Upright
Disruption from outside, arriving uninvited. Hail destroys the crop and waters the ground — the damage and the clearing are the same event.
Rune 9 of 24 · Heimdall's Aett
ᚺ Hagalaz
Hail.
Reversed
Often read as having no reversed meaning: hail falls the same way regardless.
Position in the row9 of 24
AettHeimdall's Aett
SoundH
Literal meaningHail
ElementWater
Can be reversedNo
Hagalaz is the 9th rune of the Elder Futhark and belongs to Heimdall's Aett. Before it meant anything divinatory it was a letter, carrying the H sound.
Primary source
What the rune poem says
Hail is the whitest of grain; it is whirled from the vault of heaven and is tossed about by gusts of wind and then it melts into water.
— 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
HA-ga-lahz
Deity
Hel and Urd
Tree
Yew
Element
Water
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.