and other explanations exist.

The rune stood for the Proto-Germanic sound z, which never began a word, so it is found mostly at the ends of words. Early examples include the name ending -þewaz on the Thorsberg chape, a scabbard fitting from a north German bog dated to about 200 to 260 AD, and ansuz on the Vimose buckle from Denmark. On the Kylver Stone from Gotland, about 400 AD, the oldest known complete row of the 24 runes, it stands fifteenth and is carved upside down.

The earliest form looks like a trident (ᛉ). From roughly the fifth and sixth centuries an upside-down form appears, for example in Scandinavian inscriptions such as Kragehul and Stentofte, and the Charnay brooch from France joins both into a star-like shape. As the sound shifted towards an r-like sound, the Younger Futhark wrote it with the inverted shape, now called ýr (ᛦ), a name meaning “yew” taken over from another rune; by about the eleventh or twelfth century the sound had merged with ordinary r. The Younger rune maðr (ᛘ) looks like Algiz but comes from a different rune, Mannaz. In England the rune kept its shape but lost its sound; manuscripts give it the value x, and it is used that way in rex on coins of King Beonna of East Anglia.

The Austrian occultist Guido von List built his own set of eighteen “Armanen” runes, published as a book in 1908 (Das Geheimnis der Runen) and tied by him to Odin’s rune stanzas in the Hávamál. His fifteenth rune, the Man rune, has the Algiz shape. In German völkisch and Ariosophist writing of the early twentieth century it was called the Lebensrune, “life rune”, and its upside-down form the Todesrune, “death rune”. Neither name has a medieval source.

In Nazi Germany the life rune appeared in SA uniform rules, in a 1936 pharmacists’ emblem and in the SS Lebensborn programme. During the Second World War it marked birth dates, and the inverted form death dates, on death notices and gravestones; a Catholic journal pointed out in 1940 that this custom had no medieval precedent. After the war the neo-Nazi National Alliance put it in its logo, and the Anti-Defamation League lists it as a common white supremacist symbol today. The ADL also notes that many modern pagans use the rune with no racist meaning, so each use has to be judged in context.

In modern rune divination Ralph Blum’s 1982 system gave it the meaning “protection”, and many modern heathens use it as a sign of their faith.

Heathen Heritage rejects the rune’s use by Nazis and by today’s racist movements.