Haegl in the Old English Rune Poem

Haegl's stanza calls hail the whitest of grains, whirled down from the vault of heaven and driven about by gusts of wind before it finally turns to water, an image that reaches for the grain and harvest vocabulary the poem uses elsewhere for genuinely nourishing crops, Ger among them, and applies it instead to a destructive weather that damages the very crops that vocabulary usually describes, a deliberately unsettling borrowing of language rather than a simple description. This opens the poem's second run of eight stanzas, following directly on from Wynn's settled contentment, and the shift in tone is immediate and pronounced, hail read across the wider Old English rune poem tradition as one of the more clearly unfavourable signs in the whole sequence, a hardship following hard on the heels of the first section's comparatively gentle close.

Halsall's critical edition notes that Haegl's eventual melting into water gives the stanza a resolution of sorts, the destructive hail does not remain hail forever, a detail some readers have taken as softening the stanza's difficulty, turning what begins as pure damage into a passing, temporary state rather than a fixed condition. Halsall notes the stanza gives no indication of season or region, hail being common enough across the whole of early medieval Britain and northern Europe that the image needed no further localising for its original audience.