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Eoh and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Eihwaz

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Eoh and Its Elder Futhark Cognate, Eihwaz

Eoh is the thirteenth of the twenty four Futhorc runes carried from the Elder Futhark, its name and reading a direct continuation of Eihwaz, whose own name likewise means yew, both traditions treating the tree's toughness and longevity as the rune's defining image, one of the more stable continuities in the row's later half.

R. I. Page's survey notes that Eihwaz occupies the thirteenth position in the Elder Futhark's own twenty four rune sequence, a position some later esoteric commentary has read as numerically significant given the number's wider symbolic associations in various traditions, though the primary runic evidence gives no indication the row's original compilers attached any special weight to a rune's numeric position beyond its place in a fixed, memorised order.

Eoh's Anglo-Saxon sound value, transliterated eo, represents a diphthong distinctive to Old English phonology, one of several vowel sounds in the futhorc that required the tradition to either adapt an inherited rune's value or, in the case of the row's five later additions, create an entirely new sign to represent a sound the Elder Futhark's original twenty four letters had no need to distinguish. Page adds that Eihwaz's own letterform, a simple zigzag or angled stroke, shows no obvious pictorial connection to a tree at all, one of several runes in the row whose shape and meaning do not visibly reinforce one another the way Gyfu's or Ing's arguably do.

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