Hagalaz

  • Alphabet Elder Futhark
  • Group Heimdall's Ætt
  • Sound h
Historical evidence

The name and the earliest evidence

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is reconstructed as *hagalaz or *haglaz, “hail”, the frozen kind that falls from the sky. No early inscription spells the name out, but the later names agree closely: Old English hægl, Old Norse hagall, and the Gothic letter name hagl (written haal in the ninth-century Salzburg manuscript, as Dickins notes). The rune stands for the sound h.

It is the ninth rune of the 24-rune Elder Futhark. On the Kylver Stone from Gotland, dated by its grave to about 400 AD and the oldest known complete listing of the row, it stands between w and n. The Vadstena bracteate, a gold pendant of about 500 found in Östergötland in 1774, divides the row into three groups of eight, and h opens the second group. These groups are called ættir; naming them after gods is a later custom.

The rune has two shapes. Scandinavian inscriptions use two upright staves joined by one slanting bar (ᚺ); continental inscriptions also use a form with two bars (ᚻ). In England the single bar came first and the double bar took over from the seventh century. The Frisian Harlingen solidus, a coin of about 575 to 625 reading hada, has an early double-barred h, and in England the form is first attested on St Cuthbert’s coffin of 698.

In the sixteen-rune Younger Futhark, used in Scandinavia from about the eighth or ninth century to the eleventh or twelfth, the rune is called hagall and keeps the sound h, but its shape changes to a stave crossed by two diagonal strokes (ᚼ), with a simpler short-twig form (ᚽ).

Myth and literature · Quotation

The rune poems

Old English Rune Poem

H. (hail) is the whitest of grain; it is whirled from the vault of heaven and is tossed about by gusts of wind and then it melts into water.

Old Norwegian Rune Rhyme

Hail is the coldest of grain;
Christ created the world of old.

Old Icelandic Rune Poem

Hail = cold grain
and shower of sleet
and sickness of serpents.

Myth and literature

What the rune poems say

All three poems start from the rune’s name and call hail a kind of grain, an image Dickins also finds in the Old English poem The Seafarer, where hail falls on the earth as the coldest of grains.

The Old English verse is the fullest. It follows a hailstone from the sky: the whitest grain, whirled down from heaven, blown about by the wind, and finally turned into water. It describes the weather and makes no moral point.

The Norwegian rhyme calls hail the coldest grain and then, as in every couplet of that poem, adds a second line with no stated link to the first: Christ made the world long ago. Dickins notes that Christ was sometimes named as the Creator, and points to Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, which gives “maker of heaven and earth” as one way to name him.

The Icelandic poem lists three names for hail: cold grain, a shower of sleet, and “sickness of serpents”, which Dickins explains as a poetic name (kenning) for winter. One manuscript adds the Latin word grando, hail, and hildingr, one of a series of words for “king” attached to the stanzas, each chosen to alliterate with its stanza.

  • Bruce Dickins (ed. and trans.), Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples (opens in a new tab) (1915), notes to Norwegian stanza 7 and Icelandic stanza 7; note on the Latin and ‘king’ glosses from AM 687 Rights: Public domain. Published 1915; the translator died in 1978, but the work is in the public domain in the US (published before 1930).
Historical evidence

Later history

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, saying they had been revealed to him during a spell of blindness in 1902. His seventh rune, Hagal, follows the Younger Futhark hagall (ᚼ). List’s circle and later Armanen writers treated it as the “mother rune”, pictured as a six-sided crystal from which the other runes could be drawn. None of this has a medieval source.

The SS under Heinrich Himmler took up runes from List’s system. The Hagall rune, set in a hexagon, was one of the signs on the SS death’s-head ring designed by the occultist Karl Maria Wiligut, where it was explained as faith in the Nazi cause. It was also used at SS weddings and as the emblem of the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord. The research group Bellingcat notes that neo-Nazi groups still use it, while pagans and others interested in runes use it with no such meaning; because it looks like an ordinary asterisk, each case has to be judged in context.

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

Modern interpretation

Name and sources

Sound and image: H: Hail.

Upright: Wrath of nature, destructive, uncontrolled forces, especially the weather, or within the unconscious. Tempering, testing, trial. Controlled crisis, leading to completion, inner harmony.

Merkstave (cannot be reversed, but may lie in opposition): Natural disaster, catastrophe. Stagnation, loss of power. Pain, loss, suffering, hardship, sickness, crisis.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the divinatory meaning used for readings here. Rune divination as practised today is a modern practice; it is not a documented ancient Norse one.

Upright

  • necessary disruption
  • forced change
  • uncontrollable event
  • transformation through crisis

Hagalaz is hail — disruptive, uncontrollable, and ultimately transformative. Like Gebo, it's a symmetrical rune with no reversed form, because some disruptions simply are what they are regardless of orientation. Hagalaz represents necessary upheaval: a force outside your control that breaks something in order to clear ground for what comes next.

Upright in particular areas
In general
A disruptive event is reshaping the situation, and it isn't really negotiable. The work is adapting to it, not preventing it.
In love
A sudden shift in a relationship's circumstances that neither person fully controls, forcing real adaptation.
In work
An external disruption, a market shift, a reorganization, that's genuinely outside your control. Adapt rather than resist.

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