Eolh in the Old English Rune Poem

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.