Ingwaz

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is reconstructed as *ingwaz, the name of Ing, a god or legendary ancestor. The reconstruction rests on later evidence: the Old English rune name ing, recorded in Byrhtferth’s manuscript (an older Vienna manuscript has the garbled name lug), and the Gothic letter name enguz in a ninth-century manuscript of Alcuin, where it is attached to a different letter. The rune stands for the sound ng, as in English “sing”. That sound never begins a word, so the name starts with the vowel before it, which sets this rune apart from most of the others.

Ingwaz is the twenty-second rune of the Elder Futhark in the Kylver order. It is one of three runes not found in the earliest inscriptions of about 175 to 400; a 1981 claim that it appears on finds from Vimose and Leţcani was rejected in 1990. Its first secure appearance is in the rune row on the Kylver Stone from Gotland, now dated to about 375 to 470, and it also stands in the row on the sixth-century Vadstena bracteate and, less clearly, on the Grumpan bracteate of about 500. Outside such rows it is not found as a rune on its own. A combined sign joining i and ng occurs in a few inscriptions, the most certain on the Szabadbattyán buckle (first half of the fifth century), but most identifications of that sign are disputed. The rune’s origin is unknown: it may be a new invention or adapted from the Latin letter Q.

Modern charts draw it as a small diamond (ᛜ). The Anglo-Saxon futhorc kept the rune as ing in a larger form with crossing strokes (ᛝ), which Unicode encodes separately. The Younger Futhark dropped it, and the k-rune came to cover the ng sound.

Because the Younger Futhark had no ng rune, the eighteen-rune “Armanen” row that Guido von List published in 1908, built on the Younger Futhark, has no place for it either. No specific later misuse of this rune is recorded in the sources checked; the völkisch and SS use of runic signs drew on List’s row, which leaves it out.

Modern rune divination brought it back. Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition 1983), which did much to start the popular practice, uses all 24 Elder Futhark runes plus a blank stone of Blum’s own invention, and calls this rune Inguz. Blum’s names, order and meanings are his own and are not drawn from the old sources.