Eh and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Ehwaz

Eh is the nineteenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and reading a direct continuation of Ehwaz, whose own name likewise means horse, one of the more stable continuities in the row's final third, both traditions reading the animal's prestige and utility as the rune's core content without any of the reinterpretation visible in runes such as Thorn or Os.

R. I. Page's survey notes the sound value e that Eh carries into the futhorc as distinct from several of its neighbouring vowel and diphthong runes, part of the increasingly fine phonetic distinctions the later portion of the futhorc row was called on to represent as Old English orthography developed, distinctions the row's five later purely Anglo-Frisian additions would extend still further.

The horse's prominence in Anglo-Saxon elite burial practice, well attested archaeologically in horse burials accompanying high status graves across early medieval England, gives Eh's reading of the animal as a mark of noble standing a material basis well beyond the rune poem's own testimony alone. Page notes Ehwaz's letterform, a symmetrical M shaped stroke, as one of the row's more visually distinctive signs, its balanced form sometimes read as suggestive of a horse's legs or gait, another shape based reading offered cautiously rather than as settled fact.