Ansuz, the rune of the gods and of speech

The name of the fourth rune is also the name of a divine race. Ansuz, in Common Germanic, meant a god, and in the plural the Æsir, the family of deities led by Odin who in Norse mythology dwell in Asgard. The sign, similar to fehu but with its slanting strokes pointing downwards, originally represented the sound a, and its history shows clearly how runes changed value along with the language.

The Æsir and their name

The word is attested in antiquity. The Gothic historian Jordanes, in the sixth century, writes that the Goths called their divine ancestors Ansis, demigods. In Old Norse the term became áss, plural æsir, and the rune took the name óss. In Germanic personal names the element ans- or ás- is frequent: it appears in names such as Ásgeirr or Oswald, the latter the saintly seventh-century king of Northumbria.

In the Younger Futhark the sound of the rune changed: through sound changes the name óss came to begin with a nasal vowel, and the rune came to represent that sound and then o. The value a was given to the rune ár, year, which had lost its initial j.

The god and the mouth

The three medieval rune poems give different readings. The Icelandic one is the most explicit: the rune óss is “aldingautr”, the ancient Gautr, that is, Odin, lord of Asgard and prince of Valhalla. Gautr is one of the god's many bynames, and the series of titles is built like a small poetic litany.

The Old English poem, by contrast, says “Os byþ ordfruma ælcre spræce”, os is the source of all speech. Many scholars think the Christian author reinterpreted the name as Latin os, mouth, avoiding the reference to the pagan god. But the choice is telling: Odin was also the god of poetry and wisdom, and speech remains at the centre.

The Norwegian poem takes a third path. It plays on the homophony between óss, god, and óss, river mouth, and says that the estuary is the way of most journeys, as the scabbard is for swords. An example of how medieval poets exploited the ambiguity of names. Such play also made the verses easier to memorise.

From one rune to three

In England, where the vowel a had developed in different ways, the old ansuz rune split. The name os and the sound o stayed with the traditional sign, while two new runes, æsc, the ash tree, and ac, the oak, were created for the other sounds. That is why the Anglo-Saxon alphabet is called the futhorc and not the futhark.

A frequent formula on Scandinavian gold bracteates, alu, begins with this very rune, but its meaning is debated. Clearer is another piece of evidence: the Swedish Noleby stone, of the sixth or seventh century, speaks of a rune “of divine origin”, in an expression that returns almost unchanged in the Hávamál. Ansuz, the rune of the Æsir, thus sums up the ancient and widespread idea that writing was a gift of the gods.