Hagall

Hagall's two stanzas agree closely on the physical image, hail as the coldest of grains, echoing the Old English Haegl stanza's own whitest of grains, but the Norwegian poem then takes a striking turn its Icelandic counterpart does not follow, closing the stanza with a direct statement that Christ created the world of old, an explicitly Christian line embedded in what begins as a purely meteorological image, evidence that whoever composed or transmitted the Norwegian poem in the form that survives felt no tension in placing a Christian theological statement directly beside an inherited pre-Christian rune name.

The Icelandic poem instead stays within the natural world for its whole stanza, extending hail's cold grain into a shower of sleet and, more unusually, a sickness affecting serpents, an image whose precise sense is not fully explained by the surviving text and which this entry states as attested without claiming full confidence in its original significance. Dickins' 1915 edition notes the Norwegian poem's Christian insertion here as one of several points across its sixteen stanzas where a Christian frame is layered onto material that plainly predates the conversion of Norway, a pattern broadly comparable to the Old English poem's own handling of Ger and Daeg discussed elsewhere in this survey of the runic traditions.

Hagall is the seventh of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Hagalaz, the Elder Futhark's own ninth rune, one of several cases where the sixteen rune row's own internal numbering shifts from its Elder Futhark ancestor's position because runes dropped elsewhere in the reduction close the gap, Hagalaz's ninth place in the older twenty four rune row becoming Hagall's seventh in the newer sixteen. Barnes' handbook treats this kind of positional shift as a useful reminder that the Younger Futhark is not simply the Elder Futhark with eight signs deleted from the end, but a genuine restructuring in which runes were dropped from various points across the whole row, some merged into surviving neighbours and others apparently abandoned outright with no clear successor.

Hagall's sound value h and its core meteorological meaning both carry forward from Hagalaz with reasonable stability, even as the stanza built around the name in the Norwegian tradition specifically absorbed new, distinctly Christian content the Elder Futhark original could never have carried. Barnes notes that Hagall's positional shift, ninth in the Elder Futhark to seventh in the Younger Futhark, is one of the more easily traced examples of the reduction's restructuring, since the runes dropped ahead of it in the older row can be identified fairly confidently from comparison with surviving Elder Futhark inscriptions.