Ansuz

Ansuz is the clearest single demonstration that rune names were not fixed and that the meanings attached to them moved with the language.

Three names for one character

The reconstructed Elder Futhark name is *ansuz, a god of the Aesir. The asterisk is doing work: no source from the Elder Futhark period gives us the name. It is reconstructed from later evidence.

In the Younger Futhark the name is oss or ass, still a god.

In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it is os, and the Old English Rune Poem glosses it not as a god but as the mouth, the source of speech, the support of wisdom and the comfort of counsellors. The Old English word os did mean a divinity, but the poem is plainly reading it as Latin os, mouth.

Why the shift happened

The Anglo-Saxon poem was written by Christians. A stanza celebrating a heathen god was not usable; a stanza celebrating eloquence was. The rune kept its shape and its sound and acquired a new subject.

The same pressure is visible elsewhere in the poem. The rune whose Elder name is reconstructed as thurisaz, a giant, becomes thorn in Old English, a plant. The rune reconstructed as kaunan, an ulcer, becomes cen, a torch.

What follows

Modern rune divination generally reads Ansuz for the divine word, inspired speech, Odin, and messages, which is a sensible synthesis of the god-name and the mouth-gloss, and it is a synthesis. It combines two readings that come from different centuries, different languages and different religions, and treats them as layers of one meaning.

That may well be good practice. It is not a recovery of what a fifth-century carver had in mind, and no one is in a position to say what that was.

The runes of the Elder Futhark were a writing system before they were anything else, and the surviving evidence for them is objects with letters on them.

Fourth in the row

Ansuz is the fourth character of the Elder Futhark, the twenty-four character row used in the earliest Germanic inscriptions from around the second century. It supplies the a of the sequence f, u, th, a, r, k from which the row takes its name.

A vowel that moved

This character's sound value did not stay still. As the language changed, the vowel it wrote changed with it, and the Younger Futhark that replaced the Elder row in Scandinavia inherited the character with a different value again. That instability is why transliterations of the same character vary between corpora, and it is a linguistic fact about the languages rather than a disagreement between scholars.

What survives

The Elder Futhark corpus consists largely of short inscriptions on brooches, weapon fittings, combs, bracteates and stones. Many are single names. Several of the longer texts have readings that remain contested, and the standard editions print alternatives rather than choosing.

The name

Ansuz is a reconstructed form, projected back from the names the medieval Old Norse and Old English rune poems give the characters of their own later rows. The word behind it means a god of a particular family of gods, and the Old English tradition, working in a Christian context, glosses its equivalent character differently.