Rune 2 of 24 · first ætt · /u/
Ūruz rune meaning
Ūruz (ᚢ) is the second rune of the Elder Futhark. The reconstructed name means "aurochs", the wild ox of northern Europe, extinct since 1627. The Old English poem gives a proud horned beast; the Icelandic poem reads the same rune as drizzle that ruins the hay; the Norwegian poem reads it as dross from bad iron. I read Ūruz as strength that has not yet been asked what it is for.
The name
Reconstructed
Proto-Germanic *ūruz, "aurochs". Old English ūr keeps that sense. In Old Norse the word úr had shifted to "drizzle" or "slag", which is why the Norse poems describe something completely different under the same letter.
Status: reconstructed, with an attested change of meaning between traditions.
What the rune poems say
Attested
Translations: Bruce Dickins, Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples, 1915.
Old English rune poem (manuscript copy from the 10th century; the poem is likely older)
“The aurochs is proud and has great horns; it is a very savage beast and fights with its horns; a great ranger of the moors, it is a creature of mettle.”
Dickins 1915
Norwegian rune poem (17th-century copy of a lost 13th-century manuscript)
“Dross comes from bad iron; the reindeer often races over the frozen snow.”
Dickins 1915
Icelandic rune poem (manuscripts from around 1500)
“Shower: lamentation of the clouds and ruin of the hay-harvest and abomination of the shepherd.”
Dickins 1915
This is the clearest case in the whole row of the same stave carrying different images in different places and centuries. Anyone who tells you Ūruz has one fixed meaning is choosing one poem and hiding the other two.
What is reconstructed, what is modern
- Reconstructed
The name "aurochs"
Reconstructed.
- Attested
Beast, drizzle, dross
Each attested in its own poem.
- Modern
"Health, vitality, raw power" as a divinatory keyword
Modern, derived from the Old English image only.
- Modern
The Icelandic and Norwegian images are almost never used in modern rune books. That is a choice, not a tradition
- Attested
- in a named, datable source
- Reconstructed
- a scholarly inference from later evidence
- Modern
- twentieth-century or later practice
- Mine
- the reader's own interpretation
How I read it
Mine
I keep all three images in play. Ūruz is force before purpose: the animal that fights because it has horns, the weather that ruins the harvest because it is weather, the slag that comes out of bad iron whether you want it or not. In a reading it asks what strength you have that is currently running without direction, and what it is costing. Mine.
Your question
Ask the rune
If this is the question you are carrying, write it in your own words. The first reading is free.