Eihwaz

Eihwaz is the thirteenth rune of the Elder Futhark, fifth in the second aett. It carries a sound sometimes reconstructed as a close vowel or a "ei" glide and its phonetic value is one of the more debated of the row. Its reconstructed name means the yew tree, an evergreen long associated with longevity, death and protection. The yew is sometimes identified with the world-tree, so the rune gathers ideas of endurance, the axis linking worlds, and the passage between life and death.

Eihwaz stands fifth in the aett of Hagal. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, eoh, meaning yew, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing the yew as rough-barked without on the outside, firm in the earth, guardian of fire, sustained by its roots, a tree pleasant on one's estate. Eihwaz is one of the eight Elder Futhark runes with no surviving Younger Futhark counterpart in unaltered form; the later Scandinavian tradition instead developed a separate yew-bow rune, yr, whose shape and precise relationship to Eihwaz is a matter of ongoing scholarly discussion rather than a simple continuation.

Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *īhwaz, part of the comparative linguistic evidence, alongside cognate vocabulary across the older Germanic languages, used to establish the name's original sense independent of the later rune poems themselves.

The historical runes served language and charms rather than a standardized oracle. In the modern revival Eihwaz is commonly read for endurance, the world-tree axis, protection and transformation through the meeting of life and death. These keyword meanings belong to the twentieth-century reconstructionist and esoteric movement, popularized after 1982, and are offered here as a symbolic tradition rather than a documented ancient divination.

The yew's association with graveyards and with longevity in later English folklore, yew trees are among the longest-lived organisms in Europe and commonly stand in churchyards, has fed into the modern divinatory reading of Eihwaz, which treats the rune as marking the world-tree axis, endurance and the connection between life and death. This reading draws loosely on the yew's own documented cultural associations but, as with every rune's modern divinatory use, the specific practice of consulting Eihwaz as an oracular sign is a twentieth-century construction.

The Armanen-descended rune-magic tradition transmitted into English chiefly through Thorsson's work also treats Eihwaz as usable actively rather than only read passively: chanted aloud as galdr, or carved into wood, metal or a bind-rune combining several staves, for an intended practical effect. No source earlier than the twentieth century attests any such active magical use of this specific rune, and the practice should be understood as a modern reconstruction built on the reconstructed name and the rune poems rather than as a recovered ancient technique.