Uruz

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is not recorded and has to be reconstructed, and here scholars are less sure than with most runes. The usual reconstruction is *ūruz, “aurochs”, the great wild ox of Europe’s forests. It rests on the Old English rune name ūr, which the Old English rune poem plainly takes as the aurochs, and on the Gothic letter name uraz written down in a Salzburg manuscript that Dickins connects with Alcuin. A second candidate is *ūrą, a word for water or wet weather, which fits the Norse rune poems, where úr means a shower of rain or, in the Norwegian poem, probably slag from iron. The two words may share a root. The rune stands for the sound u.

Uruz is the second rune of the Elder Futhark, the 24-rune row used from about the second to the eighth century. It appears in the oldest complete row, on the Kylver Stone from Gotland (about 400), and in the rows on the Vadstena and Grumpan bracteates (sixth century and about 500). There is wide agreement that its shape, a stave with a second, shorter stroke joined to it by a slanting top, comes from the Latin or North Italic letter V, though the exact route is debated.

The rune kept its place and name in the later rows. In the Younger Futhark (from about the ninth century) úr had to cover several sounds, among them u, o and w, because that row had only sixteen letters; from the eleventh century a dotted form could mark y. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc ūr kept the sound u, and a modified form, ȳr, was added for y.

The Swedish scholar Johannes Bureus (1568 to 1652) recorded a short Swedish rune poem in which ur is linked with a west wind, close to the Icelandic sense of bad weather.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row in 1908 (after a 1906 article), he built it on the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark plus two of his own, and kept this rune as his second, Ur. The system is his own invention, which he said came to him during a period of blindness after a 1902 eye operation. The völkisch nationalist movement and later Himmler’s SS took up List’s runes; the sources consulted do not name Ur among the signs the SS used. 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 dated 1982 or 1983 in different listings), sold with 24 rune stones and a blank one. Writers of such systems mostly prefer the “aurochs” reading of the name.