Heimdall's Aett

Heimdall's Aett is the second of the three groups of eight runes making up the Elder Futhark, covering Hagalaz, Nauthiz, Isa, Jera, Eihwaz, Perthro, Algiz and Sowilo, the middle third of the twenty four rune row as the Kylver Stone's dividing marks lay it out. Where the first aett opens on Fehu, wealth and increase, this middle group opens on Hagalaz, hail, a sign generally read across the surviving rune poem tradition as disruptive and destructive, so the row moves from an opening group weighted toward growth and social bonds into a middle group whose early runes, hail, need and ice among them, read considerably harder, before the group closes on Sowilo, the sun, one of the row's most straightforwardly favourable signs.

R. I. Page's account of the Old English rune poem, the earliest and fullest surviving commentary on individual rune meanings even though it describes the later Anglo-Saxon futhorc rather than the Elder Futhark directly, glosses Hægl as a grain that falls from the sky and troubles the world, a reading broadly consistent with how this aett's opening sign is read across the wider tradition. The middle position of this aett within the row's three part structure has invited comment from modern rune workers about a possible movement from beginning through trial to completion across the three groups, though this reading is an interpretive layer rather than anything the Kylver Stone or the early sources state.

The custom of naming this aett after Heimdall, the watchman god of Norse myth said in the Eddic sources to guard the approach to Asgard and to possess extraordinarily keen senses, is common in modern rune literature, sometimes explained by pointing to this aett's association with vigilance, protection and the trials of Hagalaz and Nauthiz that open it, yet as with the naming of the aett either side of it, this entry cannot trace the specific pairing of Heimdall with this particular group of eight runes to the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, or either surviving rune poem.

Some modern sources instead name this middle group Hagal's Aett, after its own opening rune rather than after any god at all, a naming with the advantage of staying closer to what the row itself actually shows, and the coexistence of both namings in circulation today is itself evidence that the god based scheme is a comparatively recent addition layered onto an older, purely structural division rather than an inherited part of the tradition with one settled, ancient form. What the medieval evidence supports without qualification is the row's division into three groups of eight and this group's own eight runes in their fixed order; the choice to call the group Heimdall's rather than Hagal's, or to name it for any god at all, belongs to twentieth century and later rune practice, stated here plainly rather than left for a reader to assume was always so.