Isa

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is reconstructed as *īsaz, “ice”. No early inscription spells the name out, so it is a reconstruction, but it is one of the safer ones: the Old English rune name is and the Old Norse íss both mean ice, and the matching Gothic letter is listed as iiz in a ninth-century manuscript of Alcuin (Codex Vindobonensis 795), a form read as Gothic eis, “ice”. The rune stands for the vowel i, short or long.

Isaz is the eleventh rune of the 24-rune Elder Futhark (used from roughly the second to the eighth century) and the third of its second group of eight, the group modern writers call Heimdall’s ætt; the original names of the groups are unknown. Its shape is a single upright stave. It is one of the few runes that show no variation in form, and it is generally taken to be the same letter as Latin I.

Because it belongs to the rune row, it appears in the row inscriptions: the Kylver Stone from Gotland (about 400), the oldest known listing of the whole row, and the sixth-century Vadstena bracteates, which split the row into three groups of eight.

The rune kept its name, place and shape in the later rows. In the Younger Futhark (in use from about the ninth century) it is íss and, with only sixteen runes to go round, covered e as well as i; later a dotted form, which Icelanders simply called stunginn íss, “dotted ice”, was used for e. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc (about the fifth to eleventh century) it is is, the eleventh rune, still standing for i.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row in 1908 (as a book, after a 1906 article), he built it on the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark plus two of his own. Its ninth rune is Is, taken over from the Younger Futhark íss. List said the runes had been revealed to him in 1902 while he was blind for months after eye surgery; the system is his own invention, not an old tradition. The völkisch nationalist movement took up his runes, and runic signs drawn from such systems were used on SS insignia until 1945. After the war Karl Spiesberger reworked the Armanen system.

No specific racist use of this rune is recorded in the sources we checked. The Anti-Defamation League notes that white supremacists sometimes write in runes as a code alphabet, and that runes are far more often used in ordinary, harmless ways, so each use has to be read in context. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

Modern rune divination for a general public grew from Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition 1983 in the listing we used; 1982 in others), sold with 24 rune stones and a blank stone Blum added. Isa is among them, with meanings that are Blum’s own.