Upright
Endurance through a hard passage. The yew is poisonous and near-immortal — the rune of surviving what should have finished you.
Rune 13 of 24 · Heimdall's Aett
ᛇ Eihwaz
Eihwaz is rune 13 of the 24 in the Elder Futhark, in Heimdall's Aett, and carries the sound EI. It means “Yew tree”. Upright: Endurance through a hard passage. The yew is poisonous and near-immortal — the rune of surviving what should have finished you. Reversed: Confusion, weakness, or avoiding a passage that must be crossed. That reading exists for 17 of the 24 runes; the other 7 are symmetrical or read upright only.
Reversed
Confusion, weakness, or avoiding a passage that must be crossed.
Position in the row13 of 24
AettHeimdall's Aett
SoundEI
Literal meaningYew tree
ElementAll
Can be reversedYes
Eihwaz is the 13th rune of the Elder Futhark and belongs to Heimdall's Aett. Before it meant anything divinatory it was a letter, carrying the EI sound.
Primary source
What the rune poem says
The yew is a tree with rough bark, hard and fast in the earth, supported by its roots, a guardian of flame and a joy upon an estate.
— Anglo-Saxon rune poem, recorded around the 8th–10th century
Where the rune poems come from and why the medieval reading is often blunter than the modern one — explained once on the main page.
Calculated
Eihwaz by the numbers
Position in the row
13 of 24
Odds of drawing it
1 in 24 · 4.17%
Rune of the day in 2026
13 times · 3.56%
Reversed on those days
15%
Can be reversed
Yes
Of the 24 runes, only 17 have a reversed reading — 71% of the row. Four are symmetrical and cannot be turned over at all, and 3 more are conventionally read upright only.
The rune-of-the-day figures are exact rather than estimated. Our daily draw is derived from the date, so the whole year can be computed — which a site with a random draw cannot do.
Days it falls in 2026: 5 Feb, 26 Feb, 20 Mar, 18 Apr, 30 Apr, 22 May, 12 Jul, 18 Aug
What happened to it
Eihwaz after the Elder Futhark
In the Younger Futhark
Dropped from the Younger Futhark. Its sound had no clear equivalent left in Old Norse.
Worth knowing
One of the least attested runes, and its exact original sound is still argued over.
Around 800 CE the 24-rune Elder Futhark contracted to the 16-rune Younger Futhark — fewer symbols for more sounds, at exactly the point the language was growing more complex. Eight runes were dropped outright. Which ones survived, and how they changed, is the closest thing to a documented history these symbols have.
Traditional associations
Pronounced
AY-wahz
Deity
Ullr
Tree
Yew
Element
All
Eihwaz sits in Heimdall's Aett, position 13 of the row, and carries the EI sound. Its literal meaning is yew tree — which is where every later reading of it starts.
The poem above is a source; this table is twentieth-century reconstruction.