Ehwaz

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is reconstructed as *ehwaz, “horse”. No early inscription spells the name out, so it is a reconstruction, but a secure one: it belongs with Latin equus, Old Irish ech and Sanskrit aśva, the Old English rune is named eh (properly eoh, “horse”), and the Gothic letter for e is recorded with the name eyz, which is usually taken as the Gothic word for horse. Old Norse had the word too, as jór. The rune stands for the vowel e.

Ehwaz is the nineteenth rune of the Elder Futhark, in Tyr’s ætt. On the Kylver Stone from Gotland, a grave slab of about 400 that carries the oldest complete rune row, it stands between b and m; the same stone also uses it in the separate word sueus. A family of gold bracteates of the fifth to seventh centuries, struck from one die and found in Skåne and on Gotland, bears a short text read as ehwu or ehwe and tentatively translated “(dedicated) to the horse”. The reading carries a question mark in the runic database, so it remains a proposal.

The shape is two upright staves joined by a pair of strokes that meet in the middle, rather like an M. Where it came from is uncertain: it may be a runic invention, or it may be modelled on a Mediterranean letter; scholars disagree. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it kept its shape and its e sound. In Scandinavia the sixteen-rune Younger Futhark dropped it altogether: the language’s e was then written with the i rune, and a dotted i was introduced much later to tell the two apart.

The Austrian occultist Guido von List published his own row of eighteen “Armanen” runes in 1906 as an article and in 1908 as the book Das Geheimnis der Runen, claiming that they were hidden in Odin’s rune stanzas of the Hávamál. His seventeenth rune is called Eh, a name taken from the Anglo-Saxon row, though the form he gave it is not the Elder Futhark ᛖ. List’s system was part of the German völkisch movement, and some of his runes were later taken up by the SS; we have found no source that names this rune among them, so we make no such claim.

Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition dated 1982 or 1983 in different sources), which set the pattern for much modern rune casting, includes Ehwaz among its twenty-four stones plus a blank one. Modern meanings given to the rune come from such books, not from the old sources.