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
Yew tree.
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
Three rune poems survive — Anglo-Saxon, Norwegian and Icelandic — and each gives a verse per rune. They are the closest thing to a contemporary source for what these symbols meant to the people using them, and they are older than every interpretation written since.
Read the verse against the modern meaning above. Sometimes they line up exactly; sometimes the medieval version is blunter and more practical than the spiritual reading that replaced it. Fehu is a good example — the poem is about cattle, wealth and the obligation to share it, not about abundance mindset.
The Anglo-Saxon poem survives only through a 1705 printed copy; the original manuscript burned in the Cotton library fire of 1731.
Traditional associations
Pronounced
AY-wahz
Deity
Ullr
Tree
Yew
Element
All
Deity and tree correspondences are later reconstructions rather than attested medieval practice — they were largely assembled in the twentieth century by writers systematising the runes into a modern occult framework.
The rune poem above is a source. This table is interpretation. The difference is worth keeping in view.