Thurisaz

The rune’s name is hard to pin down because the old alphabets disagree. The Scandinavian rune rows call it þurs, “giant”, and from that scholars reconstruct a Proto-Germanic *þurisaz; the reconstruction is a best guess, not a recorded word. The ninth-century Abecedarium Nordmannicum gives the early form thuris. The Anglo-Saxon rows call it þorn, “thorn”, and the Gothic letter name recorded in a Salzburg-Vienna manuscript, thyth, seems unrelated to either; Dickins notes that the three names have no connection with one another. One modern suggestion is that “thorn” began as a poetic name for a giant. The rune stands for the th sound in “thing”.

It is the third rune of the Elder Futhark and the “th” in the word futhark. It is missing from the very oldest finds at Vimose and first appears on the Thorsberg chape, a bronze scabbard fitting offered in the Thorsberg bog in Germany, dated to about 200 to 260, whose inscription is usually read as a man’s name. It stands third in the full row cut on the Kylver Stone from Gotland, of about 400. Where the shape came from is unsettled: an original form, the Latin D and a North Italic letter have all been proposed.

The rune lived on in both later rows. In the Younger Futhark, complete by the late eighth century, þurs covered both th sounds (þ and ð). In England þorn was taken into the Latin book hand as the letter þ, used through the Middle English period; early printers replaced it with y, which is where the old-fashioned “ye” for “the” comes from. Icelandic still writes þ today.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row (an article in 1906, a book in 1908), he kept this rune as his third, Thurs, also called Dorn, “thorn”. List said the runes came to him during months of blindness after an eye operation in 1902; the system is his own invention, not an old tradition.

The völkisch movement took up List’s ideas, and under Heinrich Himmler runic signs drawn from such systems were used in SS training and on SS flags and uniforms until 1945. We found no record of this rune being one of the SS emblems or of a specific hate-group use of it; the note here concerns the system as a whole. After the war Karl Spiesberger reworked the Armanen runes without their racist parts. Heathen Heritage rejects any racist or extremist use of the runes.

Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first edition 1983), sold with a set of rune stones, brought rune divination to a wide public. Thurisaz is one of its 24 runes, with a meaning that is Blum’s own.