Thurisaz, the rune of the giant and the thorn

Of the runes that have survived to the present day, one is still read every day in the newspapers of Reykjavík. It is the third rune of the futhark, thurisaz, which in the Icelandic alphabet has become the letter þ, pronounced like the th in English thing. Its name, however, takes us to a world far removed from typography: that of the giants, enemies of the gods in Norse mythology.

The giant of the Norse poems

The reconstructed Germanic name, thurisaz, corresponds to Old Norse þurs, one of the terms for giants, alongside jötunn. In the cosmology of the Edda the giants dwell in Jötunheimr and represent the forces of chaos that threaten the order of Asgard. The god Thor is their adversary par excellence, and his hammer Mjöllnir is the weapon with which he strikes them down.

The Norwegian rune poem says that the giant causes the sickness of women, and the Icelandic one calls him the torment of women and the dweller in the cliffs. These formulas, enigmatic to us, reflect medieval beliefs according to which certain illnesses were the work of supernatural beings. The giant of the rune is not a character but a hostile, shapeless force.

The thorn of the English poem

In England the rune changed its name. The Old English Rune Poem calls it thorn and describes it with a concrete image: “Ðorn byþ ðearle scearp”, the thorn is exceedingly sharp, painful to anyone who touches it. The change of name may be explained by a wish to replace a pagan term with a neutral one, or simply by similarity of sound. The sign, a stave with a triangular point on its side, does indeed resemble a thorn.

Under this name the rune entered the Latin alphabet of Old English. Scribes used it for the th sound, and the letter thorn survived in English manuscripts until the late Middle Ages. When its shape became confused with y, the habit arose of writing ye for the, still visible on certain mock-antique signs.

A rune in the sagas and the Eddas

In the eddic poem Skírnismál, the messenger of the god Freyr threatens the giantess Gerðr, who rejects his lord, declaring that he will carve for her the giant rune and three other signs: “Þurs ríst ek þér ok þría stafi”. The scene shows that runes were believed capable of acting on those who received them, and that thurisaz was associated with misfortune. The text is preserved in the Codex Regius, a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

In real inscriptions, however, the rune is above all a much-used letter, because the th sound was frequent in the Germanic languages. It appears in names, verbs and pronouns, as in the word þausi, “these”, on the great Jelling stone. In Old English and medieval Icelandic the sign then passed from stone to parchment, keeping the same value.

Thurisaz thus leads a double life. In poetry and myth it evokes giants, thorns and threats; in everyday use it is a simple sign for a common sound. That a rune linked to the enemies of the gods should have survived precisely as a letter, while almost all the others disappeared, is one of the small ironies of the history of writing.