Algiz

Algiz is a useful corrective for anyone inclined to think the futhark is well understood. Three separate things about this character are unknown.

The name

The form *algiz, elk, is a modern reconstruction. It is extrapolated from the Old English name eolhx or eolhx-secg, which the Old English Rune Poem describes as a sedge that grows in the fen, wounds and burns anyone who grasps at it.

Eolh does mean elk in Old English. Eolhx-secg means elk-sedge, a plant. The poem is describing the plant, not the animal. Whether the Elder Futhark name was the animal, the plant, or something else again is not recoverable.

The sound

The rune's value in the Elder Futhark was a sound conventionally written z, the reflex of Proto-Germanic *z, which in North Germanic became a sound written R and eventually merged with r. It never occurred at the start of a word, so the rune could not be named by the ordinary acrophonic method, you cannot name a letter after a word beginning with a sound that no word begins with.

This is why the name is unstable, and it is a genuine structural oddity in the row.

The meaning

Modern practice reads Algiz for protection, and for the elk's antlers or a hand raised in warding. Both are readings of the shape, which is a legitimate way to interpret a symbol and is not the same as knowing what it denoted.

The inverted form

The character reversed became a letter in its own right in the Younger Futhark, named yr. That reversed form has a specific modern history: it was adopted in twentieth-century Germany as the Todesrune, the death rune, printed to mark dates of death, and it is still in circulation in far-right symbolism.

Readers who work with reversed runes should know that the reversed Algiz is not simply this atlas's Algiz turned over. It is a historical character with a name of its own and a recent political afterlife.

The Elder Futhark was a script, and the surviving evidence for it is inscriptions on objects rather than any body of text.

Fifteenth in the row

Algiz is the fifteenth character of the twenty-four character Elder Futhark, used for the earliest Germanic inscriptions from roughly the second century onward.

A sound with no comfortable transliteration

This character writes a sound that later became a variety of r in North Germanic, and editors transliterate it in several ways because no single Latin letter fits it. In the Younger Futhark its descendant character survives with a changed value and, eventually, a changed position in the row. A reader comparing editions will meet the same character under more than one symbol, and that is an editorial convention rather than a disagreement about what is on the object.

What survives

The corpus is short inscriptions on brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and stones, many of them personal names. It is small enough that a single new find can change the reading of a class of inscriptions.

The name

Algiz is a reconstruction, projected back from the names given in the medieval Old Norse and Old English rune poems to the characters of their own, later rows. Its meaning is not securely recovered, and the atlas records that rather than choosing one of the proposals.

Later use

The character was among those adopted in twentieth-century esoteric and then political contexts, a history recorded separately in this atlas and entirely distinct from the inscriptional record described here.