Eihwaz (ᛇ)
Pronunciation: AY-wahz · Latin equivalent: EI · Heimdall’s ætt, fifth rune
Name and meaning
Proto-Germanic īhwaz, the yew — the graveyard tree, the bow-wood, evergreen and patient, poisonous and enduring. The tree that stands for the axis between life and death, and for many practitioners a shadow of the World Tree itself.
In the rune poems
Attested in the Anglo-Saxon poem (ēoh) as a rough-barked tree, hard and fast in the earth, a keeper of fire and a joy on the homestead. The yew-name’s lineage continues into the Younger Futhark’s ýr, though shapes and roles shifted in the passage — the connection is real but not a straight line, and this entry leans on the Anglo-Saxon verse.
Upright
Endurance rooted deep: reliability, the long defense, strength drawn from what does not die back in winter. Also the axis — connection between what is above and what is below, the ancestor-tree in the yard. A rune for holding fast through the turning.
Merkstave
This rune is one of the nine that cannot reverse: its form reads the same either way up. If your set marks each stone’s bottom (see Casting the Runes: Merkstave and the Marked Stone), it may still fall merkstave, and a shadow reading applies — the same force obstructed, frozen, or turned inward. Otherwise, take it as it lies. Read in shadow: endurance curdled into rigidity, or the axis leaned on when it is time to climb.
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