Eolh

Eolh's stanza describes a plant, generally translated elk sedge, found mostly in a marsh, growing directly in water and wounding severely, staining with blood any man who in any way grasps it, a stanza built entirely around unqualified physical hazard in the same register as Thorn's far earlier warning, though considerably more vivid and specific about the injury involved.

The identification of the plant itself carries some uncertainty, elk sedge being the conventional translation of the underlying Old English term, a sharp edged marsh grass whose leaves can indeed cut skin, though as with several of the poem's plant and animal stanzas the precision of the original botanical reference cannot be verified with full confidence at this distance. Despite the stanza's content describing a hazard rather than a protection, the rune's Elder Futhark cognate Algiz carries a strong association with protection and defence in modern rune literature, a reading Halsall's critical edition treats cautiously, since the Old English stanza itself offers nothing about protective power at all, only danger, and any protective reading has to be argued from the Elder Futhark evidence and later Younger Futhark and bracteate material rather than from the surviving Anglo-Saxon poem.

Eolh is the fifteenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, where its cognate Algiz is one of the row's more debated names, connected by some runologists to a root meaning elk or protection, the same ambiguity carrying into the Old English tradition's own reading of a hazardous plant rather than a protective concept, a case where the futhorc stanza and the modern popular reading of the Elder Futhark rune point in genuinely different directions rather than confirming one another.

R. I. Page's account treats this divergence as a caution against assuming any single, unified meaning travelled unchanged across every runic tradition that used a related rune shape, since the Old English poet working centuries after the Elder Futhark's formation, in a different linguistic and cultural setting, plainly understood Eolh as naming a dangerous plant regardless of whatever protective association the shape may or may not have carried further back or further north. The rune's distinctive Y shaped letterform is one of the more visually recognisable in the whole row and survives with only minor variation across the Elder Futhark, the futhorc and, in modified form, later Younger Futhark tradition as well.